If You Don't Believe in God, You May Believe in Aliens

Atheists consider themselves the supreme realists. They don’t believe in the “ghost in the machine” and ridicule those of us who believe that God exists and is the creator of the universe.

But they do have a metaphysical problems relating to the origin of things. Does the universe have a beginning or an end? How did life begin? What was there in the beginning of things?

The last question cannot be dismissed because the theory of evolution, which seeks to explain how we are what we are demands that there be a beginning. If life began an eternity ago, is the world as we see it and all the things in it the natural end result of … forever? That seems to be illogical.

So I read with interest an article Glenn Reynolds liked to in Popular Mechanics 5 Projects Ask if Life on Earth Began as Alien Life in Space.

To try to answer the question of the origin of life on earth and to answer critics who reason that life’s complexity is too great to have evolved spontaneously, theories have been created that life on earth began on some other planet.

That underscores the reasons that people like Ben Stein have given for Intelligent Design, and the reasons for allowing it a place at the table of science. If enough scientists are concerned that life may not have begun from non-life on earth, doesn’t that leave open the possibility that the explanation may not be entirely materialistic in the way we understand the term?

If reputable scientists are actually exploring the possibility that life arrived on the earth wholly formed and not just the building blocks of life, but

...organisms that were ready to rock and roll when they arrived,

Why demand that one possible explanation should be excluded from consideration? If some are ready, as Dawkins is, to attribute life on earth to alien races from another part of the universe, the dogmatic exclusion of intelligent design is prejudice, not science.

UPDATE: Commenter Bobxxx replies:

Scientists laugh at "intelligent design" because those are just code words that mean "the magic god fairy did it". Scientists don't invoke supernatural magic.

I want to thank him for this because it's the kind of response you will see from the militant atheists who ridicule belief in God. I wanted to bring this discussion to the fore because I think it's interesting. It highlights the "faith" that the "faithless" have. They are really not "faithless" at all, it's a different faith that exists in opposition to Christianity.

Here's my reply.

Bobxxx,

Thanks for your reply. Yours is the kind of witless response that I have seen other atheists give to the question being explored. First of all, “scientists” are not a monolithic group who all think alike and many who are classified as scientists believe in God. In fact, according to this article from Live Science, about two thirds of scientists believe in God.

Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists -- people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology -- said they do not believe in God. Only 31 percent of the social scientists do not believe.

In the new study, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed 1,646 faculty members at elite research universities, asking 36 questions about belief and spiritual practices.

"Based on previous research, we thought that social scientists would be less likely to practice religion than natural scientists are, but our data showed just the opposite," Ecklund said.

Some stand-out stats: 41 percent of the biologists don't believe [ed: that means that over half either believe or don’t know], while that figure is just 27 percent among political scientists.

In separate work at the University of Chicago, released in June, 76 percent of doctors said they believed in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife.

So you see, Bobxxx, your belief system does not correspond with reality even regarding what scientist believe.

Second, your straw man of “the magic God fairy” is more than a little shopworn. People like you may find it clever in the same way that sophomores telling each other how smart they are snicker amongst themselves, but we don’t believe in fairies or magic. We do consider – and find curious – that some scientists and atheists are so closed minded that they would rather believe in little green men than in God.

Some, including Bobxxx, may find it interesting that Dr. Francis Collins, Director of th Human Genome Project believes not just in God but is a follower of Jesus.

From CNN:

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views.

As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God's plan.

I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers.

I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" "Why am I here?" "Why does mathematics work, anyway?" "If the universe had a beginning, who created it?" "Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?" "Why do humans have a moral sense?" "What happens after we die?" (Watch Francis Collins discuss how he came to believe in God )

I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist's assertion that "I know there is no God" emerged as the least defensible. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."

Dr. Collins’ belief is not proof of God’s existence. That would be an “argument from authority,” and is a logical fallacy. But it refutes the common belief that scientists who study life are atheists. To insist that there is a conflict between trying to find out how the universe works and the belief that the universe was created by God is not rational. That belief requires dogmatism that is usually associated with uneducated yahoos who go in for snake handling … with my apologies to snake handlers.