Planetary Jewel

Earth's Story Is One in a Billion

For this is what the Lord says—
he who created the heavens,
he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth,
he founded it; he did not create it to be empty,
but formed it to be inhabited—he says:
“I am the Lord, and there is no other.”
—Isaiah 45:18

Just a few short decades ago, the Earth was considered to be an ordinary planet, orbiting an ordinary star, lost in a vast galaxy of other stars, amid myriad other galaxies populating the cosmos. Mindless processes produced the first living organisms, we were told, which slowly evolved over the eons to produce creatures like us.¹ This secular myth was accepted hook, line, and sinker by the uneducated...