Last month, the Pentagon released its report on UFOs. Since then, I've been musing a bit on whether or not extraterrestrial life could exist. In itself, this is probably a pointless excursion, given that God can do whatever He wants and He may or may not have made other life out there somewhere without telling us. But something struck me as I thought about the various arguments put forth.
One argument is that there surely must be life out there since there are so many trillions of stars that there must be countless planets just like ours in solar systems far away, and if evolution can have life form here then surely life can form in these other planets too. Setting aside the fact that evolution already presupposes the existence of life in the first place and therefore can't create it, this argument seems to fly in the face of the “anthropic principal” presented by secularists. That is, the anthropic principal is the claim that the necessary fine tuning of all the variables needed in our local solar system for life to exist on Earth is not evidence of design, but rather is simply the result of the vastness of space. Given how big the universe is and how many “rolls of the dice” individual locations were enabled to have, some place had to have the ideal conditions which resulted in our existence.
The reason these two explanations run counter to each other is easily displayed by a simple question. Which is it? Is life so easy to form that the vastness of the universe is why aliens are probably out there, or is life so difficult to form because it needs such precise values that the vastness of the universe is needed for us to exist in our seemingly designed location?
The sad thing is, I don't think most secularists even realize these two views are at odds with each other.
When someone holds to contradictory presuppositions in order to support the same thing, those presuppositions aren't the real reason they believe it. I could only speculate as to why people want to believe there is extraterrestrial life, but they need to make that their argument rather than rely on contradictions. However, as you said, they probably aren't aware of them and may even believe that these are the reasons for believing in extraterrestrial life. We are too often not very self-aware, especially those of us who aren't regenerated.
ReplyDeleteI think it's relatively easy to speculate as to why secularists would tend toward believing there is alien life, since if the universe was teeming with other intelligent beings then they could argue that there is nothing special about humans (i.e., nothing to indicate we are in the image of God). While the existence of more intelligent life would not disprove the Bible's claims (after all, the Bible talks about angels, which are clearly intelligent beings, but who are not in the image of God), I can see how it would provide a mental panacea for someone rebelling against Him.
DeleteTangential to this is an analysis that was posted by Corridor Crew on YouTube Aug 15, 2021, entitled VFX Artists DEBUNK Pentagon UFO Videos. It's worth a watch and their professional analysis is down-to-earth so to speak.
ReplyDeleteYes, my own opinion is that it's not proof of aliens. I actually did a video myself on the topic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuNnDFsspYA The upshot is I think it's far more likely the US has drones with electronic warfare capabilities spoofing sensors than that these are actual craft that violate the known laws of physics.
DeleteI agree. Development of methods of gathering intelligence, cloaking those methods so our enemies don't develop countermethods making them of no effect, and developing and employing methods for protecting our stealth aircraft from detection... these are far more likely than aliens.
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