Guillermo Gonzalez on Growing Evidence of Earth’s Privilege

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s ID the Future out of the archive, astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, begins a two-part conversation with host Casey Luskin by providing a rapid survey of some of the growing evidence that Earth is finely tuned in numerous ways to allow for life. He draws a helpful distinction between local fine tuning and universal fine tuning. And he tells us about the many extra-solar planets astronomers have discovered in recent years and how all that new data continues to undermine the misguided assumption (encouraged by the misnamed “Copernican Principle”) that Earth is just a humdrum planet. Far from it, Gonzalez argues. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.0	Hello and welcome to ID the Future. I'm Casey Luskin with Discovery Institute's Center for Science
0:18.0	and Culture in Seattle, Washington. Today on the show we have with
0:21.7	us Guillermo Gonzalez. Guillermo is a research scientist at Tellus One Scientific in Huntsville,
0:26.8	Alabama. He earned a PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993 and is authored
0:32.8	nearly 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He's also co-author of a major college-level astronomy textbook,
0:39.2	and his work has led to the discovery of two new planets and has been featured in journals such as
0:44.0	science, nature, and on the cover of Scientific American. In 2004, Guillermo Gonzalez, co-authored
0:50.3	the book, The Privileged Planet, How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery,
0:55.1	a book that is probably familiar to many Idy the future listeners. His latest writing is a book
1:00.2	chapter in the volume, Science and Faith and Dialogue, published by a South African academic
1:05.4	publisher Aosis, and his chapter is titled Local Fine Tuning and Habitable Zones.
1:15.1	Guillermo is also a fellow with Discovery Institute, and it's great to have you on the show with us,
1:15.4	Guillermo.
1:16.9	Thanks for having me.
1:21.8	Yes, well, we wanted to have a conversation with you about your chapter in this new volume,
1:25.4	Science and Faith and Dialogue, which, by the way, is an open access book.
1:28.5	We'll be sure to post a link to it in the description of this podcast so folks who are interested in reading Guillermo's chapter
1:31.3	can download it for free.
1:33.2	But we want to talk about your chapter about local fine-tuning and habitable zones.
1:37.9	And so I'd like to just ask you a start-off question here, Guillermo.
1:41.1	When you talk about fine-tuning, what do you mean by fine-tuning?
	...

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