The Sean McDowell Show - Staggering Scientific Evidence Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed (ft. Jay Richards)

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

20 years ago, Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez released a provocative book: "The Privileged Planet." They argued that Earth is not an insignificant blip on the universe’s radar. Rather, there is a staggering array of scientific evidence that our location is the cosmos is the result of design. In this video, I talk with Dr. Jay Richards about how the evidence for our privileged status has grown over the past 20 years. PLEASE write in your questions or objections and we are going LIVE this Friday, 10am, to tackle the toughest ones. READ: The Privileged Planet, 20th Anniversary Ed. (https://amzn.to/47ilUpA) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

What is the best evidence our universe was designed? I think you're about to hear it. Our guest today, a friend, Dr. Jay Richards, co-wrote a book in 2004 called The Privileged Planet. He has just released a 20-year update. He and his co-author offer a unique argument from the habitability and discoverability of the universe to an intelligent designer.

Now, this argument has a few layers, but I think it's a game changer when you get it. Now, please raise your toughest objections, as we're going to go live this Friday and take them head on. So send this to skeptics that you know, write in your own objections, share it with others if you want Dr. J's feedback. We're going live Friday to address the toughest objections. But today, we're going to lay out the argument and talk about how people have responded to this in the past 20 years and how you think the argument is even stronger. Jay, thanks for coming back on the show.

Sean, so good to see you. Thanks for having me. Now, I have a picture in 2004, the year my son was born, where I'm holding him in my lap, reading The Privileged Planet. I know it sounds over the top, but I love this book, and I think it's fascinating. I've been looking forward to this update for a long time.

Now, what got me, and I'm guessing got a lot of your readers over the years, was this idea of solar eclipses. Now, let's begin there, and maybe just tell us what is a solar eclipse and what are the things that we need to get right simply to observe one? Okay. So generically a solar eclipse would be a situation in which you're on the surface of a planet. You have a bright body like the sun, and then you have an eclipsing or an occulting body, in our case, the moon. And then they all line up in a straight line in space with you as the observer sort of behind it, right? So you've got the sun, you've got the moon, you've got the

observer on the surface of a planet. They're all lined up in a straight line. Then you will see an eclipse, which is effectively, it's the the shadow of in our case it would be the moon uh on the surface of the earth so that that's an eclipse um and my co-author guillermo gonzalez in the late 1990s was interested in this and thought huh you know it's interesting because on earth we don't just get eclipses that is we don't just have a situation where our moon sometimes blots out some or all of the sun we have this weird situation where the sun and the moon of course are the same shape but they also take up almost exactly the same size in the sky and this is something that of course anyone

that's seen a total eclipse uh at least implicitly recognized but it's easy to take that for granted and so my co-author Guillermo Gonzalez, in the late 90s, thought, I wonder what eclipses are like from the surface of the other planets in the solar system. So he did a study of that. It was 65 of the major moons. The really small ones don't really matter. And basically this is what he found.

The one place in the solar system where there are observers to see eclipses is the one place where you get what we call perfect eclipses, this weird match in our sky of something, these two totally different bodies, the moon and the sun, different composition. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun. It's also 400 times closer. And so you get that kind of eerie coincidence. And that, it really became the occasion for the much larger argument that we make in the privileged planet. Okay. So there's 65 moons and there's other surfaces. The one place where you can observe

a solar eclipse in our solar system is the one place where there happen to be observers to observe a solar eclipse. Well, so the one place you can observe perfect solar eclipses. So other places have, yeah, exactly. So where you get this match. So other planets have some kind of version of it. And you can even say, if you're on the, say, floating in the top of the clouds of, in Saturn, you know, Prometheus, a little potato-shaped moon. But it's the only place where you get this perfect match is where there are observers. Okay. Now, the perfect match is important because it's one thing to say, oh, that's an interesting coincidence, so to speak, that there's observers where there's a solar eclipse.

But that's only the first piece of the argument. The second piece was is that solar eclipses enable powerful scientific discovery. So talk about that connection and some of the very scientific discoveries that a solar eclipse in particular has enabled. Absolutely. And some of these are really well known to astronomers, but not to ordinary people. And they involve complicated things like spectrometers. This is effectively a telescope plus a prism, which allows you to split out the light from a star or from our sun. But let me give you one that's sort of intuitive, would be the

confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. So his theory sort of boiled down to the basics is the idea that massive bodies curve something called space-time. So that rather than thinking of gravity as like this physical force that's pulling on something called space-time. So that rather than thinking of gravity as like this physical force that's pulling on something, imagine this thing called space-time and the more massive a body is, the more space-time is curved. And so Einstein developed a kind of beautiful sort of theory

that seemed to sort of match the things that we knew, but he wanted an independent confirmation of it. And so he predicted that if this theory were true, then if you could see starlight passing near the edge of the sun and you map the sky, so map where the stars are at a different time when the sun's not in that part of the sky, right? And then when the sun's in the sky, it's a very large, massive body. And if you get starlight, it's a point of light passing very close to the edge that should be enough that uh the effect on the observer would be that it looks like the star moves not because the star moves but because the light from the star when passing the sun would be curved in uh in conformity to his theory well sir

arthur eddington uh in 1919 during a total eclipse did just such an experiment uh and confirmed einstein's theory it's continued to be confirmed in the same way during a perfect silver eclipses uh in the intervening year so that's hugely important because general uh general relativity is it's the set of fundamental theoretical uh uh framework that we use for talking about the universe as a whole. But what's weird is that if you had gotten, let's say you had an eclipse where the moon just did not quite pass, completely cover this bright part of the sun, this would be useless. So anyone that's seen a partial eclipse knows this. A partial eclipse is to a total eclipse as the day is to

the night. It's just not the same thing. You've got to have the whole bright photosphere of the sun, the bright part covered, in order to get that kind of darkening effect. On the other hand, imagine that we had eclipses in which the moon were much larger in our visual field than the sun. Well, then in that case, the stars that we could see would be too far from the edge. And so, in other words, a perfect eclipse is essentially the natural experiment that you would need to set up to be able to test and to confirm Einstein's general theory, which

is, I'm just giving the one example that's kind of intuitively plausible, but it's one of only several of these that are enabled by the fact that we can see perfect eclipses. And that, as you know, is still only a part of the story because we haven't even talked about what's needed for the planet to be habitable. Okay, so the book starts with solar eclipses. The video you guys made years ago starts with solar eclipses. I've since seen a solar eclipse, not the one in 2024. It didn't go through California, but I don't know,

three or five years ago, whenever it was, went to- 2017. Oh, it was 2017. Okay. So seven years ago. I mean, that was the first one I saw and the temperature changes. It's like the animal sounds are different. It's the closest to a transcendent experience I think one can have that has a natural explanation to it. But it's like you said, a science experiment built in for us to discover the universe. Now we're going to get to some of the specific things like the moon and outer planets required for life. But before we get there, maybe lay out kind of what the heart

of your argument is so people understand the case that you're making. Absolutely. And so, Sean, I can tell you, when we first started talking about this, it's called the Privileged Planet. We talk about all the things you need to go right. If you're thinking of, let's say, you're God and you want to build a habitable planet, you know, what kinds of things are needed in this universe with the, you know, this periodic table of the elements. So it's this universe with its, you know, chemical elements that we have.

What would you need to build chemical life or to allow chemical life to exist on a planet so that's the conditions for habitability you need a whole lot of stuff to go right but the kind of two one of the most important ones is of course your planet needs to be um some place where you can have liquid water sustained on its surface so in other, not too cold so it doesn't freeze out, not too hot so it boils away. You want to be just right in that Goldilocks zone or what astronomers call around a star, the circumstellar habitable zone, which just means where you need to have a planet around a star if you're going to have liquid water on its surface, which is really important for life.

Maybe we'll talk about that in a minute. Now, it's not a surprise that the Earth is in the circumspect or habitable zone obviously right but it turns out that it's actually quite narrow it's a very kind of precise place you need to be and if you want to know how precise all you have to do is look at Venus which is slightly inside it you know totally hostile to life Mars which is slightly outside that that zone also lifeless even though it's very much like the earth so that's one thing you need to build a habitable planet another thing you need is a large well-placed moon this surprise you to people but if our moon suddenly disappeared

the earth over a few thousand years will start wobbling on its axis very dramatically like mars does because it doesn't have a large moon like we do um and so the moon and its placement and its size actually are relevant to the uh making our earth more habitable so now it's going to reverse this and say okay if you're the right distance from your star that's going to determine the size of that star in your sky. And if you have a large, well-placed moon, right, that's adequate to stabilize the tilt of your planet on its axis, right, relative to the planet goes around its star, that's going to set the size of that, right?

It turns out that when you get those two ingredients on a habitable planet, it sets up the conditions for producing perfect solar eclipses, which as we've already mentioned, is crucial for making certain types of scientific discoveries. And that is the example that is the basis of our argument, that the conditions that allow for life in a planetary environment also set up the best conditions overall for doing science so that observers find themselves overall in the best places for scientific observation and that's the combination the kind of coincidence or the correlation that we think uh once you develop the argument it makes much more sense to infer design rather than a blind process okay this is really helpful because i want people to see that there's not only certain circumstances that we're about to get to that have to be right with a moon and the sun and the distance and the age and the right galaxy and outer planets on and on and on.

But it just happens to be that those very conditions are also the conditions that enable scientific discovery. Now we're somewhat getting ahead of ourselves here, but I want people to realize that your argument is not that we just got certain things right and we happen to survive, but it's as if we've been placed in a certain place at a certain time with purpose built into the universe to make scientific discoveries. Now, so that's the heart of the argument. Now, some people are thinking, wait a minute, you haven't made your case yet. Let's get there. But first, why is this so surprising? Because I'll be honest with you, I obviously didn't have the foresight to think of this argument for so many reasons. But when I hear it, it makes sense to me. I'm not surprised by it because of my worldview. But you wrote on page 18, after talking about solar eclipses, we had no reason to expect the world to be set up just so. Why so surprising? Well, it's surprising. Now, so if you're, say, agnostic, so not an atheist, but just someone that has no sort of belief in God, there's no reason to think that the universe would be set up so that observers would be in the best places for observing. In fact, it seems just as likely that maybe you just barely have the conditions to be able to survive.

But being able to do sort of complex mathematics to predict where a planet is going to be, right, that plays no role in the survival of an organism. And so that it just be a kind of a weird pattern. On the other hand, if you're a Christian or a theist, more generically, it's at least a possibility because God could create a universe set up in this way. And so in the book, even though Guillermo and I are both Christians, we didn't want to push the argument farther than we thought it could go by itself. So we never go beyond just saying, look, the best explanation for this is intelligence, it's design, purpose, rather than the live alternative, which would be no purpose, right? It's a sort of framing. But if, on the other hand, you're a Christian, you know the Psalms, you believe the heavens declare the glory of God, you know Paul says

in the book of Romansans from the from the foundation of the world god's invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen from the things that have been made so maybe you know that then this is the sort of thing that you'd say gosh yeah i should have expected this i suppose but for some reason other than a couple of precursors like kepler um it hadn't exactly occurred to people to look for this pattern. And Guillermo and I actually struggled with that. I thought, look, if the evidence is there, why would we be the ones that would notice this? And part of it was like, well, part of it is because a lot of the community that has trained to study these things has been trained not to

ask that question. And also a lot of the evidence that we talk about in the book is only a fairly recent vintage so that stuff we talked about the production of eclipses nobody even knew that until guillermo did the study in the late 1990s and so we just decided that yeah we're at the right place at the right time uh to kind of fully develop this argument even though there are precursors historically. Okay. So we're going to, I got one more question for you before we jump into some of the very particular things we need to have life on our planet on earth, but backgrounded to this, why this discovery is so surprising is what's called the Copernican principle. Maybe explain just kind of what that is and how it's dominated science as a whole and maybe, I almost said astrology, but astrobiology, of course, and physics and astronomy and cosmology.

Break that down for us. Yes. And so, of course, so who's Copernicus? So he was the guy in 1543 wrote this book on the revolution of the heavenly spheres in which he proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system. So in other words, rather than thinking of the earth as being in a kind of stable center with planets and the sun and the moon and the distant stars rotating on spheres around us, which was, that was the kind of general view at the time.

He said, actually a lot of the movements along the sky, they make more sense if you think of the earth as a planet along with other planets going around the sun and develop that. Now, he died right after it was written. So it took a long time for this idea to kind of work its way through the Western kind of scientific community, eventually won the day. And so here's the argument that started really in the 19th century. And think of this as like an extra argument for materialism. And so here's the argument that started really in the 19th century. And it was, it's a,

I think of this as like an extra argument for materialism. So materialism is the argue that, you know, the idea that matters all that matters, there's no God, there's nothing beyond the here and now. And materialism needs a historical narrative. And the narrative has to be that the more we've learned from science, the more we realize how wise the materialists were and how silly the religious people are, right? And so

what you end up having to do is kind of make up the history of science to conform to that story. And so part of the story is like, look, if materialism is true, there should be nothing special about us, nothing special about humans, certainly nothing unusual about the earth or its circumstances. So whatever happened here must have happened countless times elsewhere. That's the Copernican principle, the idea that the long march of scientific discovery just proves more and more and more how insignificant we are, both metaphysically and in terms of our location. Now, you won't find that argument in Copernicus. In fact, it doesn't make any sense if you know the history. So just forget what he actually did and just realize it's just this idea that

science proves that there's nothing exceptional about our status or our location in the universe. It's in practically every college astronomy textbook right at the beginning. Historians of science, by the way, Sean, hate this because it just totally the beginning. Historians of science, by the way, Sean, hate this because it just totally botches the real history of science. But, you know, you're writing astronomy textbook, you're not having to deal with those people. And so that's what people learn. And if you think that, then to say, actually, no, for building habitable planets, you got to get a lot of stuff right. And it's probably just based on the evidence likely that

the production of you know the sort of ratio of habitable planets to uninhabitable ones is very substantial so that it's going to be a very small uh numerator over a very large denominator that's surprising if you've been fed from say kindergarten on this idea of the copernican principle so if i were to sum it, the Copernican principle is basically a principle of mediocrity. The earth is not that special in its location, in its time, its habitability, and hence we should find a universe or at least even in our solar system or in other galaxies teeming with life. Absolutely. That's kind of the principle. Okay. That's the principle. And that's, you the principle okay that's the principle and that's you can see how it's not as if materialism requires that life be everywhere it's just that if you that plus this

kind of idea about insignificance it leads lots of people to think okay well if there's no god there's probably life elsewhere which by itself is a terrible argument right um but lots of people just assume okay there can't be anything special here. So we should assume that whatever happened here has happened, as you said, countless times elsewhere. And so that sets up an expectation that life should be everywhere. Even though if you're thinking about it theologically, it's like, well, God could create a universe of life everywhere or life in one place, right? Let's look at the evidence. And so it's a perfect example, though, of how theism very often is open to more possibilities and more open at the evidence. And so it's a perfect example, though, of how theism very often is open to more possibilities

and more open to the evidence than materialism is. All right. If you're still with us, we're here with Dr. Jay Richards, has a 20-year update to the book, The Privileged Planet. And we're walking through the argument today. And then we're going live together Friday to take your toughest objections. So just write comment in caps. And as long as it's related to the topic, make it concise.

We'll address, we'll take your tub subjections. So if you are a believer or not a believer, or a really smart skeptic, maybe a physics professor who'd watch this and wants to hear his or her feedback, send it to him. Write in your comments and we'll do our best to respond. All right, so let's, you started with the solar eclipse and you said there's a whole lot of other things we need to get right just to have a habitable planet. Talk a little bit more about the moon and how there's a phrase in your book that if the moon wasn't there, we probably wouldn't be here either. Yeah. That's so the moon, it's nice to have,

but most of us just assume that, you know, it's not any big deal. And so that's why in Star Wars, you'll have these habitable planets with different arrangements. As it happens, we can run models now. You know, we've got a good understanding of the basic physics of the solar system. So you can run a model where you just pop the moon out and see what happens. What happens is, I mean, we all learn as kids that the Earth's tilted on its axis about 23 and a half degrees, tilted relative to the plane that it goes around the sun. So it's rotating around its axis

and that's what gives us the seasons, at least sort of when we get farther from the equator, that is because of that tilt. Now the Earth wobbles a little bit over a few thousand years, but it's highly stable because of the gravitational force of the moon itself, which stabilizes that tilt. And then we can look at Mars, and Mars is a good example. It has these two little potato-shaped, kind of probably captured asteroid moons that don't do this.

And Mars wobbles a lot, dramatically over a few thousand years, and that leads to much more catastrophic climate on the surface over time. And so it's weird, but there's like, without the moon, you're gonna get that kind of crazy wobble. It's gonna be very hostile to life. You're also gonna have not as significant a tidal system. We have tidal forces on the earth

from the moon and the sun. We wouldn't have the lunar tides. We'd just have solar tides. And oddly, that's actually, again, really, really important for life. And that's, Sean, I would say that's the sort of trend that we've seen certainly for the last 50 years. Initially, when we knew nothing about Mars,

everybody, like even the 1930s and 40s assumed, that's probably Martians and life on Mars. It required us to send something there to realize, darn it, there's no life that we can find we try to look for evidence of past liquid water right um but that tells you something that gosh okay you got to get a lot of stuff right and the moon is one thing being on the surface of the planet is another the size of the planet the composition of the planet um that's absolutely crucial slightly too large you end up

with a bunch of hydrogen like jupiter in the atmosphere slightly too small or less massive rather uh you're you're not gonna be able to hold an atmosphere in place for the life on its surface there's all of these interconnecting things that are really so complex you can't really describe it and so the way guillermo and i do we just say, think of these as kind of independent ingredients that you need to get right just to build a single habitable planet within this universe. So we need a planet of a certain core of certain size. We need a moon of a certain distance of a certain size. We also need outer planets.

How do these outer planets protect life on earth? Well, and this is the sort of irony. We also need outer planets. How do these outer planets protect life on Earth? Well, and this is the sort of irony. And then remember, so we also need the habitable planet to be in the right distance from its star. You need the right kind of star, stable, probably a single star like our sun. But then, okay, what about all these other planets, which seem sort of superfluous? Well, the astrologers have always insisted that these outer planets played a role in our existence. Now, I doubt that their account of that makes any sense. But as it happens, certainly the large gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, they act like sentinels or guardians of the inner part of the solar system.

And we all know there are asteroids and comets in the outer part of the solar system. Every so often, they visit the inner part of the solar system where earth is you don't want to get bombarded by comments if you can help it right if you want life on a planet well if you've got giant these gas giants in the outer part of the solar system they take a lot of hits because they draw in uh comets that would otherwise find their way into the the center of the solar system so we think actually um if you want to have habitable system you're going to need a planet that's like the earth in the right you know goldilocks zone but you're going to also need these otherwise lifeless giant planets in the right part of the

solar system in nearly circular orbits to protect it from this kind of bombardment from comets so weirdly jupiter and saturn do play a role in our existence, even if the logic of it, the physics of it is different from what the astrologers imagine. Now, when astrobiologists look for life on other planets, they look for the existence of water and for carbon. So maybe remind us or sum up what factors would have to exist for there even to be water and carbon on a planet and why those are such necessary ingredients for life. So here's the key thing, Sean, to realize, because people often say, okay, well, you're talking about life as it evolved here, but of course in a different environment, life would just evolve based on a different chemistry or something. That's forgetting that actually we know a lot of chemistry.

The periodic table of elements is filled in. We know, we are able to detect, we know exactly what other solar systems or other galaxies are made of, the elements are made of. It's the same chemical elements everywhere. And so if you want life, kind of a couple of basic requirements. One is you're gonna need to build molecules

that can code and retain information. So think of that something like a DNA sequence would be one example of that. You're going to also need to build complex macromolecules of different sorts, different kinds of proteins and organs, organelles and all that stuff. But you're also going to need to be stable enough to build those things, but not so stable that they can't undergo chemical reactions. You need it to be what's called metastable or metastable, that sweet spot between not too stable and just stable enough. Carbon is uniquely suited to that. There just isn't another member of the periodic table that has these properties. And so that's why when NASA spends all this money looking for liquid water, they're not just being unimaginative.

They know that if you're going to get life, it's almost certainly going to be on carbon chemistry. Now, what about water? Water, it turns out, is liquid over the same narrow range of temperatures over which carbon chemistry is most reactive. So it's this perfect hand-in-glove fit in terms of being the matrix for the reactions that carbon needs. So think about that. So this range of temperatures over which you've got liquid water, that's, you know, zero to a hundred if we use the communist centigrade system, right? I mean, that's a very narrow range if you think about the temperatures that persist in the universe, right? From almost absolute zero to, you know, say surface of the sun.

Most places are just gonna be way too hot or way too cold. And so just from our knowledge of chemistry and our knowledge of what life needs to be able to code information, undergo chemical reactions, build complex molecules, you can narrow the range of possible locations for life very dramatically. And so this is not being unimaginative and saying, oh, life elsewhere must be like life here. It's based on very strong, clear knowledge

about what's possible given the chemistry that's real, persists in this universe. We've been talking about our solar system in a sense, the kind of sun that we need, the kind of outer planets that we need, a moon, some of the other factors you mentioned, of course, water and carbon. We haven't even talked about the kind of galaxy, our place in the galaxy, our time in the galaxy. We'll get there, but maybe connect the dots as it relates to our place on Earth. You mentioned a few things we have to get right for habitability. How do some of these factors also enable discoverability? Okay, great. And there's one crucial thing that I skipped, and it's the type of atmosphere that you need on the surface of the planet. It's also

determined by basic chemistry. So you're going to need, in effect, an oxygen and nitrogen-rich atmosphere like our own. So now you're thinking, okay, but if you're going to need, in effect, an oxygen and nitrogen-rich atmosphere like our own. So now you're thinking, okay, but if you're setting up conditions for observation and discovery, and you can only pick one place, right, one planetary environment for doing science, you're going to have to kind of match a lot of competing characteristics. And so you're going to have different kinds of atmospheres. Some atmospheres are going to be murky. They could be opaque. They might be translucent.

So they let in light for energy on the surface, but they would really make it impossible to understand the universe at large, even to see the other planets, let alone stars and things like that. As it happens, okay, of course the earth has what we consider sort of transparent atmosphere, transparent to parts of the elect electromagnetic spectrum that are not only crucial for life on the surface uh but also the most information rich for helping us to understand the universe around us and so you can kind of simply think of it as hey we happen to have an atmosphere that's transparent to light so that we can see the galaxy uh our galaxy on its side you know in the sky we can see the stars we can see the galaxy, our galaxy on its side, you know, in the sky,

we can see the stars, we can see the moon, the sun. Einstein would have had a very hard time developing his laws of understanding of gravity and motion without being able to have these careful observations of the planets. And so just having a transparent atmosphere like we have is absolutely crucial. All those things are, you can think of that as kind of the local set of things that you would need. Obviously, having an atmosphere where you can see the stars is going to be crucial for all sorts of different science. And then one other one would be the fact that we have a water cycle and a carbon cycle on the surface of the Earth. We have all these recording devices on the surface of the earth from, of course, the tree rings is the one

that we all know about, but there's also lake sediments. There's ice cores in Greenland, in Antarctica. These are all the result of this kind of regular water cycle in which things happen on this kind of, you know, regular schedule, usually annually. And there's a huge amount of data basically recorded on the surface of the planet

so that we can learn a lot about the recent past, more distant past. If we're in a much more hostile planet, like Mars, for instance, doesn't really have any of these things. And so if you're trapped on Mars, you could somehow survive. You'd have access to a lot less information.

So those are just two things, the production of the water cycle and the atmosphere that is needed for life also sets up much better conditions for doing science than in less life-friendly planets. One of the illustrations that you carry through from the original book that just sunk with me is if somebody stuck with me is if somebody is climbing up kind of a mountain in Hawaii and they come to the top of a mountain and they find like an observatory there, they're not surprised. Now, why are they not surprised? And how is that kind of analogous of where we find ourselves in our solar system and beyond?

Well, and it really, it's all about, okay, when are we justified in making certain inferences, right? And so, and very often what people do is if God might be the person that did something, then all of a sudden the standards get too high. And so they say, well, let's just, we do this every day. So some guy's climbing, let's say Mount Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii, but he doesn't know where he is.

Yeah, he gets to the top and he sees the Keck observatory unless he's completely just a complete idiot he's not gonna be like wow why did they put this at the top of this mountain this is very inconvenient right i mean he would say no why of course he knows why it's up there it's because you put uh observatories are the best places for observing it's the same thing like, look, if we discovered that in the universe, that there's this, this pattern in which the rare places where observers can exist are also in the best places overall for observing, it should trigger a design inference in the same way that the design inference is triggered for that, for that hiker on the mountain in Hawaii. And it's the same kind of criteria.

You know, I often say, okay, let's say Mount Rushmore, for instance. We all infer design and we see Mount Rushmore. You don't need to know anything about the sculptor or who was president at the time or anything to know that, okay, that's the result of intelligence. Now, what if it were to be, what if it just happened to be

that God had directly produced Mount Rushmore? Would it be impossible to infer design in that case? Of course not. You know, it's still inferred design. So the basis, the kind of rational basis for inferring design ends up being the same, whoever the agent is. And so just the fact that, okay, in this case, it might be God involved, that shouldn't disqualify us from being able to make a rational assessment of the evidence. And we think if you look at the accumulation of, of evidences of this pattern, what we call the correlation between life and discovery, that there's more than enough to, to infer design rather than, you know, not design as a hypothesis. And of course, Mount Rushmore is the designer within the universe. Your argument points towards the designer of the universe that's arguably outside of it. We'll get to that. Let's talk a little bit about the galaxy. So we've been focusing a little bit localized in our solar system. And I mean, we could spend hours on this, but talk about, is there anything unique about the kind of galaxy we have or our location in the kind of galaxy that just enables us to survive.

Yeah. So this is called the galactic habitable zone. My co-author, Guillermo Gonzalez, is actually one of the people that initially developed this idea. And so remember I said there's a circumstellar habitable zone, so around a star, right? You're this right distance for liquid water. Well, then you've got the solar system itself. And you say, okay, now, so where's the solar system? Well, it's not in deep space. It's in a galaxy, which is this much larger body of gas and dust and stars, which we call the Milky Way. And as it happens, you can't just be anywhere within the galaxy. If you're a little too close to the center, there's a massive amount of supernovae and X-ray radiation. There's almost certainly a giant black hole there. So too close to the center is going to be hostile to life. If you're too far

out on the edge, it's basically kind of nothing but hydrogen and helium. So there's not enough heavy elements, what astronomers call metals, the kind of rocky stuff that you need to build a rocky planet. But then you also don't want to spend all your time in the spiral arms. You know, we're in the spiral galaxy. If we were to get outside it, it would look like the Andromeda galaxy, this flattened disk. And so it turns out, you know, not surprisingly, that we're going to be in a part of the galaxy that's very conducive to life. Where is that? It's basically midway out between the center and the edge of the galaxy between spiral arms and rotating at about the same rate. Now, that by itself isn't surprising. If there's going to be a habitable planet somewhere in the galaxy, it's going to have to be where the spot that would

be habitable. But remember, argument is that the conditions for habitability are also the best places for doing science. And so you could ask a separate question. Imagine you were saying, okay, where would you want to be if you had to pick one spot in a galaxy where you could see your stars and your planets around it, nearby stars, you compare the stars. You could figure out that you're in a galaxy, even though you can't get outside it, and that you could see past the galaxy to be able to see other galaxies and measure their distances and detect the cosmic background radiation which is of course a strong piece of evidence universe at a beginning the place you would pick would be the galactic habitable zone it would be the place that's the most conducive to life again so that's a one other example if you were too close to the center not only would it be hostile to life you'd have way

too much radiation way too much light and gas and dust to really figure out anything that's going on and in fact you would not want to be in the center because if you're right in the center it you have a very hard time telling um if the radiation on your sky is that local within our galaxy or is it from a distant source as it is uh we're sort of edge on we We look at the galaxy, we can see outside it, but we can also infer the shape of our galaxy. And so essentially a habitable galaxy is going to be a large one with enough heavy elements that's very stable, probably very much like our Milky Way spiral galaxy. And there are lots of galaxies that we see out there in the universe that probably

wouldn't be able to have so much as a single habitable planet within it. Okay. So just to backtrack so people are following with us, just to have life, we have to have a certain moon around us of a certain size, got to have a certain sun and our location from that sun. We have to have a planet of a certain core of a certain size. We have to have surrounding bodies. We have to have water and carbon. But then we also have to be in the right kind of galaxy in the right place. And we haven't talked about this yet, but also in the right cosmic time. And yet all of these factors that enable there to be life tend to coalesce around discoverability.

That's right. Now, what you're not saying is that this is the optimal, perfect place. And I want you to explain this idea of optimization because I travel a decent amount like you do and speak and I have a laptop, but ideally I want a bigger laptop. But a bigger laptop is heavier, takes up more space. So there's kind of a trade-off with size and space and cost given all of the competing factors that plays into the argument you're making here, doesn't it? It does. And this is another thing that people, as you know, Sean often misunderstand. And so you say, okay, what

would be the best place? Well, it's going to be the best place overall. Just as you said, the kind of the best laptop, if you're just optimizing for one factor, like screen size, well, okay, the bigger, the better. But obviously very quickly, screen size is going to compete with other things you want on a laptop. The best laptop, it's going to of course be relative to individual users, but it's going to combine price and durability

and speed and screen size, all that stuff. It's the same thing with respect to kind of building a location where you can do science. By itself, if you said okay what would be the best place say for measuring the cosmic background radiation well it wouldn't be anywhere near a planet it'd be someplace in intergalactic space right you get a really clear view of it but guess what yeah you would trade off a million other things that you could not discover for that one thing and so what you want is the kind of best uh what's called constrained optimization where you still have access to

the cosmic background radiation you can get the information you need but you can also get local information like those recording devices which require an atmosphere as it happens you say okay well if you have a perfectly dry atmosphere that would be yeah that's going to be slightly it's going to do slightly easier for telescope time and stuff like that but if you have a perfectly dry atmosphere that would be yeah that's going to be slightly it's going to do slightly easier for telescope time and stuff like that but if you had a totally dry uh atmosphere it actually prevent you from discovering other things what you really want is a partly cloudy atmosphere because that gives you water and it gives you water droplets which actually gives you rainbows and a bunch of other things and so you've really got to think when you're thinking okay if you're setting up the best place for doing science and you're picking one place, it's got to meet all these competing

conditions. It needs to be good enough to be able to detect the really important things, but without ruling out being able to make other discoveries that require a different set of conditions. And so that's absolutely crucial to sort of understanding our argument. One of the objections I've heard a lot, and I know you have as well, Jay, is that the size of the universe is just a ton of wasted space, that most of it is inhospitable to life. It's just vast and it's wasted space. Does it turn out as far as we can tell that we need the size of the universe or close to it, not only for survival, but also for discoverability. Well, we certainly need a pretty large universe for discovery. And so, I mean, the problem is, of course, Sean, is the question is sort of,

what it is, it's kind of a hidden theological objection. Like why would God create a universe with all this stuff if there's life just on Earth? It really doesn't make sense theologically, because if there is a God that Christians believe, and God's not using limited resources. So it's not like he's using up the matter or something like that. So waste for God doesn't really make sense there. On the other hand, it might seem odd if it didn't have any purpose. But if you think about it, let's imagine God just created the universe. It's just our solar system, but everything else is exactly the same and so there's a finite speed of light it's the same well we would only have a few hours of information about the past of the

universe before there's no more data left it's only because we can see uh distant galaxies that we can learn more about the universe because it took the light a long time to get here. So in many ways, when we're looking at the universe around us, we're not actually looking at it as it is at the moment. We're looking at time samples of different things. And the farther something is away, the farther back it is in time. So we're getting this kind of layered sample of the universe. And so I think you could just turn this around if one of the reasons God created the universe is so that we could do science and

discover and read the book of nature that God has written even read beyond it to its creator this is how you'd want to set it up so that you can discover things and that's just on the discoverability side it might be that you know we're supposed to explore some things that we might not have considered which we just sort of treat as an open question. But the other thing is, you know, people often say, well, okay, but Earth is so small compared to the universe as a whole. But that, again, it's a weird kind of theological objection because size and significance are not the same thing, obviously. People will say, well, we seem so small compared to the universe, so we must not be important. They never say, well, gosh, we're so big compared to neutrinos.

We must be really important. They never go the other way. As it happens, you know, on a logarithmic scale, the earth, kind of the human size scale to earth size scale are actually right in the middle of between the smallest and largest structures, which it turns out to be very important for science. But it's careful. It's important when you're thinking about these arguments not to let kind of half-baked theological objections disguised as something else sort of intrude too much. Now, you have about 12 or 15 objections that you anticipate and respond to in the back of the book. We won't get to all those, in part because I want people watching this to share it with their skeptical

friends, their scientific friends, write in your objections. And I'm going to ask the expert, we're going live on Friday, 10 a.m. and just write comment in caps. And as long as it's on point and it's not too long, we will throw it to Dr. Richards. But let's consider just a couple right now that I'm guessing people are thinking might overturn this a little bit. One of the biggest challenges to the fine-tuning argument, which you get into in the book, and we haven't even gone into here, related kind of the constants in cosmology and physics, is the multiverse. I can imagine somebody applying that to the argument here and saying, well, if there's an infinite number or many universes, at some point, people are going to find themselves in a universe, not only where

they're alive, but they can make scientific discoveries. We happen to be in such a universe. Yes. And so it's important to distinguish that from another argument, which would be, because it's a legitimate argument to say, okay, look, there's a lot of planets in, you know, potential planets, including the 6,000 we've discovered so far around other stars. And so maybe it's possible to get one habitable planet by chance, just given the range of options. And so, and we're all, yeah, absolutely. If our argument were just Earth-like planets are rare, therefore it's designed, that wouldn't work. On the the other hand when you're talking about multiverses you're talking you're basically you're positing the existence of other universes that serve other chances for this kind of grand cosmic lottery to

play in order to get around what otherwise looks like a setup it looks like design i mean the fine tuning evidence that's what it's called it's called the fine tuning evidence, that's what it's called. It's called the fine tuning problem. It looks fine tuned. Maybe it is fine tuned. And so the idea is that, well, okay, but if there's, let's say, a hundred billion galaxies and they vary in their macro properties, then, you know, surely one might be compatible with the existence of observers. They will evolve, look around and say, gosh, the universe seems fine tuned for existence. Now that's a kind of logical possibility. On the other hand, notice what's happening is that we don't have any independent evidence of these other universes.

We're positing them to increase the opportunities for chance to operate, because then they're able to sort of block a design, what would otherwise be an obvious design inference. All right? So remember that. It'd be one thing if we already knew those universes existed. It's another thing to just posit them really to get around an inference

to design. And so here's really the question. Given, I'm not going to rule out the logical possibility of a multiverse scenario, but given that the universe is set up so that observers find themselves in the best place for observing. Is that more likely on the design hypothesis than not? Clearly it is. If the universe is designed for discovery, then this is what we would expect. So it's more likely on that hypothesis than materialism. Does the multiverse sort of increase the probability that we would observe ourselves in this condition? Not at all. Because first of all, let's say it's an infinite number of universes.

There are gonna be far more universes where the observers find themselves in bad places for observing, because there's so many more ways to do that than in good places for observing. So it doesn't really enhance the probability of seeing the universe we actually see. And you can't use a selection effect argument for observing distant stars

or something in the same way that you could talk about certain conditions or prerequisites even to be able to observe. Almost nothing about the kind of scientific observability of the universe played a role, say, in the survival of ancient human beings. And so it's a bit complicated, but the kind of selection effect argument really just doesn't touch our argument precisely because even if you want to inflate the number of universes available, there are going to be far more that are not conducive to science than that are. And so it doesn't really enhance the probability of us seeing this universe.

Whereas the alternative hypothesis is that the universe is designed for discovery. It does. It's in fact, I think it's the obvious and natural inference that almost anyone would make if they were a genuine fence sitter. Talk about the relationship between your, your thesis, you guys are advancing and Darwinism. Now I ask, I know thoughtful skeptics and agnostics are not going to say that darwinism explains this because they they understand certain factors at play but maybe clarify for people watching who might not be making the connection of why this is not only so surprising but even a kind of darwinian process requires not only a fine-tuned universe, but also a habitable planet with a lot of chemistry things right before you could even have such a process. That's right. In fact, everything in

our argument, now look, I actually, I don't buy materialistic origin of life scenarios, and I don't think natural selection and random variation explains very much. It explains some things, but not nearly everything in biology. That said, there's nothing in our argument that requires you to be on one side or the other of those debates. In fact, a kind of purely materialistic origin of life scenario could be that maybe, you know, it pans out. Let's say that the Darwinian mechanism really can explain all the diversity and complexity of life after you get the first life.'s say okay even if that's true our argument is exactly the same because it has to do with the conditions necessary for life itself we don't think that well okay once you get a habitable planet with liquid water it's like

the job is done the philosophers would say that that's a necessary set of conditions for life they're not sufficient um but our argument insofar as the argument itself goes, is completely agnostic with respect to the materialistic origin of life scenarios and Darwinism. And the wise observers and reviewers actually understood that, which is why we just sort of avoid talking about it, even though anybody with Google can figure out what our views on that are. To me, that's a benefit of the argument. It's kind of like the way Thomas Aquinas developed his cosmological argument. He said, now, of course, we believe as Christians

that God created the universe in the past, but maybe we can't prove that philosophically. But even if the universe is eternal, that doesn't mean that it's necessary or that it's not contingent. He sort of grants the skeptic a lot of leeway, even if Darwinian theory fully explains the complexity of life, our argument is still the same.

That's really helpful. Now, what do you think? Read it again this time. It's been like two decades. You guys are very reserved on what you think follows from this. And I thought that was appropriate. You don't overstate your case. You say, this is what we suggest. We put our thesis out there for feedback, even though we think it's stronger than ever. What do you think are the worldview implications?

If your argument is right, what follows in terms of the worldview that best explains this? From this argument alone, I know you're a Christian. You've talked about that elsewhere. Of course. But what does this argument tell us about worldviews, so to speak? I think it can get us at least with a couple of additional pieces. I think it could get us to a generic deism or theism for sure. And in fact, I would just drop it in. If somebody wanted to know that argument, I would just give them the privileged planet plus Steve Myers' return of the God hypothesis and say, plug it in here. Because Steve, of course, lovingly sort of develops scientific evidence to theism. And I just think you need a little more, but it's going to need to be an intelligent agent that transcends the physical universe and has the power to be able to bring about the

universe that we actually see, right? So, okay, maybe you could say maybe that's not omnipotence, but it's still pretty darn, that sounds like the job description for God. But we always want the sort of argument not to be a force to say, okay, what do we think this argument alone gets you to? It absolutely gets you beyond materialism. We think this just does not make any sense on the materialist hypothesis. It makes perfect sense of the design hypothesis. And because we're talking about the design of the universe as a whole,

the agent is gonna have to transcend the universe. And since we know it's finite in time, I mean, the universe for all sorts of reasons is just a crummy candidate for ultimate explanation. And it's the live alternative to something like theism or a personal God. And so we think, yeah, it gets right up to that. But we don't want to sort of pretend that it certainly doesn't deductively prove that. And that we'd want to add a little bit to it before we'd make the argument for theism. But that was, I mean, very much, we just wanted to

say, okay, let's just let the argument go as far as it can and then just not go any farther. That's helpful. So give us a summary of how you think your argument has fared since 2004, over two decades. And obviously, well, obviously you're biased in one sense, but I know you're going to tell us what the feedback and the criticism is and how you guys have responded, but is it what you expected in 2004? Are you pleased? Are you hesitant? Like, how would you frame it? I'd say we're very pleased that 20 years out here, there've been no major findings to our argument that put a dent in it. As you've noted, we decided to go ahead and try to anticipate all the objections ahead of time, just to make it easier for people so they wouldn't have to strawman us. They could just use the ones we came up with.

But, I mean, it's totally open to falsification. I mean, really easy if you find life based on a different type of chemistry or life on a completely different planet, a planetary environment. That's going to put a big dent in our argument. But there are other kind of more subtle objections that we had to deal with. What's different now, probably the most significant difference between 2004, it was just, I think, about 100 extrasolar planets at the time we finished the manuscript. We're now pushing up close to 5,000 extrasolar planets. So we have a lot more data to kind of narrow that.

For people that aren't following it, we still haven't found an Earth-like planet, even as Earth-like as Mars. We found that planetary systems come in all sorts of varieties, but it's just so much easier to build a planet where life can't exist than one where it can. And so you'll get a lot of planets with these hot Jupiters, Jupiter giants

that are in these very elliptical orbits that would just make a habitable planet very difficult. Now, we still have discovering left to do. In fact, we don't have quite the power to even really detect Earth-sized planets around other stars. And so I'd say that the field is narrowing. It's becoming more and more clear that Earth-like planets are going to be rare relative to the alternatives. But, you know, there's still, unfortunately, a lot of unknowns. And so that gives us an opportunity to make predictions about what we think is going to be found.

So it's a risky prediction. It's not something that we have sort of immunized against refutation or objection. I see some of the popular responses and engagement. But what's been the academic response? Have people ignored you guys? Have they welcomed it? Have they criticized it? Have you seen certain changes in people being more open to this in the past couple of decades? I would say we, a great blessing, we were not ignored for sure.

And I would say the thing that's probably most meaningful to Guillermo and me, I think, was actually probably the review. I think it was in science by a researcher at the SETI Institute who disagreed with us. But it was a totally rational, respectful, intellectually honest review. We were appreciated that. What was frustrating was the massive ad hominem attacks, especially against Guillermo, who, when the book came out, was not a tenured faculty member. He was teaching at Iowa State in the physics astronomy faculty. And an atheist religion professor led a campaign and a petition drive to get him to die in tenure. I mean, it's really kind of nasty stuff.

When the documentary came out, there was a premiere at the Smithsonian, you know, just rented the space and followed the rules. And there was a huge objection to that. So the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had to respond to it, weirdly. And so it absolutely was not ignored. I've always thought the argument is naturally kind of located within the arguments for design in fine-tuning so you've got an argument from Big Bang cosmology for a beginning evidence of the kind of cosmic features of the universe and fine-tuning great arguments for design and biology and the origin of life and then the privileged planets for it is the bridging argument and the one thing it has that some of the arguments don't

have is that it emphasizes not just what's needed for life but also what's needed for scientific discovery and then Michael Denton has actually picked up and filled that out some more because, you know, one of the objections to people that make arguments like this is that it's somehow anti-science. Well, I don't know how you can say that an argument that says science is built into the structure of things, how that could possibly be anti-science or effectively say God created the universe to make science possible. That's really interesting. One of the objections to intelligent design is that it doesn't make any predictions. Right.

And yet in 2004, you and Guillermo Gonzalez made some predictions. Yes. Can you give us an example? Did you make any that didn't come true? Did you make any that did come true? And do you have any further objections moving forward or predictions moving forward now? Yeah, it's a great question. And we do some of those, of course, in the book, the one that was probably in some ways the riskiest, because we noticed that there are these standard candles. What a standard candle is, is it's just a way of measuring a distance

between one thing and another at different size scales. And so to be able to measure, you know, the distance to another galaxy that requires certain things to happen, in this case, certain kinds of stars have to be detectable. But then it gets very hard to measure distances at larger intervals. And we made a prediction that a

particular type of supernova, that supernova is a type of stellar event, it's a giant explosion, effectively, would be found to be really, really useful standard candles for measuring great distances. Because what we noticed is that if the universe is set up for discovery, and there are these standard candles at certain size scales, there's this other size scale where we don't quite have one yet. What would be a candidate for it? And it was this type of supernovae that we predicted that are now widely recognized to be that. And then the other thing would just be that the more we learn, the more we would come to appreciate just how precisely fine-tuned things have to be, even in a local setting, for life to exist. So basically,

we said, look, we're predicting that when the data comes in, it's going to be the number, the sort of, you know, if you think of the sort of numerator is the number of habitable planets, and the denominator is the number of total planets, that that ratio is going to be very, very wide. So in other words, rarity is going to, it's going to continue to persist as we learn more about the universe and planetary systems. Do you think we'll find life on other planets? And if we did, what would it do to your thesis? It wouldn't do anything. So our argument our argument it depends is that how i should really answer that um our what we predict our argument at least predicts that if we find life complex life

elsewhere in the universe it will be around a a planet in a system very much like ours and so guillermo said look if we get if seti ever works and we get a radio signal from another uh stellar you know, the first thing we should do is ask them to send us some pictures of their perfect eclipses and we'll send some of ours. That's the prediction. So our argument doesn't say Earth is unique. It's just that if there are other planets with life around it, it's going to be very,

very much like Earth. It's not going to be just these radically different kind of systems and different stars and planets and moons. There's something I've wanted to ask you and in our different conversations I haven't, but you kind of hint at this at the book. Could there also be a correlation between habitability and seeing beauty? Because I think of like a solar eclipse is beautiful, rainbows. Like are there certain things that are beautiful? Now, of course, even Mars has its own kind of beauty, right?

Now, you can't survive there, but its own kind of beauty. But the kinds of things we distinctly associate like sunsets and solar eclipses and even certain things that are galaxies could somebody or has somebody made an argument from survivability and have ability to accessing and seeing and experiencing beauty well and it's funny sean because we had thought of that initially and say a little more about it in the book than we did before uh and we absolutely think there's something to that i mean you described it at the beginning talking about there's just something ethereal and transcendent about seeing a perfect silver eclipse it's like almost unlike anything else but the beauty of of rainbows um we think that those are sort of markers uh effectively i mean we know that uh theoretical beauty is for for scientists especially in the physical sciences they treat it as a marker of truth so So, and of course, Einstein famously talked

about the kind of beauty of his theory. Mathematicians way of talking about beauty is usually a type of symmetry or fit, but just the kind of visceral beauty that you see, you know, when you are always excited to see a rainbow, no matter where you live, and always excited to see a perfect solar eclipse. We think that those are markers

and that there's actually more work to be done um it's hard to quantify beauty obviously but it's clear that beauty plays a profound role and has played a profound role in scientific discovery itself and so it absolutely should be a part of this and it it's it's not left uh you know we notice that gosh a lot of the things that we're talking about actually are just at least intuitively beautiful things and so part of that we sort of feel like okay somebody else is going to probably do a better job of making that argument than we we do we just kind of provide a couple of hints it's a really interesting question of course i'm bringing in christian theology here whether we view god primarily as an engineer or as an artist or as both. And of course, there's room for both of them. Your argument is more the engineer,

scientific discovery side. And I think somebody could make this argument from beauty, and I would love to see somebody expand it and connect those dots. But nonetheless, you're right that it's not one or the other. There's a sense of beauty that often draws us to make scientific discoveries absolutely so we can't really siphon them off separately all right so we're going live on Friday 10 o'clock what would be your invitation I hesitate to say challenge but your invitation of people who watch uh what kind of questions do you want what response do you want what would help us have the best hour of responding to help you in your research but viewers assess this argument give an invitation for people watching uh to join us

but also to leave certain kind of comments that would help us have a good conversation on friday i mean i think probably the most important thing is that people come away understanding exactly to leave certain kind of comments that would help us have a good conversation on Friday? I mean, I think probably the most important thing is that people come away understanding exactly what the argument is rather than isn't, because very often people will make objections to an argument that we're not making, you know, and so that's obviously unproductive. And so if there are things that just don't quite make sense, or if you think there's some obvious objection, it's probably one that we've thought of. The really obvious ones, remember we've had this for 20 years, and even if we're not very smart, other smart people would have brought them up. And so if you're thinking, oh, this is obviously wrong

because X, it might be that you're misunderstanding the argument. So sort of drill in on that. But of course, if people do have objections, I'd love to discover there's another objection that we don't have in that final chapter of the book. And we just have to take account of it because there's always sort of new ideas. But, you know, we want this argument to hold up on empirical grounds. It doesn't require that you assume Christianity or theism. I would say it requires that you assume at least that it could be possible that there's evidence for design in the universe. If you're open to that and say, okay, I'm going to be open to the evidence one way or the other.

Those are the types of people that we, we think the argument should be able to persuade. Somebody is a committed materialist. I mean, you know, there's that's sort of impenetrable. So that's what we hope to do. And very often what I've found is that people argue over the argument because they think we're saying something that we're not. That's really helpful. All right. If you're watching this and you have a question, write comment or question in the comments in caps, and then just think through your question as succinctly and related to the topic as possible. And we will get through as many as we can when we go live on Friday. If you have a friend who's a skeptic, who doesn't buy this and has some background in this, send it to them and ask them to submit their tough questions.

That would help us and help viewers have an even better show. Jay, you sent me a PDF. I suppose I should have asked this before. Is the book out and available right now? It is. The release date was August the 27th. So it's been out for a few days and is available at all the usual bookstores.

Awesome. Pick up a copy. Join us Friday at 10 o'clock. Love the book Privileged Planet. Even if people don't join us, I hope they'll pick up a copy, believe it or not. It's not only interesting, I find it really compelling and fascinating. It is either my favorite or one of my favorite books on design. And I hope you guys will do another update in 20 more years or maybe a decade this time. Friends, while you're

watching, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other shows coming up like this talking about intelligent design, evidence for the resurrection, near-death experiences. You will not want to miss it. If you thought about studying apologetics, we have full classes like this in our apologetics program at Biola on the case for intelligent design, where we read and study and think and debate these topics. Would love to train you formally. Jam, looking forward to it. We'll see you Friday at 10 o'clock. Did I miss anything that you want to include or let folks know? That's great. Thanks so much, Sean. Looking forward to Friday. Can't wait. We'll see you then.

All right.