Philip Adams - Not so special

I recently read Philip Adams blog post entitled What makes us special. Apparently Phil has the answer to that question. Turns out it is...nothing. That's right, sweet nothing. In fact we're downright arrogant and full of ourselves. Not Phil of course. Sure, he has just answered one of life's most complex questions in one piddly little post, but that's just par for the course for uber-atheists such as Adams.

You see, some of us just aren't absorbing the lessons that science is teaching us. Such as cosmology (one little planet and sun amongst billions). And apparently we (humans) have come along really late in the "cosmic calendar" - but maybe that's our fault for being born when we did. And the harsh lesson of Darwin. I always thought Darwin was a rather kindly old chap, and I can't recall him being described as harsh before.

I suppose that means the people who lived before these scientific discoveries are excused then, because how were they to know? But we, oh yes we, know what we need to know. Even though, by Phil's own reasoning, modern science has been around for only a ridiculously short period of time, we can be assured that nothing new will come up that may require humans to change their minds about their "specialness". Now that's hubris.

Turns out that Phil's quite the statistician also: "The trillions of life forms that seem statistically inevitable on the billions of other planets...". Hmm, lets see, we have a sample of one, so yeah, we can extrapolate from that. No problems.

But I really must disagree with the following assertion of Phil's: "Everything we do impresses us enormously, no matter how eccentric or insane". Phil's blog post is definitely insane, but I for one am not terribly impressed by it.