Mother Earth is a bitch!

Below is an article from a blog by Charlie Stross. In short, it sums up an old scientific theory about the relative uninhabitable nature of the Earth. While it's been discussed in the past by many writers, Stross puts this in a very different light, making it easy to understand and very interesting to read.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/how_habitable_is_the_earth.html

What I find most interesting about this article is that in many ways this theory can be used by believers to insist upon the existance of a supreme being ("It had to be God's plan, it's too big of a coincidence not to be.") or by non-believers to praise the randomness of evolution and the cosmic dice throw. As someone who is basically agnostic, with a leaning towards some sort of supreme architect of the universe, whether it is "God" or the governing laws of phyics, I'm left in sheer amazement of the evolution of the human machine.