The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery | Astronomy Book for Science Enthusiasts | Perfect for Classroom Learning & Space Exploration Studies

This book has to be one of the most underrated publications...ever. On the one hand, the book represents a substantial collection and culmination of astronomical findings and observations from the past century. Science geeks will enjoy it period! On the other hand and from a different angle, I really cannot think of a greater challenge to atheism than this volume - and I am familiar with quite a few of those that do so.It's just too bad the book is systematically dismissed as either (erroneously) as a regurgitation of the anthropic principle or a piece of creationist propaganda. Such critics typically do not have the patience to wade through the absolute mass of data and scientific scholarship that this book presents. If only people would read books before criticizing them!Personally, I walked away from this book being completely blown away. Is it not bizarre that human inventions in technology come *exactly* when they're most desperately needed? Why is it that out of the billions of years of our earth and solar systems history, right now is the best time to view solar eclipses - and simultaneously right now is when we just so happen to technology to view and enjoy them most? The discussion about cosmic time and the size of human beings - being in the literal center of the cosmos, looking down into microscopic matter and looking up into the vast huge galactic universe, etc., leaves one with the impression that God spent billions of years putting the universe together *for this very moment* - the 10-100,000 years or so that human beings, conscious of the cosmos, are living. I would try and ignore the subtle, weird implications of the book were it not for the undeniable science behind it.It just sickens me how many people will not read this book under false auspices - and how many millions of people are constantly being told the same, outdated mantra that "the sun is just an ordinary star," and "the planet is just an ordinary planet" and "the solar system is just an ordinary solar system" and on and on and on when 100% if it is scientifically bogus.What is it with modern science's obsession with destroying any possible traces of extraordinary phenomena and human exceptionalism?