Marcelo Gleiser points out that the fashionable Principle of Mediocrity is based on faulty logical reasoning:
He concedes that the Principle can be quite sound under controlled circumstances: If most balls in a box are red, you are more likely to randomly draw a red one. Where stars are otherwise alike, the Principle can be useful for making probability decisions in astronomy.
But the probability of life on other planets presents us with a very different situation: The Principle assumes, in the absence of any evidence, that Earth is typical in terms of its properties and life forms, not simply its position. And that is what he sees as an unwarranted assumption:
News, “Astronomer: We can’t just assume countless Earths out there” at Mind Matters News (November 14, 2021)
A quick look at our solar system neighbors should dispel this notion. Mars is a frozen desert; if it had life in its early years, it didn’t offer enough stability to support it for very long. The same applies to Venus, now a hellish furnace. Farther away, there are many “Earth-like” exoplanets, but only in the sense that they have a similar mass and orbit a star at a distance that is within the habitable zone, where water, if present on the surface, is liquid. These preconditions for life are a far cry from life itself.
Marcelo Gleiser, “The mediocrity of the mediocrity principle (for life in the universe)” at Big Think (October 6, 2021)
Realistically, he notes, life must exist on a planet for a long time before the ways it changes a planet’s atmosphere could be detected from many light years away. Intelligent life may take longer and be far more tenuous. Put another way, on our own planet, water bears can survive many catastrophes that humans cannot. But they don’t think or seek to communicate with anyone and likely never will.
Takehome: Marcelo Gleiser notes that the starting point of the Mediocrity Principle assumes countless Earths. That’s not a conclusion from evidence. It’s bad logic.
You may also wish to read: Physicist: Copernican Principle doesn’t make Earth insignificant. That, Marcelo Gleiser says, is a philosophical attitude, unrelated to the science. Theoretical physicist Gleiser notes that we’ve only begun to point huge telescopes at exoplanets. There are too many unknowns to be sure of our status.
Most of us know about privileged planet. Here is another characteristic of earth’s location that is fortuitous. Jupiter cleans up the asteroids and keeps them in place.
https://techstartups.com/2021/11/07/jupiter-protects-earth-asteroids/
The problem of trivializing life to the point of meaninglessness goes much deeper than just the fallacious principle of mediocrity.
The belief that everything is meaningless, (i.e. the universe, all life in the universe, and human life in particular), is based upon none other than the foundational and primary presupposition of ‘randomness’ within the Atheist’s naturalistic worldview.
Instead of a rational Mind, i.e. God, as the primary cause for the universe, all life in the universe, and human life in particular, the Atheistic Naturalist instead holds that completely blind, undirected, randomness is the primary cause for the universe, all life in the universe, and human life in particular.
Yet for something to occur in a truly random fashion means that it happened for no rhyme or reason whatsoever. And therefore, by definition, there can be no meaning for why anything happens in the Atheist’s worldview.
In short, meaninglessness is built into the very foundation of the Atheist’s naturalistic worldview as the primary presupposition of completely blind, undirected, randomness.
As Stephen Talbott noted, “It (Randomness) is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness,,,”
And Talbott’s observation that, “This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle”. is spot on.
As Wolfgang Pauli himself noted, “they (Darwinists) use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’”
Yet this appeal by Atheistic Naturalists to ‘random miracles’ as a explanatory principle in science makes scientific rationality itself impossible.
As Bruce Gordon explains, “the materialist is forced to believe in random miracles as an explanatory principle. (Yet) In a Theistic universe, nothing happens without a reason. Miracles are therefore intelligently directed deviations from divinely maintained regularities, and are thus expressions of rational purpose. (Therefore) Scientific materialism is epistemically self defeating: it makes scientific rationality impossible.
The late Richard Lewontin, (Harvard- professor of biology), once complained that “To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
Thus it is more than a tad bit ironic that the atheist’s worldview itself, by appealing to ‘random miracles’ as an explanatory principle, is the worldview that is guilty of allowing the possibility “that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that (random) miracles may happen.”
For example of this ‘rupturing’ of the regularities of nature’, in the Atheist’s worldview, (where ‘random miracles’ are allowed as a explanatory principle), “it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science.”
Thus the Atheist’s primary postulate of completely blind, undirected, randomness, (which, I remind, the Atheist holds to be the primary cause of the universe, all life in the universe, and human life in particular), makes scientific rationality itself impossible.
Oh well, so much for the Atheistic Naturalist’s claim that he is the one who is being ‘scientific’ and rational in forsaking God and in toeing the line of methodological naturalism.
To repeat Pauli, “While they (Darwinian Atheists) pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’”
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