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February 18, 2019
Theater aficionados know that noise and commotion behind the curtain during intermission of a theatrical performance intensifies expectation. Then, when the curtain rises after intermission, the audience sees that the scene has been radically altered and their “wow” factor is heightened. Earth’s scene (or ‘cene) has also changed dramatically in history to bring about surprising changes for humanity’s benefit.
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Fine-Tuning
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Earth Design
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Oceans
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Atmosphere
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Geophysics
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Asteroids
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February 11, 2019
Years ago, in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss referred to dark energy as presenting “the most extreme fine-tuning problem known in physics.” Dark energy is energy embedded in the universe’s space surface that makes up about 70 percent of all the stuff of the universe (see figure 1). Krauss determined that the fine-tuning level is more extreme than one part in 10120! He has been joined by several other theoretical physicists who conclude that the required fine-tuning of dark energy is “the most difficult problem in physics.” The obvious question is does this most difficult problem point to a causal agent with the capacity to fine-tune to a degree far, far beyond anything we humans are capable of manifesting?
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Earth Design
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Stars
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Universe Design
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Dark Energy & Dark Matter
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Anthropic Principle
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Animals
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February 4, 2019
Large terrestrial mammals bring delight to everyone. Such pleasure explains why zoos, wild animal parks, and safaris are so popular. It also explains why so many of us enjoy the close encounters we experience with wild terrestrial mammals when we visit national parks and wilderness areas. To add to our enjoyment, a paper1 published in a little-known science journal, Acta Oecologica, provides research showing that we humans are living at an especially optimal time to experience and benefit from large terrestrial mammals.
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Earth's History
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Ecosystems
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Fine-Tuning
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Requirements for Life
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Earth Design
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January 28, 2019
Ongoing development in high-precision cosmology may soon provide yet even more compelling evidence for the supernatural origin of the universe. Astronomers’ ability to accurately measure distances to “standard candle” stars has been the limiting factor in their quest to build a precision model for the origin and history of the universe. However, a recent measurement has lowered this limit by a factor of nearly five times.
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Cosmic Expansion
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Universe Design
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Origin of the Universe
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Big Bang Theory
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January 21, 2019
Last May I debated with Peter Atkins, Oxford University chemist and well-known atheist, on the Unbelievable? radio show and video podcast. Toward the end of the debate, moderator Justin Brierley asked each of us to name a possible scientific discovery that, if proven true beyond any reasonable doubt, would cause us to abandon the philosophical worldview we were advocating. You can watch the debate here.
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Milky Way Galaxy
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Universe Design
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God
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Origin of the Universe
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Big Bang Theory
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January 14, 2019
During our mountaineering trips I am always the cautious one, carefully charting the safest routes to our destinations. Not so much my wife. Whenever we get to the edge of a chasm, she loves to dangle her legs over the cliff’s edge and gaze for several minutes at the vista.
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Galaxy Design
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Milky Way Galaxy
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Design
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Anthropic Principle
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January 7, 2019
When we think about volcanoes, the images that typically come to mind are violent eruptions that devastate the surrounding landscapes and bring death or serious injury to anyone so unfortunate as to be in the vicinity. Figure 1, for example, shows the lava flows from the 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which killed more than 23,000 people and destroyed the town of Armero, Colombia.
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Ocean life
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Ecosystems
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Earth Design
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December 31, 2018
For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, December is a good time to remind everyone about the Sun. It is the month when the Sun spends the fewest hours per day above the horizon. Where I was raised in coastal British Columbia, December was also a month characterized by incessant rain. I remember several Decembers when the Sun never made its appearance in the sky.
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Mars
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Solar System Design
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Sun
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Earth Design
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Early Earth
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December 24, 2018
At this time of year, people everywhere celebrate the wonder of God sending his son to Earth to live, die, and be raised in order to redeem humans. Perhaps few think of the wonderful planet God created as a stage for his heavenly purposes. Two seemingly obscure events, the Hiawatha impactor and the Younger Dryas cooling event about 12,000 years ago, have made it possible for humans to live in an abnormally stable climate that launched the development of high-tech civilization.
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End Times
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Meteors
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Fine-Tuning
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Earth's History
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Geophysics
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Earth Design
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Asteroids
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December 17, 2018
Floods and fires raged and boulders rained from the sky. Such a sci-fi-like scenario in Earth’s relatively recent past gave us, in part, the extreme climate stability that has allowed humans to flourish.
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Earth Design
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Natural Disasters
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Asteroids
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Oceans
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Geophysics
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America
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December 10, 2018
In last week’s blog1 I described how a careful reconstruction of temperature proxies at sites all over the world revealed that the climate stability humans have enjoyed over the past 9,500 years was about twice as stable as scientists had previously concluded. That is, we are twice as blessed as we had previously thought. Thanks to the extreme climate stability of the past 9,500 years, we have been successful in launching and sustaining global high-technology civilization and in building our population up to seven billion individuals.
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Oceans
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Global Warming
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Earth's History
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Earth Science
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Natural Disasters
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Geophysics
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Asteroids
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December 3, 2018
One of the most outstanding and blessed features of Earth is that it has an ice age cycle where, for the past 9,000 years of that cycle, the planet has experienced extreme climate stability. New analysis of historical temperature measurements garnered from 73 different locations on Earth now reveals that the climate of the past 9,000 years has been far more stable than previously thought. That is, we humans are much more blessed than we previously recognized.
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Fine-Tuning
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Global Warming
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Earth's History
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November 26, 2018
Just a year ago, I had a regular attendee in my Paradoxes Sunday school class1 who was 101 years old. He was mentally sharp and, for his age, physically fit. He lived alone and drove himself to class. He claimed that the secret to his longevity was a disciplined diet and daily physical and mental exercise. However, a few months ago, he caught a flu bug that within a week took his life.
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November 19, 2018
Stymied by attempts to find life-friendly conditions on surfaces of extraterrestrial planets and moons, astrobiologists have turned to increasingly exotic sites. Two such sites are (1) the upper atmospheres of planets and moons with thick atmospheres and (2) possible pools of liquid water below the surfaces of planets and moons. A nearby example of the former are Venus’s high clouds. Nearby examples of the latter are Europa and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively.
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Requirements for Life
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Ocean life
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Origin of Life
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Fine-Tuning
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Water
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Life on Other Planets
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Exoplanets
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Earth Design
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November 12, 2018
During my graduate school days at the University of Toronto I had the privilege of taking a short course from Princeton University astronomer and cosmologist Jeremiah Ostriker. In that course Ostriker spoke about the missing mass of the universe. The mass he was referring to was not the dark matter (aka cold dark matter; exotic dark matter) that is comprised of particles that do not interact or that interact very weakly with photons. Rather, he was concerned about atomic matter, matter comprised of protons, neutrons, and electrons that has the property of interacting strongly with photons. Detection of such matter carries significant implications for the reliability of big bang models for the beginning of the universe.
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Universe Design
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Origin of the Universe
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Big Bang Theory
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November 5, 2018
Astronomers have detected and measured the mass and/or orbital features of 3,869 planets in 2,887 planetary systems beyond the solar system.1 This ranks as a staggering rate of discovery, given that the first confirmed detection of a planet orbiting another hydrogen-fusion-burning star was as recent as 1995.2 What do the characteristics of these systems reveal about potential habitability for advanced life?
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Extrasolar Planets
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Life on Other Planets
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Earth Design
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Solar System Design
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Gas Giant Planets
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Fine-Tuning
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Exoplanets
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October 29, 2018
Our intestinal tracts are amazingly designed to withstand a high degree of stress. However, a new set of experiments establishes that there are limits to how much stress our intestinal tracts can tolerate. In particular, the experiments show that deep space travel will do irreparable, life-threatening damage to our intestines, which creates a severely limiting factor for people who envision a future where humans can travel to other planets and colonize them.
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Fine-Tuning
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Earth Design
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Solar System Design
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Space Weather
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Life Design
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Cells
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Cancer
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October 22, 2018
Extraterrestrial iron dust delivery by means of exquisitely fine-tuned processes has made modern civilization possible. Scientists sought to discern the nature of an unknown part of a phenomenon—bioavailable iron on Earth—and their research led to a major discovery that was published in the October issue of Geology.
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Geophysics
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Fine-Tuning
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Oceans
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Ecosystems
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Earth Design
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Sun
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Solar System Design
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Ocean life
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Meteors
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Atmosphere
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Asteroids
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October 15, 2018
About 800,000 years ago, a miraculous change took place on Earth. The ice age cycle transitioned from happening every 41,000 years to about every 100,000 years, in what is now referred to as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT). And without the MPT and its consummate fine-tuning and exact timing in history, we would not presently be able to enjoy today’s high population and advanced civilization.
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Fine-Tuning
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Earth's History
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Sun
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Solar System Design
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Oceans
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Ocean life
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Atmosphere
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October 11, 2018
The experimental and observational evidence that the universe has a beginning in finite time establishes that the universe must have some kind of Beginner. Space-time theorems provide additional evidence that some kind of causal Agent beyond space and time created our universe of matter, energy, space, and time. I describe and document in much detail the experimental, observational, and theoretical evidence for this causal Agent in The Creator and the Cosmos.
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God's Existence
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Life Design
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Particle Physics
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Galaxy Design
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Universe Design
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Sun
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Solar System Design
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Milky Way Galaxy
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Life History
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Laws of Physics
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Fine-Tuning
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Earth
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Creation
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