In the school science lesson that I remember best, students used cash register tapes to construct a to-scale timeline of the earth's history. I can no longer remember the details of how many years were represented by what unit of length on the tape, but, considering that our planet was formed around 4.6 billion years ago, and choosing on a football Sunday to represent this history on a 100-yard scale, you can maybe see why I was impressed.
100 yards=4.6 billion years
10 yards=460 million years
1 yard=46 million years
1 foot=15+ million years
1 inch=1,250,000 years
0.1 inch=125,000 years
0.01 inch=12,500 years
The extinction of the dinosaurs occurred less than two yards from the goal line representing present time. Recorded human history fits easily in the last hundredth of an inch.
I thought of this lesson recently while reading the opening chapters of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, wherein various strategems are employed to impress upon the reader the unfathomable size of our solar system, which is itself a lonely outpost in one of the universe's uncountable galaxies. Our place in both time and space can make one feel insignificant.
Minimal science literacy, it seems to me, removes human beings from the center of the frame, where the devout insist upon placing us. The idea of "intelligent design" is thus turned on its head. Where is the sense of architectural design in all this time and empty space? If there was a God, and he cared mainly for us, there would be no need for the vast auditorium with a tiny stage for our human drama built at one end only after the passage of billions of years. Given God's supposed purpose, the design is absurdly out-sized in every dimension.
Put it another way. The notion of "intelligent design" takes too narrow a view. It alleges signs of design in one obscure corner of the universe but takes no account of unfathomable stretches of cold blank nothingness. For no logical reason, the evidence in the case is restricted to what humans can see with the naked eye on their own small planet--and the witnesses are not allowed to testify about that planet's long history, either.
There are lots of places in the universe from which it is difficult to detect design. But, of course, in those places intelligent beings do not compose essays arguing that, from where they sit, the existence of a benevolent design appears doubtful.
Isn't it remarkable that we should live here on earth, where God has taken care to calibrate everything in such a way as to support our survival, instead of on some cold or boiling planet with a poisonous atmosphere, where nothing could live for ten seconds!
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