Emerging from the moon’s far side during their fourth orbit, they [Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders] were mesmerized by their vision of Earth, a delicate, gleaming swirl of blue and white, contrasting with the barren lunar horizon — the famous Earthrise picture.Reading the creation story while viewing the earth from 220,000 miles away seemed fitting, but, as Gonzalez and Meyer note, there are many who think that the God of Genesis had nothing to do with the creation of the universe.
To mark the event, the crew decided, after much deliberation, to read the first ten verses from the book of Genesis, starting with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The reading, and the reverent silence that followed, went out over a live telecast to an estimated 1 billion viewers, then the largest audience in television history....
Yet we know so much more today about the universe than we did fifty years ago, and it gets increasingly more difficult to deny that the universe has an overwhelming appearance of having been intentionally engineered. Here's Gonzalez and Meyer:
Astronomers now know that Earth is a rare, life-friendly “oasis in the big vastness of space,” as Borman later reflected. In the past few decades they have discovered that life on our planet depends on many improbable “rare-earth” factors. Earth must orbit the sun at just the right distance, with just the right axial tilt, and with just the right-shaped orbit and right planetary neighbors.There are so many more properties of earth that make it suitable for life that they could've mentioned, but they chose instead to expand their topic to encompass the whole universe:
Life depends on Earth having a moon of the right size at the right distance. The solar system as a whole must also reside in a narrow life-friendly band of space within our galaxy, the “galactic habitable zone.”
We’ve also come to appreciate that we inhabit a privileged platform for scientific discovery. Earth’s crust is endowed with the abundant mineral and energy resources required for advanced technology, including that necessary for sending astronauts to the moon.
Our clear atmosphere and location far from the center of a large galaxy allow us to learn about the universe near and far.
At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Even slight changes to the relative masses of fundamental particles or to the strengths of fundamental forces, or to the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe or to its initial arrangement of mass and energy, would have rendered the universe incapable of sustaining life.Nor are the discoveries pointing to intentional agency limited to just the physical sciences:
In the 1960s, physicists had just begun to discover examples of such fine-tuning. Now they know of many more. This suggests “the common sense interpretation,” as Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, “that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.
In the 1950s, Watson and Crick discovered that DNA contains digital information, which many biologists and computer scientists have likened to software code. Molecular biologists have since elucidated a complex information-processing system serviced by equally complex nano-machinery in even “simple” one-celled organisms.These developments and many, many more affirm the wisdom of the Apollo 8 astronauts' choice of readings on that Christmas eve in 1968.
These discoveries have thwarted attempts to explain the origin of life by undirected processes. By 1980, Francis Crick would acknowledge that the origin of life appears “to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
