Michael Denton - The Miracle of Man

THE MIRACLE OF MAN

THE MIRACLE
OF MAN

THE FINE TUNING OF NATURE
FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE

MICHAEL DENTON

SEATTLE DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PRESS 2022

Description

For years, leading scientists and science popularizers have insisted humans are nothing special in the cosmic scheme of things. In this important and provocative new book, renowned biologist Michael Denton argues otherwise. According to Denton, the cosmos is stunningly fit not just for cellular life, not just for carbon-based animal life, and not even just for air-breathing animals, but especially for bipedal, land-roving, technology-pursuing creatures of our general physiological design. In short, the cosmos is specifically fit for creatures like us. Drawing on discoveries from a myriad of scientific fields, Denton masterfully documents how contemporary science has revived humanitys special place in nature. The human person as revealed by modern science is no contingent assemblage of elements, an irrelevant afterthought of cosmic evolution, Denton writes. Rather, our destiny was inscribed in the light of stars and the properties of atoms since the beginning. Now we know that all nature sings the song of man. Our seeming exile from nature is over. We now know what the medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed manifest in human flesh. And with this revelation the... delusion of humankinds irrelevance on the cosmic stage has been revoked.

Copyright Notice

2022 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Library Cataloging Data

The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence by Michael Denton

256 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.6 in. & 0.9 lb., 229 x 152 x 15 mm & 0.4 kg.

ISBN-13: Paperback: 978-1-63712-012-5, Kindle: 978-1-63712-014-9, EPub: 978-1-63712-013-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935635

BISAC: SCI036000 SCIENCE/Life Sciences/Human Anatomy & Physiology

BISAC: SCI019000 SCIENCE/Earth Sciences/General

BISAC: SCI015000 SCIENCE/Space Science/Cosmology

BISAC: TEC056000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING/History

Publisher Information

Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98104

Internet: discoveryinstitutepress.com

Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

First edition, first printing, May 2022.

ADVANCE PRAISE

While there is a general awareness of the fine tuning of the various laws and constants of physics rendering our planetary home particularly well suited for intelligent life, Michael Denton describes an additional astonishing array of qualities demonstrating prior fitness for complex carbon-based, high-energy, metabolically efficient life that takes the fine tuning in a different direction and to an exceptional degree. He cleverly describes the amazing fitness of oxygen, nitrogen, and water in both the hydrological cycle and in the respiratory and circulatory system. He highlights some surprising and intriguing observations, such as the relationship between the tension in small blood vessels and their ability to withstand relatively high hydrostatic pressures courtesy of the counterintuitive characteristics of the law of Laplace. Denton describes not just amazing and specific adaptations but the surprising prior fitness of basic physics and chemistry, a peculiar challenge to any naturalistic explanation and reminiscent of remarkable foresight. Teleology is evident everywhere you look.

David Galloway, MD DSc FRCS FRCP FACS FACP; former President, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; Honorary Professor of Surgery, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow

Every important realm of science is worthy of continuing reevaluation. The idea that a field of inquiry is settled science and therefore must be excluded from scientific challenge is detrimental to science. In this spirit, I am happy to recommend Michael Dentons The Miracle of Man . While many science books on origins focus on the question of biological evolution, others on the first cell, and others still on fine tuning in physics and the birth of the universe, Dentons latest is refreshing in the attention it pays to the astonishing degree of fitness for advanced life manifest in chemistry. Forty-five years ago, my dear friend and Berkeley colleague, the late Phil Johnson (then on sabbatical in London), quizzed me on Dentons 1985 book. I enjoyed it and encouraged him to address his powerful intellect to analyze Dentons book. Phils study of the Denton book was perhaps the first step in the development of the intelligent design movement.

Henry F. Schaefer III, PhD, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving. Thus wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell in perhaps the most spectacularly wrong-headed pronouncement of the twentieth century. Au contraire, in The Miracle of Man , Michael Denton gathers the voluminous evidence of modern science that shows the exact opposite: the universe precisely embodies the end for which it was built.

Michael Behe , PhD, Professor of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University; author of Darwins Black Box , The Edge of Evolution , and Darwin Devolves

If Lawrence Hendersons 1913 classic The Fitness of the Environment was volume 1, then Dentons 1998 Natures Destiny should be considered volume 2. If one thinks that Denton completed the series with that work, one would be mistaken. In my opinion The Miracle of Man earns a well-deserved status as volume 3. Denton provides significant new examples of natures prior fitness for mankind to support his anthropocentric thesis.

Guillermo Gonzalez , PhD, astronomer, astrobiologist, and co-author of The Privileged Planet

In his new book Michael Denton contributes a highly original new approach to the teleological design argument. Previous approaches either focused on evidence for design in the unlikely conditions of the physical constants and laws of the universe or on unlikely complex phenomena in biology. Here Denton shows that the intricate properties of light, carbon, water, air, fire, and metals all are contributing to a unique prior environmental fitness of nature for human biology, which suggests that the universe is not just fine tuned for any life but was specifically designed for us and our cultural and technological development. Indeed, Denton provides powerful scientific evidence for theism and anthropocentric human exceptionalism that are at the core of the Judeo-Christian worldview. We are not insignificant accidents of nature and not the cosmic orphan. Denton provides the scientific underpinning for a theistic real humanism far beyond the nihilistic implications of so-called secular humanism. This book deserves to become a game changer that will spark a new enlightenment and re-enchantment of the cosmos in the twenty-first century.

Gnter Bechly , PhD in paleontology, Eberhard-Karls University of Tbingen; Scientific Curator from 1999-2016 at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany; Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture

The Miracle of Man is a masterful summation of Michael Dentons work. For the last several years he has been making the case that nature is uniquely suitedprepared in advance, as it wereto permit creatures with our physical characteristics to exist. This book brings it all together: If the characteristics of light, the sun, water, oxygen, and carbon were not precisely as they are, we would not exist. If our atmosphere were different, or our planets location and composition, life as we know it could not exist. This may seem a trivial argument, but it is not. Rather than say that hey, we are suited for the environment because we are adapted to it, we must also admit that, seen from the other side, the precise chemical properties of the elements, formed in the fires of creation, were pre-adapted to permit creatures like usair-breathing, high energy, bipedal and terrestrial, with our basic physiology. The very chemistry of life seems to have been designed for us! Read this book if this hypothesis sounds absurd or trivialthe weight of the evidence may change your mind.