Newsletter Vol.3, #15—May 6, 2007

Matthew 10 ³⁴"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶And a person's enemies will be those of his own household.

Apologetics Press ::

Sensible Science

Is There Intelligent Life in Outer Space?
by Bert Thompson, Ph.D. ~ Cont’d. from last week

WHY THE INTEREST IN EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE?

One might ask: “Why all the interest in the possibility of intelligent life existing in outer space?” There are several answers to such a question.

First, there are some who firmly believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life because they are convinced that, if life evolved here, it not only could have evolved elsewhere, but must have done so. Carl Sagan is but one example of evolutionists who follow this line of reasoning. In an interview in January 17, 1980 issue of New Scientist magazine, Dr. Sagan made the following points:

1.     There are something like 10²² stars in the Universe, and as about one in a million of these stars is a yellow dwarf star like our Sun, this means there are about 10¹⁶ Sun-type stars in the Universe.

2.     Now one in a million of these Sun-type stars probably has a planetary system similar to that of our Sun’s. Therefore there are about 10¹⁰ planetary systems in the Universe.

3.     One in a million of these planetary systems must have a planet similar to that of Earth, and life must have evolved on those planets in the same manner in which it has evolved here on Earth. Therefore, there are at least 10,000 planets in the Universe that have life on them.

Paul Davies, the renowned physicist and cosmologist, stated in his book, Other Worlds:

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 100 billion stars grouped together in a gigantic spiral assembly typical of the billions of other galaxies scattered throughout the universe. This means that there is nothing very special about the Earth, so probably life is not a remarkable phenomenon either.... [I]t would be surprising if life were not widespread throughout the cosmos, though it may be rather sparse (1980, p. 151).

Sir Fred Hoyle joins such thinkers. In his book, Lifecloud, he wrote: “With so many possible planetary systems, should we not expect inhabited planets to be moving around some of the nearby stars? We certainly should” (1978, pp. 145-146). It is evident, then, that many evolutionists believe intelligent life exists on other planets simply because evolution must work that way.

Second, there are some who believe life will be found in outer space because life simply could not have “just happened” here on the Earth. However, far from invoking a Creator, their intended point is simply that the available evidence indicates that life is too complex to have occurred here on the Earth by purely naturalistic processes. So, life must have evolved somewhere in outer space and been planted here. This is the view of Sir Francis Crick in his volume, Life Itself: If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?... Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is approximately equal to...a one followed by 260 zeros.... The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time (1981, p. 51).

Dr. Crick then made the following fascinating admission: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (p. 88, emp. added). But, while acknowledging the impossibility of the accidental formation of life here on the Earth, he refuses to accept the idea of an intelligent Creator, and instead opts for “directed panspermia”—the idea that life was “planted” on the Earth by intelligent beings from outer space.

Dr. Crick is not alone in this viewpoint. The same year that Life Itself was published (1981), Sir Fred Hoyle authored Life from Space, in which he took essentially the same position. In fact, in an article that year in Nature, he wrote:

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate mater is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it.... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence (1981, 294:148).

Dr. Hoyle opted for a kind of pantheistic intelligence that created life spores in other parts of the Universe, with these spores ultimately drifting to Earth to begin life as we know it. Because of the tremendous (and impressive) complexity of life—and the obvious design behind it—other scientists are opting for this viewpoint as well. Leslie Orgel, one of the heavyweights in origin-of-life experiments, is on record as advocating this position (1982, pp. 149-152).

Third, there are, without a doubt, some evolutionists who are determined to believe in some form of intelligent extraterrestrial life because they are convinced this somehow will nullify creation. For example, Ian Ridpath, in his book, Signs of Life, has suggested: “Religions which contend that God made man in His own image could be severely shaken if we found another intellectual race made in a different image” (1975, p. 13).

Jonathan N. Leonard likewise has shown his disdain for the concept of creation in his classic essay, Other-Worldly Life:

Scientists point out that there is nothing miraculous or unrepeatable about the appearance of life on earth. They believe it would happen again, given the same sufficient time and the same set of circumstances. It would even happen under very different circumstances. There is no reason to believe that conditions in the atmosphere and oceans of the primitive earth were modified by any outside power to make them favorable for the development of life. They just happened that way, and it is likely that life would have appeared even if conditions had been considerably different (1984, pp. 186-187).

Such writers make it clear that they believe if extraterrestrial life were to be discovered, it somehow would “disprove” the existence of a Creator.

A CRITIQUE

What response should the creationist offer to these various evolutionary positions on the existence of intelligent life in outer space?

First, let us note that any claims made concerning the existence of life in outer space are just that—claims—and nothing more. In their more candid moments, even evolutionists admit such. Michael Rowan-Robinson of the University of London has observed:

From the almost imperceptible wanderings of several nearby stars we can deduce that they have small companions, but the masses of the companions deduced in this way are, with one exception, one or two per cent of our Sun’s mass, that is 10-20 times the mass of Jupiter. Such objects could in fact be tiny stars, rather than planets, for they may be undergoing nuclear reactions in their core. This one exception is Barnard’s star, the next nearest to the Sun after the Centauri system, five light years away. It has been claimed that this star has one or two companions of mass about that of Jupiter. This is still a matter of dispute between astronomers. It is an act of faith, based on rather shaky probabilistic arguments, to say that other planets like Earth exist in the Universe (1980, p. 325, emp. added).

Freeman Dyson, in his classic text, Disturbing the Universe, wrote eloquently on this very point:

Many of the people who are interested in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have come to believe in a doctrine which I call the Philosophical Discourse Dogma, maintaining as an article of faith that the universe is filled with societies engaged in long-range philosophical discourse. The Philosophical Discourse Dogma holds the following truths to be self-evident:

To be continued …