Australian geneticist Michael Denton is the author of several excellent books, two of which - Firemaker and The Wonder of Water - I discussed earlier this week.
In these works Denton explores the amazing properties of both fire and water that most of us take for granted or of which we are completely unaware, but which would, were they only a smidgeon different from what they are, make life, or at least advanced life, impossible.
Denton has also written a third book titled Children of Light in which he applies the same sort of analysis to light, the atmosphere, the leaf, and the eye, and the "coincidences" and design he highlights are breathtaking.
For instance, visible light is an electromagnetic radiation the spectrum of which is exceedingly vast. If a stack of playing cards were placed on the earth and extended all the way beyond the milky way to the next nearest galaxy to represent the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiations, the frequencies that are visible to the human eye would be just a couple of playing cards thick.
This extremely thin sliver of frequencies is not only visible to the human eye, but these are the only frequencies that can be used to drive chemical reactions, they're the only frequencies that can be utilized by plants for photosynthesis, they are the only frequencies that can penetrate the atmosphere and water, and they are the bulk of the frequencies produced by the sun.
If the sun didn't produce these frequencies, or if the atmosphere didn't allow them to reach the surface of the earth, or if they couldn't penetrate water to trigger photosynthesis in algae, or if that sliver of energy didn't have the precise physical properties it does, there'd probably be no life on earth except, perhaps, a few bacteria.
There's more. The sun radiates heat (infrared) which warms the earth, but if the dominant gases in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorbed infrared then that heat would be trapped and the earth would be much too hot to sustain life. These gases make up about 95% of the atmosphere and they allow heat to reach the surface and to escape back into space.
On the other hand, carbon dioxide and water vapor both do absorb heat. They provide a blanket that keeps the earth's surface from getting too hot during the day and keep some heat from escaping the earth at night which prevents the temperature from dropping to intolerably cold levels after sundown.
For various reasons, if the amounts of these atmospheric gases were just slightly different, life on earth would be significantly more difficult and higher life would probably be impossible.
It's this array of "just right" physical and chemical factors which have led scientists like Denton, a former agnostic, to the conclusion that light and the atmosphere are the products of intentional design. His discussion of the astonishing structure of the leaf and the human eye leads one to the same conclusion.
Here's a short video in which Denton himself discusses some of this:
Denton has much, much more in Children of Light that will surely amaze you. Taken together his three books, Firemaker, Wonder of Water and Children of Light, offer a powerful, awe-inducing case for the conclusion that the best explanation for the dozens of properties of fire, water, and light being precisely what are needed for the emergence and sustenance of creatures like us is intelligent agency.
