The Privileged Planet - How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery Description:

The Privileged Planet : How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery review:
1 stars (Elevation of the ego to a new level) - The proponents of this Intelligent Design worldview based book and some reviewers here see this book as a breath of fresh air to put purpose back into a directionless, material based culture. The first premise that evolution,Copernicus and science has taken away our purpose in life is not valid to me.



Science has only enhanced our understanding of life and it's task is not to provide a purpose in our lives because like religion that is a subjective experience. Science explains how things work and does not presume to answer why we are here.



I think that the philosophy of this book and other ID dogma does the opposite of restoring a purposeful based view of life. It only adds to the self-absorbed pathological sickness that infests many individuals in the American culture...the sense of being special, divinely ordained to be the center of the world and a gross sense of entitlement.



Everything then was created just for us. Believers are superior to athesist and agnostics,Christians are superior to non-Christians, Americans are superior to other cultures and now the ego even goes out further... the earth was designed and placed so humans(specifically Judeo-Christians) could appear,evolve and be the priviledged observers of the cosmos and discover the creator.



That is obscene, absurd and ludicrous to propose such a thing in a universe with literally billions of galaxies and 15 billion light years across. In the midst of all that space, how likely is it that the lifeforms on one tiny orbital body would have the "truth" nailed down in their corner.



Is it some grand purpose that stellar objects go super-nova and explode perhaps wiping out billions of life forms that may be in the vicinity. Or how about that some galaxies are on crash courses that will cause future destruction. Is it purposeful that the sun will one day go cold and all life on this planet will cease to exist. Or what about asteroids that have and may crash here again to cause widespread extinction...is that purposeful or designed by a loving designer?



The list could go on to all the imperfect mechanisms in our biological makeup that contadict the idea of a grand designer.



This inflated hubris of elevating ourselves...the EGO,(not just Americans do it)over everything is one of the reasons we have so many problems in this world.



I can be in awe of the universe,be humble, be ethicaly self-directed, respect all life and be absolutely grateful I am alive in the "now" without having to know the "purpose"of it all. There is enough to learn in how the universe operates without being obsessed with the why or if it was designed.



We are here now, we are alive and cognizant. Our atoms and molecules will one day make up something or someone else in the universe. It is an endless continum and that is enough for me.

That does not depress me one bit. It is acknowledgeing reality.



If there is a life force and "purpose" that is behind it all, I believe it would have to be grandly more sophisticated than the ludicrous cartoon characters in religious texts and the hypothosis of this book
5 stars (National Center for Science Education is a Religious Propaganda Site for Church of Evolution!!!) - To any who are fed up with the violent blasts of ignorance spewing forth from the negative reviewers, understand where they are coming from. There is no evidence for macro-evolution. All avenues of scientific inquiry more than disprove it! These Darwinist proselytizers who remain in the "dark ages" of science...faithfully believing theories that date back 150 years ago...are no threat to any who are truly interested in reading the arguments, data, and proof in this book. My prediction is that, in about 10 years, people in this Evolution cult and its deeply embedded blind faith, will be sitting in dark corners with primordial egg on their faces.
5 stars (Informative and thought provoking) - The book made me aware of many issues relating to the conditions needed for life that I had never known about. It also made me aware of how unique our planet is in terms of being able to observe the universe and discover its laws. I think the book is excellent.