A perfect solar eclipse like the one on Monday was the inspiration for The Privileged Planet, an important and unusual book in the canon of intelligent design works. Perfect solar eclipses are, in fact, the subject of the book’s first chapter. On a new ID the Future episode, co-author and CSC Senior Fellow Jay Richards chatted with interviewer Andrew McDiarmid, explaining how such awesome cosmic events are the tip of an iceberg-size design argument.

Download the podcast here, or listen to it here.

The conditions for a habitable planet (right distance from the right size star, a big but not too big moon that is the right distance away to stabilize Earth’s tilt and circulate its oceans) are also conditions that make perfect solar eclipses from the Earth’s surface much more likely.

And perfect eclipses aren’t just eerie and beautiful. They’ve helped scientists test and discover things, and are part of a larger pattern: The conditions needed for a habitable place in the cosmos correlate with the conditions well suited for scientific discovery. As Richards notes, this correlation is inexplicable if the cosmos is the product of chance. But if it’s intelligently designed with creatures like us in mind, it’s just what we might expect.

Image credit: Buddy Nath, via Pixabay.