More Denton: another new book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 11, 2022, 16:34 (717 days ago) @ David Turell

Humans were destined to arrive:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/michael-dentons-new-book-nature-is-fine-...

From the publisher:

"For years, leading scientists and science popularizers have insisted humans are nothing special in the cosmic scheme of things. In this important and provocative new book, renowned biologist Michael Denton argues otherwise. According to Denton, the cosmos is stunningly fit not just for cellular life, not just for carbon-based animal life, and not even just for air-breathing animals, but especially for bipedal, land-roving, technology-pursuing creatures of our general physiological design. In short, the cosmos is specifically fit for creatures like us. Drawing on discoveries from a myriad of scientific fields, Denton masterfully documents how contemporary science has revived humanity’s special place in nature. “The human person as revealed by modern science is no contingent assemblage of elements, an irrelevant afterthought of cosmic evolution,” Denton writes. “Rather, our destiny was inscribed in the light of stars and the properties of atoms since the beginning. Now we know that all nature sings the song of man. Our seeming exile from nature is over. We now know what the medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed ‘manifest in human flesh.’ And with this revelation the… delusion of humankind’s irrelevance on the cosmic stage has been revoked.'”

Quotes from Denton:

ID comment: "a vast suite of chemical and physical parameters were precisely set. These parameters are “uniquely fit” for creatures like ourselves, as Denton shows:

"[O]ur existence as energy-demanding active air-breathing terrestrial organisms critically depends on a wildly improbable ensemble of natural environmental fitness comprising various chemical and physical laws as well as the properties of specific molecules such as oxygen and CO2 and specific elements such as the transition metals, properties that must be almost exactly as they are."

"The exquisitely fine-tuned ensembles of environmental fitness described here, each enabling a vital aspect of our physiological design, amount to nothing less than a primal blueprint for our being, written into the fabric of reality since the moment of creation, providing compelling evidence that we do indeed, after all, occupy a central place in the great cosmic drama of being.

"This is the miracle of man. We are not positioned in the spatial center of the universe as was believed before Copernicus, but what we have found over the past two centuries confirms the deep intuition of the medieval Christian scholars who believed that “in the cognition of nature in all her depths, man finds himself.”

Comment: Denton is a Ph.D. & M.D. Like Adler and Schroeder he is one of the authorities who shapes my views