The complexity of design in creation is an obvious indication of a higher creative intelligence and designer.  Chance leads to nothing or at best, chaos.  Denton, not a Christian or a Creationist, looks at reality and the facts and inexplicable intricacy of system design and like some others before, puts the context of this detailed woven fabric against the backdrop of the environment we live in.  He calls this the ‘prior fitness’ necessary for life.  It is not just the perplexity of organism development which promotes the need for a creative designer, but the entirety of the natural environment which must be built and ready for life.  As with natural organic design, evolution has nothing intelligent to say about this ‘prior fitness’ of the earth and its environment.  As an anodyne and counter-narrative to the ‘things happen’ cult this book is a must-read to begin to grasp how a platform for life must first be enabled, before life itself, in all its grandeur and vast systemic combinations, can be allowed. 

Denton: “If the remarkable prior environmental fitness of nature for advanced energy-hungry creatures such as ourselves were restricted to our use of oxygen for generating energy, this prior fitness would still stand as a great wonder.  But, as we shall see, nature also exhibits highly specific prior environmental fitness essential for many other adaptations crucial to the existence of large terrestrial organisms like ourselves, including high acuity vision, fast nerve conduction, and muscles strong enough to grant mobility to be beings of our size and design….nature is also uniquely fine tuned to enable beings of our biological design and size to make fire, develop metallurgy, build and advanced technological civilisation, and come to do science and understand the nature of the universe and its unique fitness for our type of life.”

Denton uses science and even evolutionary observations to make the following pertinent and irrefutable claims about the prior fitness of our world, including water, soil, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and how sunlight is filtered and used. 

1-Hydrological cycle with 875 cubic kilometres of water evaporating from the oceans every day and replaced through the evaporation-condensation-precipitation cycle.

2-Water as the universal solvent of perfection, a chemical combination that is ideally suited to hydrate creatures large and small, along with complex soil systems and terrain.  The water cycle, the usual gentle rainfall versus a deluge, the role of the wind, mountains and geological shapes in water usage and regeneration is simply a miracle.

3-The fitness of the earth for aerobic life.  Oxygen powers our movements and is part of a complex process of energy transformation, namely: CH (sugar, fats) + Oxygen à is transformed into Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy (ATP and heat).  This equation by itself is a miracle of engineering.  This process produces excess energy to allow organisms to grow in size and complexity and perform tasks beyond just surviving. 

4-Oxygen is generated by photosynthesis in the chloroplasts of green plants.  This process depends on Sunlight.  The fitness of the Sun’s radiation to allow this to occur is simply staggering.  The light emitted by the Sun exists in a miniscule visual region of the light spectrum, between wavelengths of 380 mm to 750 mm in length.  Any wavelength outside of this calibrated range would mean no life on this planet. 

4-The atmosphere must absorb a significant fraction of infrared radiation when the Sun is shining, or we would have wild swings in daily temperatures of 100 C of more.  No carbon-based life in a water matrix would survive such fluctuations.  About a ¼ of outgoing infrared emission escapes through a .80- and 100-micron window, allowing the Earth to build a stable atmosphere and not becoming Venus.  Without this detail in the absorption spectrum there is no life on Earth. 

5-Nitrogen (N2), oxygen, ozone (O3), carbon dioxide, and water vapour must be present in their respective gas by weight bandwidths, or no life would exist.  The combine absorption characteristics lets through just the right light for photosynthesis and absorbs just the right amount of heat.  70% of our atmosphere for example is N2 which adds density to the atmosphere, serves as a fire retardant, slows the speeds of Earthly fires and keeps the oceans from evaporating.  Only an oxygen concentration of about 20% at a partial pressure of more than 80 mm Hg offers the requisite oxygen for the metabolism of organisms our size.  If the concentration was any higher there would be devastating fires.  Co2 has operated within a ceiling and is 0.04% of gas by weight, a trace chemical, which may have an upper limit of 10 times of what is present today for cognitive life.

Denton goes through the above in some detail, using current and past science and even philosophy to demonstrate the obvious fact that somehow, embedded in millions of miracles of perfect design, our planet was made for humans.  He summarises:

“The wheel has turned.  Scientific advances beginning with the flowering of chemistry in the nineteenth century and continuing at ever increasing pace….have vindicated the ancient covenant and revealed humanity to be as the medieval scholars believed, reflective in the depths of his natural being of all facets of the greater macrocosm of which he is an integral part.  And in one of history’s supreme ironies, it is now the denial of humankind’s special place in nature, the foundational denial of the current secular culture and Zeitgeist, which increasingly outdated and devoid of empirical support.”

Randomness, ‘exploding big bangs’, chance, ‘selection’, would produce nothing.  The atheist-evolutionist worldview is empty of science.  Money, power, coercion, bullying, threats keep it alive.  Someday that paradigm of viewing the human and life as one would observe floating pond scum, or leaves in the wind will end and science will return in the clothing of faith.