Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, aliens and the search for another creator — GetReligion

“The logic is that many individuals assume life is particular, that human beings are uniquely purposed and created in God’s picture and that this life — life made in God’s picture — can’t exist wherever else,” mentioned Stephen C. Meyer, who has a doctorate within the philosophy of science from Cambridge College. He’s known for writing controversial books, comparable to “Signature within the Cell: DNA and the Proof for Clever Design” and the brand new “Return of the God Speculation.”

Many consultants appear to suppose Christianity has specific doctrines on this matter, he added, however “that is not a sound judgement, since there is not any specific Christian instructing on the topic — except we’ve got now taken C.S. Lewis as canonical.”

The Oxford don and Christian apologist did, beginning in 1938 with “Out of the Silent Planet,” write an area trilogy specializing in contacts between people and clever beings on different planets. In an essay entitled “Will We Lose God in Outer Area” he speculated that the gap between earth and the remainder of the universe served as “God’s quarantine precautions.”

Shortly earlier than his dying in 1963, Lewis told a journalist: “I look ahead with horror to contact with the opposite inhabited planets, if there are such. We might solely transport to all of them of our sin and our acquisitiveness and set up a brand new colonialism. I am unable to bear to think about it.”

Pope Francis has brushed away comparable questions on extraterrestrials. In 2015 he instructed the Paris Match information journal: “I believe that we should always persist with what the scientists inform us, nonetheless conscious that the Creator is infinitely better than our data.”

However discussions of extraterrestrial life elevate the identical “Creator” questions that trigger fierce arguments on earth.

For instance, some scientists have speculated that aliens could also be linked to life on earth. In a 1973 paper — “Directed Panspermia” — Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA construction, and biochemist Leslie Orgel famous that life might have been “intentionally transmitted … by clever beings on one other planet. We conclude that it’s potential that life reached the earth on this means, however that the scientific proof is insufficient nowadays to say something concerning the chance.”

That might elevate one other final query, in line with evolutionist Richard Dawkins of Oxford, a well-liked evangelist for atheism. Throughout one “clever design” debate, he wrote that “even when our species was created by house alien designers, these designers themselves must have arisen from easier antecedents — to allow them to’t be an final rationalization for something.”

That is a legitimate level, mentioned Meyer, reached by phone. However these dedicated to perception in a random, unguided means of creation — for the universe and life — would nonetheless must show how circumstances exist for this to have his occurred on different planets. In the meantime, “a theistic God may have created life wherever.”

“Not discovering E.T. might be a blow to naturalists greater than discovering E.T. can be a blow to theists,” he mentioned. Substituting aliens for the work of a Creator God would not “simply kick that may down the highway, it will kick it out into house.”