Anthropic Principles

Description

Popular accounts of the history of science contend that the Copernican revolution diminished humanity’s opinion of itself and that the Darwinian revolution completed our cutting down to size. From being the embodiment of Imago Dei, with dominion over the other inhabitants of the central component of the universe, Earth, the human species came to see itself as an accidental product of chance forces, precariously clinging to a brief existence on the surface of a trivial planet, orbiting an insignificant star near the edge of one among billions of galaxies. However, equating centrality with importance has little logic, and anyway few modern cosmologists would consider that the universe hasa center. Moreover, the concept that life, even perhaps conscious life, arose only as the product of an immensely improbable sequence of accidents, has been challenged on strictly scientific grounds, quite independent of theological ones, by many thinkers in the past century. The term...