Well, as David said it is only probability, but if you really think about how large the universe is, how many other things there are, there's gotta be like 99.99% fact to it.
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What's more believable; Aliens or God?
- Thread starter Daviso452
- Start date
Well, as David said it is only probability, but if you really think about how large the universe is, how many other things there are, there's gotta be like 99.99% fact to it.
Erebus
Well-Known Member
A lot of this really depends on your definitions. If by God you mean an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being then I would argue that such a being is unlikely to exist given the suffering in the world. I would also argue it's far more likely that extraterrestrial creatures/plants etc exist.
If however you take a pantheistic approach then God is far more likely to exist than aliens even if we argue that the chances of the universe containing no other life are infinitesimal.
Not really. That perspective is less a matter of science and more a matter of anthropocentrism. As Cohen and Stewart put it in their book on the science of extraterrestrial life: "We are inferring that evolution must have been easy, because it didn't take very long. An alternative is that it was very hard for life to evolve on its own accord, if not impossible, so life could only occur because someblyd or something (God, the Solid State Entity, the Galactic Mind, the Cosmic Computer) created it." The authors do not adhere to this view, but it is found across scientific disciplines elsewhere. The edited book Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is filled with papers written by scientists from different backgrounds on how unlikely and improbable life is at any level. Intelligent life (not just human intelligence or greater, but something a good deal more complex than single-celled organisms), as far as we know, requires unbelievably improbable sequences of events. In 2007 the National Research Council published the results of a committee titled Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems which could only conclude that life elsewhere is possible, but acknowledged that some members (and specialists elsewhere) believe the probability that the necessary conditions for life combined with life arising out of these conditions are "infinitesimal."
shanedawson
25 characters isn't enoug
With all these galaxies in a tiny portion of the sky, and many many more beyond them that we can't see, I think I can believe that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe
Why? In essence, this is a probability issue. We are limited in our predictive power by a number of factors (such what other fundamentally different types of life are possible and how). However, the universe isn't infinite. If the conditions necessary for life (let alone life which evolves into intellegent life) are as improbable as many believe, then the vastness of the universe is nothing compared to the massive improbability of life.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
Every single one of the tens of thousands of points of light in this (very large) image is a galaxy, containing hundreds of billions of stars and planets. It also covers less than 1 part in 50 million of the sky.
It would be immensely disappointing if there was nothing else out there.
It would be immensely disappointing if there was nothing else out there.
How is it anthropocentrism? I'm saying there ARE other species out there, not that Earth is the only planet that contains life...
With all these galaxies in a tiny portion of the sky, and many many more beyond them that we can't see, I think I can believe that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe
Also, considering how we can't even see our little spec planet in all of that in that photo, and that's not even close to how far out you can get, why would God care to look into that one galaxy to find that one spec to talk to humans?
tytlyf
Not Religious
I think there is a large possibility of life in the universe beyond Earth. Earth is a prime example of life in a galaxy. There may be life in our own galaxy and probably is.
god has nothing on the universe. god is just a simple way to describe things without answers.
I don't know about you, but I'm not a simple person.
tytlyf
Not Religious
Do you understand why you wouldn't see Earth in this photo or any planets for that matter? You can't even see stars in that photo.
Each one of those galaxies contains trillions of stars. With trillions of planets.
Yes... I graduated elementary, I think I should know that.
tytlyf
Not Religious
So you were joking when you said you can't see Earth in that photo?
Well no, but you missed my point: you can't see earth because we're incredibly small when we zoom out that far, it's so unreasonable to think God has visited or even knows of our existence.
Not only if God knows of our existence, but if aliens do.
I'd imagine aliens kind of like the ones on Half-Life anyway, they'd look like what we'd call animals, because they are an entirely different species.
tytlyf
Not Religious
That's as far as we can zoom IN. The Hubble deep field photo is "a patch of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held out out arm's length"
Our galaxy isn't in that photo.
Ah my mistake
Okay, but imagine a photo that included all galaxies, including our own, we wouldn't see Earth, obviously, so my argument still stands, although I was looking at the wrong picture, again my mistake.
Which leads to a fallacious line of thought. It's an often advantageous (from an evolutionary perspective) component to natural human reasoning, but it's not logically sound (bayesian models aside). The fact that life on this planet is a given, and that there are an enormous number of other planets, "naturally" leads to the conclusion that there is probably life on other planets. In reality, there is no real basis for this conclusion. We don't really understand the probability space.
I'll use two examples to illustrate:
Imagine you are at a party or gathering of some sort, comprised of 30 people. As a game and a way to give out party favors, the host allows everyone to pick out cards with various numbers on them, each corresponding to a particular "prize." After everyone has turned in their cards, it turns out that each number corresponded to a different type of model car. The natural assumption is that all the cards (there were more cards than people, as the host will be throwing several such parties in the near future) correspond to model cars. However, it turns out that out of a large number of prizes, only 30 were model cars. By an extremely unlikely coincidence, every party member picked cards with numbers corresponding to model cars. Your assumption here was a good one, because you knew most of the parameters, but it was still wrong.
Now imagine you visit australia. Here, for the first time, you see a number of swans. All are black. You naturally assume that swans are black. However, you just happened to visit the one area on earth where black swans exist.
We see life one earth, so we know that life is possible. But we don't know how probable it is. There are many, many, many reasons for thinking that life, particularly intelligent life, is virtually impossible. The odds against life on earth, in other words, were astronomical. Yet here we are. That's no reason to suppose that life exists elsewhere.
I don't recall referring to god, and the concept isn't really relevant to my point at all.
But the underlying logic is pretty much the same. The point is the focus on us (or life on earth in general, if we are talking about any type of life elsewhere, rather than intelligent life). We (or life on earth exists), and this leads to an inclination to view life as in some sense likely. Combine this with the vastness of the universe, and you get the natural conclusion that life exists elsewhere. But as I noted in my previous point, there's no real basis for this induction. We simply don't know how likely it is for life to emerge. And again, there are a great many scientists in various fields who argue that it is so unlikely that the chances of life elsewhere are infinitesimally small. Such was the argument in Ward and Brownlee's book Rare Earth. Others take this argument even further and argue that the initial conditions alone for life to emerge, let alone intelligent life, are evidence of design. Such is the argument in Barrow and Tipler's Anthropic Cosmological Principle and Guillermo and Wesley's Privileged Planet, among others.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
So much for Drake's equation.
In regards to the OP, I smell a something fishy. When neither choice is particularly realistic, the answers become moot.
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Rakhel
Well-Known Member
The answer to the OP is Both and Neither.
Sum of Awe.
We cannot prove G-d exists and neither can we prove that he doesn't. However, if we take the idea that he does, how can you be positive that he has only visited this planet? We have no idea how long those planets have been there, much less if life exists on them. So it is entirely feasible to think that we(Earth) are just one stop on his journey, that he many have started long ago.
Sum of Awe.
We cannot prove G-d exists and neither can we prove that he doesn't. However, if we take the idea that he does, how can you be positive that he has only visited this planet? We have no idea how long those planets have been there, much less if life exists on them. So it is entirely feasible to think that we(Earth) are just one stop on his journey, that he many have started long ago.