The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

[...]

So it's worth noting that Christianity views emptiness as intentional. God doesn't just fill the Earth to the brim, he makes a garden and places two people in it. The rest of the planet, and perhaps the Solar System, is our canvass to paint, our ground to till, our problem to solve.

There used to be a quote going around among the anti-religion people, about how the earth couldn't be designed because so much of it is ocean. The argument, I guess, is that because people can't live on water then the ocean is wasted space. 

I think that idea is pretty much over now. We know that if the oceans die then people will, too. 

Our concepts of what constitutes "empty" have changed. 

These days the concept of "environmental aesthetics" is big among philosophers who work on aesthetic issues. It traces the history of how people have valued and judged natural spaces. People's opinions about the beauty, usefulness, and scariness of forests, mountains, and deserts have changed a lot over time. More importantly these philosophers work to de-couple our view of nature from our view of art. Since art is by definition made by people for people, it always has a particular human-centered viewpoint. Traditionally the criteria for judging art beautiful are then applied to nature -- a landscape is seen as beautiful if it looks like a painting, for example. So the new approach is to think of the aesthetics of these places in different ways -- not as something you stand back and view as if it were in a museum. I haven't heard the new approach applied to theology at all, but I think it would certainly change how people judged design in nature. 

Part of the problem may include how Star Trek and similar things have damaged our imaginations. In those things space is considered as populated by lots and lots of people only slightly different from us. There are lots of places to go and have fist fights in order to solve a problem at the end of the hour. It reduces the universe to something like different neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and removes all the real strangeness and beauty that comes from extreme non-human views.