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What are odds of life being just a random accident? Want to bet?

By MONROE ROARK

The recent earthquake-tsunami disaster in Asia has gotten a lot of people talking about the earth and why it does what it does.

I will not speculate here as to why the catastrophe occurred. That is for another discussion in another forum. But its very occurrence brings forth questions about man’s relationship to the elements by demonstrating how small humans are and how little control they have over their environment. It is the height of humanistic arrogance to suggest anything else.

But using events like these to argue that everything happens at random is not the correct approach. This planet did not get here by accident. Consider the following:

• No sign of life has been found anywhere else in our solar system. On Earth, life of some type is found everywhere from the tropics to the polar ice caps.

• If the yearly average temperature on Earth rose or fell by just a few degrees, most or us would either burn up or freeze. It has been estimated that a one-degree change is the average worldwide temperature would have a serious effect over time, and a two-degree change could be disastrous.

• If Earth rotated any slower on its axis, life would freeze at night because of lack of heat from the sun or burn during the day from too much sun.

• If we orbited too close or too far from the sun, we would all die. Our yearlong orbit is accurate to a thousandth of a second.

• If Earth were not tilted 23 degrees on its axis, there would be no seasons and eventually the entire planet would be huge continents of snow and ice, with no rainfall or oceans.

• The large amount of water on our surface absorbs huge amounts of sunlight and releases that heat at night, helping stabilize temperatures. But Earth is the only planet with any large bodies of water. Amazingly, water is also one of the few elements that does not continue to contract as it gets colder. If that were not the case, there would be huge deposits of ice at the bottom of the oceans and a lot of dead marine life.

• Air on Earth works as miraculously as water. If air did not rise when heated, then the surface of the planet would be unbearably hot while the temperature a few hundred feet off the ground became far too cold. But this air flow keeps that from happening.

It also creates wind currents which are important to the ecological system. The gases which make up the atmosphere are a perfect mix for sustaining life. Any large variation would kill us all. Plus, if the atmosphere were thinner, a great many meteors would break through and wreak havoc on a daily basis.

Evolution, by its very definition, is a process by which life adapts to fit its existing environment. If that were the process here on Earth, then why have other environments not been conquered as well over millions or billions of years?

Even on Earth, only a sliver of its space is habitable. You can dig several thousand miles to get to the center of the planet, but you can’t live more than a few hundred feet underground. Likewise, the closer one gets to the edge of the atmosphere, the tougher it is to survive. So there’s not much room left.

But consider what organisms lie in just six inches’ depth on an acre of typical farm soil.

There are billions of stars in our galaxy with planets circling them. The odds of a single planet being just the correct size and the correct distance from the correct star to sustain life as we know it are so astronomical (pardon the pun) that they are difficult to calculate.

So can an intelligent person really believe that anything about Earth’s formation is accidental? Or is it logical to conclude that “God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it; he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18, emphasis mine)”?

Draw your own conclusions.

[Some of the information above was provided by the Institute for Creation Research (www.icr.org).]

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