Friday, June 15, 2007

The Privileged Planet

Last week & last night I watched a DVD-Documentary called 'The Privileged Planet' which argued against popular secular thinking that earth is simply an insignificant 'pale blue dot' in the universe. The film gave all sorts of evidence for 'design' and 'purpose' in the formation and location of our planet.

Without ever mentioning God or even hinting toward Christianity, the movie reminded me of two key points: 1) God exists and 2) God cares. The 1st half of the film focuses on that first point by showing that it is all but impossible for the earth to have come about randomly (minus an intelligent being). The second half declares that not only was the earth specially created, but it was specifically designed so that we could observe and grasp the greatness of the universe. In other words, not only is there almost certainly a Creator, but there is a Creator that wants us to know more about Him & His work. God exists. God cares. To me, that is the general revelation that we can learn from nature.

3 comments:

Dancin' said...

I'm glad you wrote "all but in impossible". I don't think we can prove that it is impossible for the universe to come about by randomness because none of us were there at the formation of the world and that could have been the 1 random time everything randomly worked together to begin the universe.
What we can argue is it is highly improbable that it happened this way by offering other MORE probable explanations. The first logical point is that if we were began by randomness then it follows that the worlds it create are random in function and action, however, we have a world that is based on order. In short randomness should be the norm rather than the exception to the norm.

I'm not sure if this seems random in and of itself, but it irritates me when I hear well meaning Christians say "The Big Bang is impossible" when we can never prove that.

Dancin' said...

P.S. Anthony Flew, posterboy atheistic evolutions, became a theist (not a Christian, but a theist)as a result of studying microbiology because it demonstrated there is greater probability that there is a creator.

matthew said...

Certainly we're not eyewitnesses. But even if we were I still doubt we could 'prove' something of that magnitude was happening just the way we were observing it.

Of course, God was indeed an eyewitness (and moreso) and we have good reason to trust the account in Genesis.

Your second point (that a randomly created world should be far more random than what we observe) is one of the major points of the Privileged Planet.

A 'Flew' interview is available on leestrobel.com