Book Review: Destiny or Chance: Our Solar System and Its Place in the Cosmos

Author: Stuart Ross Taylor
Spiritual Bias: N/A
Origins Bias: Evolutionist/Reductionist
Rating: Caveat Emptor
Level: Intermediate

Comments: Perhaps this book should have been titled "Solar System Astronomy" because most of the book deals with basic scientific understandings about our local solar system. Overall there's very little in depth discussion about whether or not the solar system has been designed or evolved through random chance. There's little more than one chapter towards the end of the book that deals with this issue of the anthropic principle. In any case, Taylor does conclude that intelligent life is unique to our Earth which strikes accord with my philosophy. However he believes that this is simply due to chance and not design. I find this very strange because after all, Borel's law implies that highly unlikely (or extremely low chance) events are caused by intelligent agents. He also takes a few jabs along the way at Christianity. Most of the attacks he makes are on straw men and can easily be dismissed. For example, in the section of the book were he discusses the fine tuning of the physical constants of the cosmos he finds the need to bring up abruptly the veracity of the Bible. Specifically he mentions the measurement taken by King's Solomon architect in I Kings 7:23 - "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." Taylor notes that the text doesn't mention 31.41592654.. with regards to the circumference and thus concludes that the Bible is not divinely inspired. First, it's quite ridiculous to believe that Scripture which was mainly written to communicate spiritual truth would contain unimportant technical details such as the exact value of pi. After all, the text says that the basin was "circular" in shape. It need not have been an exact circle. Second, the value of a cubit is less than an exact measurement roughly a bit more than twenty inches and lastly, there's no exact mention of the measurement method used - inside the rim vs outside of the rim of the basic or otherwise. It's these kinds of shallow attacks on Christianity and the Bible that really bother me and are scattered throughout this book. This coupled with the fact that most of the book covers basic solar system astronomy leads me to give this book a rating of "Caveat Emptor" from the perspective of origins. However, if you're interested in the scientific models of the solar system then you'll find this choice a good one.

Summary Quote: "[T]he Earth evolved through a series of chance events into an abode suitable for the origin and evolution of ife. Other planetary systems are unlikely to contain clones of the Earth, and must be expected to differ substantially from our own. Chance events continued to affect the evolution of life throughout geological time, the most dramatic being the massive collision with an asteroid 65 million years ago, which wiped out the ammonites, the graceful pleisosaurs, the great dinosaurs and much else at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. This great disaster cleared the way for the evolution of mammals to fill the vacant spaces. It is sobering to realize that, but for this cosmic accident, Homo sapiens would not have evolved at all, and this account would not have been written."