Monday, August 02, 2021

Where Does the Bias Toward Alien Life Come From?

I was watching an Olympic event this week and a commercial came on screen for Netflix with an alien on its craft, watching a stream of shows from space.  Some might say it was just a joke, except that it isn't for many, many people.  It works as a concept because people think life out there is paying attention to what's happening on earth.  It's a tolerable option now pushed by multitudinous science fiction productions.

Richard Dawkins said publicly in 2008, caught for the film Expelled, that since we don't know how life originated in the first place, an "intriguing possibility" is that alien civilization evolved elsewhere and then "designed" and "seeded" the first life on earth.  He may have taken that idea from a scientific paper in 1973 by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, which they called "directed panspermia."  Crick later revised this position, but these speculations highlight the trouble with the existence of evidence of design in the massive amounts of genetic information in DNA, what Dawkins, the famous atheist scientist, slipped out as an apparent "signature of some kind of designer."

I actually hear often the alien explanation for life on earth when I'm out preaching the gospel.  People know it isn't an accident that we got here or that we are who we are with all of our complexity.  They are unwilling to say it's because of God, but they also don't accept that we evolved at least here on earth from a common ancestor.

Are aliens a good answer for the existence of the colossal and labyrinth of complicated information at the core of human existence?  Where does that bias toward alien life come from?  Is it scientific?

The reach for alien life as an explanation for human origins defers to intelligent cause.  The presence of the functionally specified digital explanation in DNA infers intelligent design.  Are aliens an even reasonable explanation as the designers behind life on earth?  Are aliens an adequate cause with the known power to produce the kind of effect of large amounts of specified information?

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists start with presupposition then of specified information contained in electromagnetic signals coming from space.  However, radio astronomers have never yet found such information bearing signals.  All of life on earth does have such information inscribed even in its simplest living cells.  No evidence exists that infers anything from space is the causal agent for life on earth.

The speculation of alien origin of life on earth springs from a bias against a divine causal agent.  It isn't science.  No science backs alien origin of life on earth.

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