The sun is 400 times the diameter of the moon, but also 400 times farther away, making them the same size to our eyes. This makes a solar eclipse a spectacular event that allows us to see the sun’s chromosphere and corona with our own eyes, which we couldn’t see otherwise, as well as the beautiful ‘beads’ of light created by the relief of the moon’s craters. The relative sizes of sun and moon let us see the sun’s seething prominences that are always there but invisible except during the totality. Could all of this be coincidence?

What about all the remarkable convergences of improbable fact that make life possible in the universe? The cosmological constant had to be just right for the formation of the universe as we know it.  So do all the other universal constants at work in the cosmos. Just the right pressure, just the right temperature, or life wouldn’t be possible. To argue, as some do, that the universe is the way it is or we wouldn’t be around to see it is, to me, a bootstrap argument.

What about the incidence of coincidence required to yield life here on earth? Evolution is, at the molecular level at least, supposed to be driven by random mutations. Although our understanding of the pure randomness of evolution is itself evolving, the most widely accepted view is still that it’s driven by random processes. Yet the number of such mutations which would have had to occur to yield intelligent life before life itself was snuffed out is staggering.

Let’s take another example. The oxygen atom is rather reactive, compared to some others. It combines readily with other elements, which should, over time, reduce the amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Yet its proportion relative to other gases has remained relatively steady over time. Most life depends on this unexpected stability.

In fact, until we came on the scene, in some ways, the earth appeared to have been stabilizing. Variables like temperature and Ph are good examples. The Gaia Hypothesis posits that the earth itself is a superorganism which is introducing homeostatic governors to steady the earth and its systems. Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere extends this idea of the earth as a superorganism to an earth which has evolved a planetary consciousness.

All seems rather New Age, doesn’t it? The materialists will certainly shred these arguments, just as they do with Intelligent Design, the hypothesis that there are so many coincidences involved in the evolution of life that it must have been engineered by an intelligent creator. I take no position on Intelligent Design. I do observe that it is nonfalsifiable. But how doreductionists explain all these coincidences? A materialist might say that the universe is the way it is – coincidences and all – because otherwise, we wouldn’t be around to see it. This weak formulation of the Anthropic Principle is, to me, a pretty weak argument.  

Although the materialist hypotheses which invoke randomness and probability can’t, in my opinion, adequately explain all the coincidences necessary to produce and maintain life and consciousness, the reductionists tend to win the war of ideas because they’re the scientific establishment. The establishment was once controlled by the Royal Society and its astronomers, and before that by the Church and its inquisitors who burned Bruno at the stake for concluding, out loud mind you, that the earth wasn’t the center of things. The established order tends to win out, until it doesn’t. Until the illogic and improbability of its arguments, stacked on one another in a house of cards, falls in upon itself in favor of a revolutionary new worldview. I believe that time is now. The worldview of the Enlightenment has held sway long enough. The sheer number of coincidences needed to evolve a universe which consciously knows itself are so numerous and so improbable that, taken together, they are unlikely to have occurred from the inception of the cosmos until now. Theory of Very Large Numbers be damned.

For more, check out Fermi’s Paradox: An Inquiry into the Ends of Civilization for free in the Books section of this website.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just