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199 born claimed that an unguided evolutionary process—one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence—cannot exist. “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology,” the Cardinal wrote, “is ideology, not science.” Scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis, he argued, were invented to avoid purpose and design. To believe that events in the universe take place entirely by chance is to give up the search for an explanation of the world. The modern Catholic Church, declared Schonborn, stands in firm defense of reason rather than chance.*° Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, in their book The Privileged Planet, questioned the assumption of mediocrity employed by Sagan, Drake, and other SETI advocates. Challenging the idea that the Earth is just an average planet orbiting an ordinary star in an unremarkable part of our Galaxy, they argued that our world occupies a privileged place in the cosmos, uniquely situated to foster both complex life and scientific discovery. The correlation between the conditions that make habitability possible and those that make it possible to learn about the universe is so improbable, they asserted, as to suggest intelligent design.” Many take issue with these conclusions. Because it is not testable, some complain, intelligent design falls into the area of faith and belief, outside the scope of science. One reviewer criticized Gonzalez and Richards for putting forward an untestable hypothesis supported only by a long list of coincidences. Extra- polating any trend into a natural law smacks of teleology, warned Brin— perceiving a plan, or cause and effect, where there may be only coincidence.** Our judgements may be biased by the local conditions and historical contingencies that led to the life and intelligence we know on the Earth, cautioned Vakoch. They may not accurately reflect the range of possible preconditions for the evolution of life, or science.” After hundreds of millions of generations of trial and error, observed Grinspoon, a highly evolved system will be so optimized for survival that it may seem to have been designed by an imaginative and ingenious mind. Aliens in what we consider exotic environments would evolve to succeed in those environments, argued Cohen and Stewart; they would seem to any visitor to be exquisitely fine-tuned.” What if there are countless other universes or countless other big bang/ big crunch cycles before the current one, and each of those universes has different physical constants? Science fiction author Robert Sawyer argued that the winning combination is bound to come up eventually by pure The Appearance of Design