[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. On this episode, radio host and bestselling author Michael Medved sits down with philosopher of science Dr. J. Richards to preview the theme of this year's Dallas Science and Faith Conference and discuss the arguments of his popular book, the Privileged Planet, written 20 years ago now with coauthor and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. Everything we've learned since we discovered the first extrasolar planet in 1995 is pointed in one direction, says Richards, and that is in the direction of increased rarity, an increase in the number of conditions that has to go right even to get a single habitable planet. Over 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered in that time, and there's suitable hype at the possibility of these planets harboring the potential for life. But as Richards explains, even if you detect some of the prerequisites required for habitable life to exist, you still need a transition from non life to life that is a massive chasm, a profound problem that we just cannot gloss over. In the interview, Richards teases a new and updated edition of his book, the Privileged Planet, and gives his host a summary of what we've learned about our privileged place in the universe in the last century.
And now it's a pleasure to turn it over to Dr. Jay Richards and his worthy host, Michael Medved.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Jay, when you set out to co write this book with Guillermo Gonzalez of the University of Washington, and I should say Jay Richards is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
He is also a senior research fellow at Heritage Foundation.
Dr. Richards, did you expect when privileged Planet first appeared 20 years ago, that people would still be influenced and demanding a brand new edition of this book?
[00:02:16] Speaker D: I mean, honestly, no. At least I didn't think it was a realistic prospect. Michael, and thanks so much for having me on. In fact, I remember, I've done a lot of radio interviews the last 20 years. I still remember the interview that you did with me long. I think we went on for an hour and it was probably one of the first interviews of March 2004, I think. But Guillermo and I did know that in 2024, which would be 20 years out, there was going to be a total solar eclipse across the United States. And so we thought, hey, well, maybe if people read this book in 2024, we will write a 20th year anniversary edition and we'll revise it. And that's, lo and behold, exactly what we did over the last year. We had been, frankly, rewriting the whole thing. I think we're probably better writers than we were as young men, but with a lot of new data. And so the new edition is actually going to come out in the fall, but this year, and as you said, the science and faith conference, both online and in person in Dallas here in a few weeks, is focusing on this theme of the privileged planet. In fact, we're doing a number of events over the course of the next few months. And so, no, I mean, honestly, this is not something I would have imagined. I wouldn't have imagined that it would have continued to sell in hardcover. We couldn't have imagined the torment that the book would have caused for Guillermo as a young, untenured scientist at the time, but we certainly wouldn't take any of it back.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Now, if I can ask you sort of the fundamental question that gets us right to the heart of the argument for privileged planet. And again, information about that book is posted up at our
[email protected].
The question I would ask would be, one of the things you hear from Carl Sagan and other people is there are so many different planets and solar systems. How many planets and solar systems have we discovered that actually would be suitable for life forms of any kind?
[00:04:19] Speaker D: Well, we know of one, and we're on it. And so, of course, when we first wrote the book on 2004, it was actually just kind of a handful, and it was in the low hundreds. It's now 5000 plus extrasolar planets have been discovered. So planets, of course, around stars other than the sun and still the most Earth like planet by far, if you don't count the earth, would be Mars. Mars is in an otherwise habitable system. We know the star is suitable for life because we're here. Its orbit is not that much different. It's considered Earth's twin, and yet it's utterly lifeless. And so that by itself, it tells you, gosh, you got to get a whole lot more right than some stars and some planets and a couple of things. You got to get a lot of stuff to go right to get a single habitable planet. Of course, somebody could say, well, okay, but it's a huge universe. Maybe we have ten to the 22 stars in the observable universe. That's a lot. Couldn't this happen by chance, just once? Maybe we're the winners of the vast cosmic lottery. To which I said, yeah, maybe because it is a big universe. We got to take that into account. But our argument isn't just about what life needs. It's also about the needs for doing science. And what we discovered in the course of writing the book is that those very rare places like the earth where observers can exist, turns out, are also the best places overall for doing science. And it's that coincidence between needs for life and needs for scientific discovery that we think that says something more than just a mere cosmic coincidence. We think it bespeaks a cosmic conspiracy.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: What you talk about is the privileged planet shows that those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet that allow for the existence of complex observers like us also provide the best overall place for observing. Now, what does that mean, in a word?
What is the significance of all of this? And what do you take away from the idea that we do live on a privileged planet that is uniquely and very rarely designed, it would seem, for life. We will get to that and to more with Dr. J. Richards of Discovery Institute. Coming up on the Michael Medved shown books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated, which came out in 2013, and the human advantage, money, greed, and God. A winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise award and many more, he also co wrote, 20 years ago, the marvelous book privileged Planet. If you pick it up and you read it, you'll want to underline sentences on every page and you'll come away feeling grateful.
Grateful for what? For the gift of life. And it is a gift because part of what Jay and his co author, astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, what they write in privileged planet is that, yes, the planet has been designed and uniquely designed to facilitate the emergence of life and even intelligent life. Jay is going to be participating, as he always does, in the annual conference on science and faith in Dallas that is coming up February 17. And you can participate by streaming. You just go to scienceandfaith.com. That's where you can find a registration and complete agenda for the scienceandfaith
[email protected].
Jay, one of the points that you make is that part of what we know that we didn't really know 50 years ago is that the universe, not just planet Earth, but that the entire universe as we know it, clearly has a beginning. It hasn't always existed. How do we know that? And why is that so profoundly important?
[00:09:08] Speaker D: Well, we know it initially because of what Edward Hubble started detecting in the 1920s, which is this so called cosmic red shift. And essentially, once he was able to measure the distances to some other galaxies outside the Milky Way, he noticed that there's this pattern. So the farther away a galaxy was, the more its light was shifted toward the red or the longer wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. And this pattern continued farther out, redder shifting light, which the natural interpretation is that the galaxies were spreading out, the universe was expanding. And then there was a controversy about this actually for decades, this idea that because if the universe is expanding, that would mean if you sort of roll the tape back of cosmic history, there'd be a time in which all the matter and space and energy would coalesce into the same spot. It turns out Einstein's general theory of relativity had predicted something like this independently, though Einstein initially didn't like this idea. But here was hubble discovering that visible evidence that Einstein's predictions had proved right. Well, then, in the intervening decades, starting in the 1960s, we first detected the so called cosmic background radiation, which is kind of the leftover echo, a relic from this early event in cosmic history. So now it's overwhelmingly believed, and believed on the basis of evidence that the universe has not always existed. It came into existence in the finite past. Metaphysically, that's probably the most important discovery you could possibly make to know that the physical universe is not itself an ultimate reality. It began to exist in the finite past. Well, of course, Christians and Jews and Muslims have believed this all along, but it was only in the 20th century that we got direct empirical confirmation that the universe had a beginning. That's huge. If you're thinking of the question, the vast question between, say, materialism on the one hand, and theism that is a belief in a transcendent God on the other, there's never been a better time to be a theist rather than a materialist.
[00:11:15] Speaker C: Well, what you're saying here about the beginning of the universe is not necessarily that everything was accomplished in the emergence of the universe as we know it, in six days or six human days.
What you're figuring out is that there was a beginning. It's why the Bible, the first book of the Bible in Hebrew is called Bereshit, which means in the beginning. And the idea of a planet being created. I know you have in privileged planet some calculations of what the odds would be for any other speck of matter out there to develop the prerequisites of life that we have obviously here on planet Earth.
Why are they and what are the ods against that existing on other planets?
[00:12:17] Speaker D: Well, if you just focus on the sort of planetary things we already know enough that we can figure out, it's very unlikely you're going to get even one habitable planet just in the Milky Way galaxy. Of course, we've got a much larger universe than that. But even if you got all the prerequisites of a planet, right? So you had liquid water and the right kind of energy and stable climate and geology, all the kinds of things you need. You still need the origin of life. You need this transition from the world of chemistry to the world of biology. And to get that, you need these organizing principles of information that just outstrips absolutely everything, rather than this materialistic story where everything's just sort of physics and chemistry. If you also have purpose and intelligence, God or otherwise, that completely changes the calculation. And so basically, everything, Michael, that we have learned since we discovered the first extra solar planet in 1995 is pointed in one direction only, and it's in the direction of increased rarity. That is an increase in the number of conditions that have to go right even to get a single habitable planet. And then even if you have that, you still need that transition from non life to life, which I just think is a deal killer if you're dealing simply with the toolkit of the materialist.
[00:13:42] Speaker C: Well, again, when you talk about non life to life, in other words, it's easier to go from a paramecium to a Mozart than it is to go from dead rock to that paramecium.
[00:13:57] Speaker D: That's exactly right. I mean, I myself don't think that the darwinian account of natural selection or random genetic mutations gets you all that much. But at least in principle, if you've got organisms, you've got reproduction, you've got information.
And so that's in some ways kind of a different argument. The question about the evolution of life from the beginning, it's that the beginning there, from chemistry to life itself, that is a massive chasm. We have absolutely no idea how to account for that in purely materialistic form. Despite what you probably are told in your high school biology class, that is a profound problem. And it's another place in nature that will be being talked about at the science and faith conference that bespeaks design, because we know where, as my colleague Steve Meyer talks about, we know where information comes from. It always uniquely comes from intelligent agents. And if you're not allowed to appeal to intelligence to explain the origin of life itself, you've really got a very limited toolkit. And I think you actually can't explain.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: It in terms of how many billions of years the earth may have existed, or the planet or the cosmos may have existed before we know of the origins of any form of life. It's a long time. Yeah.
[00:15:21] Speaker D: Yes, that's right. I mean, we're talking 13.8 billion years or so, the age of the universe. We're talking four and a half billion years, let's say 4 billion for Earth. And so everything that happened with life on Earth had to happen within that, let's just say 4 billion year window. That sounds like a lot of time, but actually, when you start working on the probabilities, even to get sort of simple protein, for instance, let alone sort of origin of the first life, 4 billion years, you use that time up actually really quickly. And so it could sound like a staggering amount of time. But if you're a materialist, it's still actually way too little time to get much done. And so I really do think we're just still languishing under the kind of victorian materialistic ideas of the mid 19th century. Unfortunately, we haven't, I think, really fully caught up to the metaphysical picture that's suggested by what we know from 21st century science. And we know that universe did not always exist. It came into existence in the finite past. It has an exquisite order and structured complexity that is just much more in keeping with what we know about intelligent agents and for theists, what we know about God than you're possibly ever going to guess. I think if you're a materialist and.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Your conference is science and faith, people should go to www.scienceandfaith.com. But one of the most important things it talks about is science and faith, which can go hand in hand. They are not at eternal war with each other, as so many people have suggested. Jay Richards people can find out about his conference coming up and the book Privileged Planet, how our place in the Cosmos is designed for discovery, that and more in this greatest nation on God's green earth.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: That was Dr. J. Richards on the Michael Medved show, discussing his participation in this year's Dallas Science and Faith Conference, which has the theme of the privileged planet. With a solar eclipse event coming, as well as a new edition of the privileged Planet, it's a great time to dive into the evidence for the uniqueness of planet Earth and how it's designed for intelligent life like you and me. You can stream this year's Dallas Science and Faith conference featuring Jay Richards, Guillermo Gonzalez, former NASA engineer Bijean Nimati, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and
[email protected]. The website to stream the conference is scienceandfaith.com.
For idthefuture. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
