Ship of Fools: Purgatory: Would UFO's destroy your belief in the Church?

Thread: Purgatory: Would UFO's destroy your belief in the Church? Board: Limbo / Ship of Fools.

To visit this thread, use this URL:
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=11;t=001179

Posted by Silver Faux (# 8783) on :

According to this news link Sir Winston Churchill banned the publication of a story on a UFO which tailed a Britsh plane which was returning from a combat mission.
Apparently, he did not want widespread public panic.
Not a bad policy during wartime, I suppose.
However, I, for one, am somewhat taken aback by this line from the news Article:
This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church.

So, would the knowledge of UFOs, if proven, destroy your belief in the Church?
Can you still believe the teachings of Christianity, and yet recognize that other life might exist?
Do visitors from other planets in way prove to you that God is not real?

[ 27. December 2014, 18:08: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]

Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
...Do visitors from other planets in way prove to you that God is not real?

As one who doesn't believe there is life anywhere else, no, it would not prove that God is not real. It would, however, convince me I don't know everything.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
So, would the knowledge of UFOs, if proven, destroy your belief in the Church?
Can you still believe the teachings of Christianity, and yet recognize that other life might exist?
Do visitors from other planets in way prove to you that God is not real?

Why?
Yes.
No.

Posted by Evensong (# 14696) on :

What Doc Tor said

Posted by RadicalWhig (# 13190) on :

I don't see how encountering the existence of life on other planets would necessarily destroy one's faith in God, but it might cause some disquiet if such life forms, with vastly superior science and technology, have whittled the gaps down so far that there is no room left for a God to exist.

It would be interesting to study the religion of alien life forms, if, indeed, they have any such thiing (it might be the product of human evolution, and a misfiring of other human mental processes, as Dawkins quite convincingly argues, and might not emerged amongst different species on other planets).

I suspect that even if belief in God is unchallenged by alien life forms, it might seriously undermine one's belief in the Christian Religion. I think it is extremely unlikely that they would have a story about a God who created a paradise and then expelled the life-forms from it because they ate fruit from a certain tree - which God had put there - when tempted by a talking snake - that God had allowed in; and if God then became so enraged at this thing, which he knew would happen, that he decided to torture everyone for ever - except for a tiny elect who would be chosen to be saved from such torment through belief in a man who was both God and the Son of God, born of a virgin, who was killed in order to placate the wrath of his father/self towards those who believe in this story. For those whose faith rests on the truth of a story like that, the experience could be very unsettling indeed.

[ 05. August 2010, 12:55: Message edited by: RadicalWhig ]

Posted by Silver Faux (# 8783) on :

Doc Tor, Evensong, Sir Winston Churchill was an incredibly intelligent man, with a vocabulary around 5 times that of the average educated person. He banned the report and pictures of the UFO for fifty years, on the grounds that it would "destroy one's belief in the church."
If you have not yet read the link included in the OP, may I suggest that you consider doing so before commenting further?

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by RadicalWhig:
For those whose faith rests on the truth of a story like that, the experience could be very unsettling indeed.

There could be other, much more unsettling revelations from aliens.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Destroy one's belief in the Church? What, by vapourising it with a ray gun, so one's left doubting it existed?

Posted by dyfrig (# 15) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Sir Winston Churchill was an incredibly intelligent man, with a vocabulary around 5 times that of the average educated person.

Er, what's that got to do with anything Doc Tor or Evensong said?

Posted by Yerevan (# 10383) on :

I think it potentially causes problems for Creationist-every-word-of-scripture-as-literal-scientific-truth types, but arguably not for anyone else. I vaguely remember Fr. Gregory (an Orthodox priest) arguing on these boards that he very definitely believed in the existence of intelligent life somewhere in the universe and saw no problem with this from an Orthodox perspective. IIRC the Catholic Church is agnostic on the issue and C. S. Lewis speculated on how the incarnation might work out in non-human societies. If there are intelligent life forms out there then I presume that God has made provision for them just as He has for us.

Posted by sabine (# 3861) on :

Churches are institutions; beliefs are...well, beliefs; and God is God.

If I found out that there is other life out there in the universe, it would probably intensify my belief in God.

And I probably would continue to be a member of the RSOF because it is my spiritual home for many reasons other than those having to do with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

sabine

Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :

What if this advanced alien race/species believed in a deity who became incarnate and based their entire advanced society on the teachings of the Incarnate Deity?

Would this bolster your faith in the Church?

How would Dawkins react?

Posted by Yerevan (# 10383) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
How would Dawkins react?

I don't think he would fess up to possibly being wrong, put it like that.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Doc Tor, Evensong, Sir Winston Churchill was an incredibly intelligent man, with a vocabulary around 5 times that of the average educated person. He banned the report and pictures of the UFO for fifty years, on the grounds that it would "destroy one's belief in the church."
If you have not yet read the link included in the OP, may I suggest that you consider doing so before commenting further?

Sir Winston was also a vain, intemperate and fallible man. On the basis of Churchill's repeated failures and subsequent success Peter Mandelson could make a comeback in 20 years time!

UFO's might shake Churchill's belief in the church but how many of us believe in the church? He might have a vast vocabulary but I don't think they were well chosen words.

I can see why this report was banned, everything that did not contribute positively to the war effort was banned at the time, but the existence or otherwise of UFO's doesn't shake my beliefs at all.

Posted by Squibs (# 14408) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Doc Tor, Evensong, Sir Winston Churchill was an incredibly intelligent man, with a vocabulary around 5 times that of the average educated person. He banned the report and pictures of the UFO for fifty years, on the grounds that it would "destroy one's belief in the church."
If you have not yet read the link included in the OP, may I suggest that you consider doing so before commenting further?

I personally don't believe in the church. I believe in Christ. While it is fun to imagine, it doesn't seem likely that there will be any green men visiting us any time soon. Even at the speed of light covering the distances between habitable planets would take a staggering amount of time. Sure, these super advanced aliens might have other technologies that allow them to travel huge distances, but where is the evidence? Still, that doesn't stop better men like Paul Davies (chair of the SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup) suggesting that contact would be terminal to Christianity. I disagree though.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
UFO's

Turnip's.

Posted by Josephine (# 3899) on :

Larry Norman's take on it.

Posted by Evensong (# 14696) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Doc Tor, Evensong, Sir Winston Churchill was an incredibly intelligent man, with a vocabulary around 5 times that of the average educated person. He banned the report and pictures of the UFO for fifty years, on the grounds that it would "destroy one's belief in the church."
If you have not yet read the link included in the OP, may I suggest that you consider doing so before commenting further?

The article says nothing about why Churchill thought the report and pictures would destroy the Church.

My comments stand

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

I've not read the article in the link (my computer here's a bit funky about opening web pages), but I did read about the release of the files and Churchills comment in the paper this morning. Before too many people criticise hischoice of words, the quoted "destroy ones belief in the church" phrase is from an account written by the grandson of one of Churchills bodyguards who overheard a conversation and later reported it to his wife, who later told the story to her grandson. There's some scope there for those not being the exact words used by Churchill.

Posted by tessaB (# 8533) on :

quote:
Originally posted by RadicalWhig:

I suspect that even if belief in God is unchallenged by alien life forms, it might seriously undermine one's belief in the Christian Religion. I think it is extremely unlikely that they would have a story about a God who created a paradise and then expelled the life-forms from it because they ate fruit from a certain tree - which God had put there - when tempted by a talking snake - that God had allowed in; and if God then became so enraged at this thing, which he knew would happen, that he decided to torture everyone for ever - except for a tiny elect who would be chosen to be saved from such torment through belief in a man who was both God and the Son of God, born of a virgin, who was killed in order to placate the wrath of his father/self towards those who believe in this story. For those whose faith rests on the truth of a story like that, the experience could be very unsettling indeed.

How God deals with us and us with Him gives us no indication of how He might deal with other life forms. They might have a completely different relationship with Him, maybe a better, maybe a worse.
I hope that there is other life out there. God is a God of love and creativity, I can't believe He limited Himself to just us.

Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on :

quote:
Originally posted by tessaB:
...How God deals with us and us with Him gives us no indication of how He might deal with other life forms. They might have a completely different relationship with Him, maybe a better, maybe a worse.
...

Exactly. Just as His relationship with other known life-forms differs - humans, animals, plants, angels. [Smile]

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

Well, apparently I'm no slouch in the brains department either, and I don't spend much of my time drunk...

Arthur Clarke thought very much along the same lines as Winston (purportedly) thought, and a few of his books dealt with that subject (most notably Childhood's End). Many years later, Mary Doria Russell won the Clarke Award with The Sparrow, which argued exactly the opposite.

If more politicians read more SF, there'd be fewer stupid decisions.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
Still, that doesn't stop better men like Paul Davies (chair of the SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup) suggesting that contact would be terminal to Christianity.

When I was in the same Dept as him, he was fond of making dogmatic statements that often turned out not to be the case... and that was two decades ago.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

Any extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth would, by definition, possess superior technology to us. If it's assumed that superior technology is an indicator of greater intelligence and a higher civilisation then we might be justified in claiming extra-terrestrial visitors would be more intelligent and civilised than us. It's possible that someone raised within the context of a British Empire (where the 'superior' civilisation and technology of British people meant that we were clearly best suited to tell 'inferior' societies how they should be governed and what they should believe) would consider that the teachings of extra-terrestrial visitors would be superior to our own. And, it would therefore follow that if the beliefs of extra-terrestrials contradict the beliefs of the Church then people would abandon the beliefs of the Church for the beliefs of ET. That is a reasonably logical progression of thought.

It does, of course, rely on several assumptions that may be completely false. Superior technology doesn't necessarily mean superior intelligence or civilisation. It certainly doesn't mean that the 'superior' race automatically governs the 'inferior', and post-Empire Britain is probably much less inclined to believe that although emerging imperialistic societies may be more inclined to believe that. And, of course, it assumes that the beliefs of IT (which we can't know simply from apparent observations of extra-terrestrial craft) would contradict the Church.

The beliefs of the Church have certainly survived in the face of a whole barrage of alternative beliefs held by intelligent and civilised human beings. Is there any reason to think that peoples agreement with Christian teaching would be undermined more by the teachings of extra-terrestrials than it would be by the teachings of atheists, muslims, hindus, assorted 'new age' religions etc?

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

UFOs implies life on other planets.

Life on other planets would DEEPEN my belief in God because:

a) he would be greater than we previously thought because he loves and cares for other life forms in many other places;

b) he would be less wasteful - to assume life exists on one marginal planet like ours and that he created entire, huge galaxies solely so that we could exist seems like waste.

As Sydney Carter put it:

Who can tell what other cradle,
High above the milky way
Still may rock the King of Heaven
On another Christmas Day?

Who can count how many crosses,
Still to come or long ago,
Crucify the King of Heaven?
Holy is the name I know.

Posted by Yerevan (# 10383) on :

quote:
b) he would be less wasteful - to assume life exists on one marginal planet like ours and that he created entire, huge galaxies solely so that we could exist seems like waste.

I think it could be taken as an illustration of God's extravagant love for humanity, and therefore quite like the idea that we're alone (though it wouldn't bother me much if we weren't). The idea that its wasteful for God to have created everything just for us seems a bit like arguing that monogamy is wasteful because of all those other people you could be shagging.

.

[ 05. August 2010, 15:28: Message edited by: Yerevan ]

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

What leo said - plus, I love those verses.

Actually, the thought that we may be the only life out there makes me less likely to believe in a God who would create the unimaginably huge universe, then leave it barren of creations that can appreciate its beauty, apart from humanity, stuck in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. I don't think anthropocentric hubris is a good argument for much, apart from the necessity of deflating our collective ego.

- Chris.

PS: we'll never realistically know one way or the other if there is life in Andromeda, without some Contact-like fictional wormhole device. Any FTL alien turning up would shake my faith in science more than God!

Posted by TomOfTarsus (# 3053) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:

quote:
Originally posted by RadicalWhig:
For those whose faith rests on the truth of a story like that, the experience could be very unsettling indeed.
There could be other, much more unsettling revelations from aliens.

Posted by Yerevan (# 10383) on :

quote:
Actually, the thought that we may be the only life out there makes me less likely to believe in a God who would create the unimaginably huge universe, then leave it barren of creations that can appreciate its beauty, apart from humanity, stuck in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way

Given that God apparently chose to live amongst humans as a peasant in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, he may have a bit of a thing for unfashionable backwaters.

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

quote:

Any extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth would, by definition, possess superior technology to us.

You mean...... they didn't come across all those light years of the expansive universe with their incredible technology and then........crash..........in Roswell?

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

People seem to be assuming that proof of extraterrestrial life would have to involve such creatures coming here and meeting us face to face. It seems much more likely that the first such evidence (if and when) will involve long-range observations by telescopes or the reception of radio/TV images. (A third possibility is that we go there and meet them.)

I agree with various other people: I do not see how the existence of such life would have any implications for my belief in God. Such a discovery would give us a larger, richer world, more to learn and appreciate.

On the other hand, suppose it could be proven (and I have no idea how) that Earth is the only planet anywhere with life on it. That would have a feel to it of smoking-gun evidence.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by fletcher christian:

quote:

Any extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth would, by definition, possess superior technology to us.

You mean...... they didn't come across all those light years of the expansive universe with their incredible technology and then........crash..........in Roswell?

I can think of only two reasons for space aliens to seek out this backwater planet. To enslave us, or to export chocolate.

Posted by dj_ordinaire (# 4643) on :

quote:
Originally posted by RadicalWhig:
I don't see how encountering the existence of life on other planets would necessarily destroy one's faith in God, but it might cause some disquiet if such life forms, with vastly superior science and technology, have whittled the gaps down so far that there is no room left for a God to exist.

It would be interesting to study the religion of alien life forms, if, indeed, they have any such thiing (it might be the product of human evolution, and a misfiring of other human mental processes, as Dawkins quite convincingly argues, and might not emerged amongst different species on other planets).

I suspect that even if belief in God is unchallenged by alien life forms, it might seriously undermine one's belief in the Christian Religion. I think it is extremely unlikely that they would have a story about a God who created a paradise and then expelled the life-forms from it because they ate fruit from a certain tree - which God had put there - when tempted by a talking snake - that God had allowed in; and if God then became so enraged at this thing, which he knew would happen, that he decided to torture everyone for ever - except for a tiny elect who would be chosen to be saved from such torment through belief in a man who was both God and the Son of God, born of a virgin, who was killed in order to placate the wrath of his father/self towards those who believe in this story. For those whose faith rests on the truth of a story like that, the experience could be very unsettling indeed.

Erm... surely one could say precisely the same about the discovery of America? That doesn't seem to have dented Christianity too badly...

Posted by Redlac (# 12725) on :

I look at this question in two ways, through what the Bible says and what science has to say.

The Bible shows me that angels were not created on earth. So therefore otherworldly beings exist. Some are naughty, some are nice.

Looking at it with science, the chances of anything coming from Mars may be a million to one, but the chance that life other than us is out there somewhere is pretty good. The theories are that they could be naughty, or they could be.. I think you see where I'm going with that.

In my thinking, God is a very creative being. If he made intelligent beings other than humans that would not be very world shaking for me. Their existence would not disprove God's.

The Church as a whole would have to do some serious thinking though if they did show up..

Posted by LutheranChik (# 9826) on :

I find fundamentalists, and child-abusive clergy and their complicit peers, to be far more damaging to my faith in the Church than the discovery of alien life.

Posted by Michael Astley (# 5638) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
So, would the knowledge of UFOs, if proven, destroy your belief in the Church?

How could it? Indeed, how would the two in any way possibly be related? A UFO is an unidentified flying object - simply a flying object that has not been identified: nothing more, nothing less, and certainly not a faith-challenging matter.

The existence of UFOs, therefore, doesn't seem to be something that requires proof. It's a simple fact of life that there will be some things that we can't readily identify. Anybody who has ever been confronted with the microscpoic hamburgers at MacDonald's will know what I'm talking about.

quote:
Can you still believe the teachings of Christianity, and yet recognize that other life might exist?
Do visitors from other planets in way prove to you that God is not real?

Ok. Now these are quite different questions from the first one. My answers are yes and no because I am a Christian.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

What an oddly phrased question.

As Fermi's paradox applies and is the greatest material proof of God there can possibly be until His return, then the detection of oxygen in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet would mean that eternal matter does life and life does mind, there would be NO material gaps for God.

I'd just have to go on faith, rather than the absolute scientific certainty of God I also have.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
What an oddly phrased question.

As Fermi's paradox applies and is the greatest material proof of God there can possibly be until His return, then the detection of oxygen in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet would mean that eternal matter does life and life does mind, there would be NO material gaps for God.

I'd just have to go on faith, rather than the absolute scientific certainty of God I also have.

What an oddly-phrased reply! I've never heard the Fermi paradox described in those terms. If your faith is so predicated on extraterrestrial life not existing, could I ask where in the bible, tradition or reason your get that from?

- Chris.

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

i am tempted at the prospect of answering the unposed question of whether life can exist on other planets. Life would appear to need water - without which no life can exist. Our planet is at a 23.44 degrees (I think) which not only allows for 'seasons' but also for tidal shifts which I think in turn stops water from becoming a stagnant mess of certain death. The seasons mean that wind shifts also, allowing for seasons of growth and the movement of water.

We are 91.5 million miles from the sun - an exact distance which permits life to flourish. A degree closer and we would burn up - a degree further away and we would freeze too much.

We are roughly 900 million miles from the edge of our solar system. If I were able to travel at the speed of light (roughly 300 millions miles per second) I could reach it in 3 seconds. It has been estimated that it would take around 4.5 billions years, travelling at the speed of light to reach the farthest point of the universe to our solar system (which isn't actually that close to the epicentre according to recent reports in studies relating to the milky way). If there is life on other planets - even if they are able to travel at the speed of light, it seems unlikely that they would be able to reach us before they would die.

If there were life on other planets it seems highly likely it would resemble us rather closely. It seems like the universe is pre-programmed to produce life in our image, with it's limited resources and exacting requirements. Of course, Stephen Hawkings would disagree with me....

[ 06. August 2010, 00:42: Message edited by: fletcher christian ]

Posted by Keromaru (# 15757) on :

Yeah, I have trouble taking this question seriously. It's almost a non-sequitur. The existence of God has nothing to do with my beliefs about the existence of aliens.* Anyway, if God made us -- or made the processes that built us -- then surely he's capable of building life elsewhere.

* They do, but they haven't visited or contacted us yet. I trust SETI on the matter more than Whitley Streiber.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

The issue is dealt with reasonably well in one of Poul Anderson's stories. The church, after the discovery of other intelligent lifeforms, concludes that Jesus was sent to save mankind and that there's no inherent reason to conclude that other species require the same salvation.

Of course, the same conclusion is also inherent in C S Lewis' science fiction trilogy.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

fletcher, are we really 3 light seconds from the outer edge of the solar system? I thought the sun was 8 light minutes away? Surely we're closer to the sun than to the edge of the solar system.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
or to export chocolate.

Millions for defense, not an ounce in tribute!

Unless they want Hershey's, they can have all that they want. Would argue against their superiority.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

FC,

As mousethief suggests, your figures are a bit off. The speed of light is just under 300 million metres per second. Einsteinian physics can allow for FTL travel, with assumptions. Life as we know it does require a rather narrow set of conditions, however current theories allow for the possibility in a much greater variety of conditions than previously thought. Have to run, more later if anyone wishes to continue the tangent.

Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :

Belief in the Church? My belief in the Church is along the lines of the Texan, who when asked if he believed in infant baptism, said:

"Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done!"

I'm not sure how UFOs could affect this.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
or to export chocolate.
Millions for defense, not an ounce in tribute!

Unless they want Hershey's, they can have all that they want. Would argue against their superiority.

Humorously, somebody on another site today called me a bigot because I spoke condescendingly of Hershey's chocolate. As it turns out I was denigrating a whole race of people (Oompa-Loompas?) who work in the Hershey factories. Shoot, I hope I don't have to eat any of that shit to regain my egalitarian cred.

Posted by cosmic dance (# 14025) on :

Hey leo, you might be interested in another poetic attempt on this idea. It is by someone called Alice Meynell and starts:

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told to us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson and the young Man crucified.

....and after several more stanzas winds up with;

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimmage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll,
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Not necessarily Great Art, but a nice idea to play with.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
FC,

As mousethief suggests, your figures are a bit off. The speed of light is just under 300 million metres per second.

It's about 4 light hours to Pluto's orbit at our closest approach (although Pluto, the wandering demoted-planet that it is, sometimes comes inside Neptune's orbit. 1 AU = 499 light seconds or 8'19", says Google).

Fletcher Christian, that sounds like the Rate Earth Hypothesis. Personally, I don't have a lot of problem with the Fermi Paradox: the Drake Equation is no more than a rule of thumb, and any sensible treatment of the uncertainties in it would certainly not have intelligent life within shouting distance, in all probability.

I think people seem to forget how big the universe actually is (although this might be for their own good), and to forget the dimension of time. Intelligent life elsewhere might have flourished and died before we came down from the trees, might arise millions of years from now, or might occur in a different galaxy - in all of which cases we'd be none the wiser. Just imagine another civilisation in the opposite spiral arm of this galaxy, wondering why we haven't contacted them yet, in the late Cretaceous.

We might have relinquished geocentricism, but I still think humanity is in great need of getting over itself. Why should all intelligent life in the rest of the universe be beating a path to our door?

In any case, Hawking was right. It'd be much better for us if they didn't.

- Chris.

Posted by Orlando098 (# 14930) on :

quote:
If there were life on other planets it seems highly likely it would resemble us rather closely.

Even on our planet there are millions of species that look nothing like us, and in fact we are the only one out of those millions who possess an advanced form of intelligence and communicative ability. If there is life elsewhere, it is much more likely to be like bacteria or lichens or something, than something humanoid.

I do agree though that the existence of some sort of intelligent life does pose problems for traditional Christian theology, which says that this planet and our species play some central role in God's divine plan and that he became incarnate as one of us and lived here and requires certain beliefs ad behaviours from us.

A Vatican astronomer was quoted in the press a couple of years ago on this topic, opining that the explanation could be that we are the only "lost sheep" of the universe and other intelligent beings remained in "full friendship" with him so do not need saving.

astronomer

I do think it is an interesting point though also to ask what beings are sufficiently intelligent for God to take a special interest in them and require them to have the right kind of relationship with him etc? I take it as read that he is not concerned over the morals and beliefs of slugs, for example, but what about dolphins or rooks or chimpanzees or Campbell's monkeys, which are clever enough to have quite advanced learning or communicating or problem-solving (even tool-using) abilities? And what about severely mentally-disabled humans - are they responsible or not? At what point is a being sufficiently self-aware and responsible for its thoughts and actions for it to need religion?

[ 06. August 2010, 09:58: Message edited by: Orlando098 ]

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
somebody on another site today

Um, what? There's another site?

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cosmic dance:
Hey leo, you might be interested in another poetic attempt on this idea. It is by someone called Alice Meynell and starts:

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told to us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson and the young Man crucified.

....and after several more stanzas winds up with;

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimmage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll,
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Not necessarily Great Art, but a nice idea to play with.

Alice Meynel is always interesting.

Posted by Unjust Stuart (# 13953) on :

quote:
You mean...... they didn't come across all those light years of the expansive universe with their incredible technology and then........crash..........in Roswell?

Yes, the engineers in Pisces designed the speedometer to display Mosaic Cubits, but the team in Saggitarius used Caanan Common Cubits for the braking system.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
UFO's might shake Churchill's belief in the church but how many of us believe in the church? He might have a vast vocabulary but I don't think they were well chosen words.

You're right, it's a difficult belief to maintain sometimes [Roll Eyes]

-- but since we say as much in the creed every week, a great many of us at least try and try again.

Although IMHO he exaggerated the threat, I don't think that Churchill's words themselves were at all ill-chosen. They showed that he was perfectly clear on the earthly source of our faith.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Orlando098:
I do agree though that the existence of some sort of intelligent life does pose problems for traditional Christian theology, which says that this planet and our species play some central role in God's divine plan ...

I'm not much of a theologian but that's news to me.

We do know (or claim to) that humanity plays a central role in God's plan to redeem this world, but as far as I can see, Christianity neither knows nor purports to know what other pies the divine thumb may be stuck in.

Proof of alien life wouldn't make a difference to my faith one way or another. The only question it would raise for me is whether the Church would have either the right or the duty to try to convert any alien enquirer to Christianity. Whether our gospel is intended to be a means of grace to another intelligent species, or whether it might be a hinderance to the equally true, but different, thing that God is doing amongst them, might be hard to answer.

(I think, on balance, we are unlikely to be alone. I think God likes life too much, and his creative imagination is too good, for humanity to exhaust all the various ways of being a free moral intelligence that God is interested in making, and to the extent that he used natural processes to make us, those processes very likely hold good elsewhere in the cosmos. I also think that our nearest intelligent neighbours might well have been placed a very long way from us indeed. Space, so the saying goes, is big, and God isn't limited to this galaxy or even to this universe after all.)

Posted by Silver Faux (# 8783) on :

Have any of you ever watched what a spider does to a fly or other captured insect?
It allows it to hang there, trapped, for an agonizing bit of time, then it approaches it and dines in its bodily fluids while the helpless prey cries out, and eventually dies in obvious pain.
So, what if aliens arrived, and began to treat you, your loved ones, and your children in such a heartless fashion, and divine itervention was wholly absent?
Would that shake your faith in a loving God?

Although we may sing "God Sees The Little Sparrow Fall," just about every sparrow or song bird we see will one day be eaten, alive, by a predator.
If very hungry aliens arrived and began to consume human beings, would that shake your faith in God or the Church, perhaps even a little?

We are sending out signals in an attempt to attract the attention of aliens.
Why?

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Have any of you ever watched what a spider does to a fly or other captured insect?
It allows it to hang there, trapped, for an agonizing bit of time, then it approaches it and dines in its bodily fluids while the helpless prey cries out, and eventually dies in obvious pain.

Anthropomorphise much? This is the same house fly you'd condemn to an equally nasty death via nerve gas without a second thought.

quote:
So, what if aliens arrived, and began to treat you, your loved ones, and your children in such a heartless fashion, and divine itervention was wholly absent?
Would that shake your faith in a loving God?

You don't have to invoke aliens to get sentient beings doing horrible things to humans: we can get along just fine by ourselves in that regard. I would say the only faith-shaker would be if they caused humanity to go extinct - in which case the question would be hypothetical.

quote:
We are sending out signals in an attempt to attract the attention of aliens.
Why?

Well, someone agrees with you.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
We are sending out signals in an attempt to attract the attention of aliens.
Why?

Are we? My understanding is that we sent out such a signal for that purpose just once and no longer do so, but confine ourselves to listening for signals from extraterrestial beings-- a project which I rather admire. However, Carl Sagan, for one, thought that television broadcasting signals are emitted from earth strongly enough to attract the attention of advanced aliens, at least by means of remote listening posts installed nearby.

His novel Contact was predicated on the interesting historical fact (as I assume it is) that one of the first television broadcasts ever made showed Hitler holding forth at a rally or military review. A benevolent alien race picked up this signal (some years later) and said oh-oh, that planet is in trouble. Perhaps the symptom was all too familiar to them.

As to why, the answer they would probably give is faith in Saint Albert: that he is correct in the theory that the speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit. Any other "advanced" life in the solar system could be a plausible threat, but we are all but certain that there is none. Hence, any alien race that may exist in the galaxy or universe is too far away to present any danger. (Considering how disastrously intelligent life on earth repeatedly screws, that was a very thoughtful safety feature on the Creator's part, don't you think?).

That's the theory. Posited as a risk/reward gamble, however, I'm not confident that would appeal to very many successful habitues of Las Vegas. For all that Sagan's Cosmos was a fascinating series, his casual optimism, peppered with cavalier dismissals of religion and especially some invidious comparisons of Christianity vs. Hinduism, seemed rather breathtaking.

[ 06. August 2010, 16:33: Message edited by: Alogon ]

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Chris

"If your faith is so predicated on extraterrestrial life not existing, could I ask where in the bible, tradition or reason your get that from?"

How did you derive that oddly derived question from what I said ?

My post-hoc rationalization added to the gift of faith which I've been given is derived from Fermi's paradox: there is no material extraterrestrial life.

Life cannot emerge from matter, mind cannot emerge from life. And the universe is unique by the way.

There is NO rational counter to that, materialism hoists itself with its own petard as Fermi saw, just a simple empirical observation will suffice: extrasolar planetary atmospheric oxygen.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Chris

"If your faith is so predicated on extraterrestrial life not existing, could I ask where in the bible, tradition or reason your get that from?"

How did you derive that oddly derived question from what I said ?

My apologies if I misunderstood what you said. I took "Fermi's paradox applies and is the greatest material proof of God there can possibly be until His return" as implicitly stating that it (and hence a lack of extra-terrestrial life) was important to your faith. However, my clumsy phrasing wasn't intended as an ad hominem, so sorry if it came over like that.

Having said that, I'm still at a bit of a loss as to why the lack of (detectable) alien life has any bearing on God's existence? Referring to Fermi's chin-scratch as providing "absolute scientific certainty of God" seems a very strong statement, and I'd be interested in the reasoning behind it.

As I've already pointed out, "alone in the universe" is not a scientific statement as it's not testable: the best we can do is state that we haven't found evidence in our space/time locality yet. As we've only just started being able to detect rocky planets in different solar systems (no mean feat!), this doesn't mean much. The Drake Equation is much more of a thought experiment than a statement of fact, and the "Great Silence" could be just an expression of the inverse-square law.

You're certainly right about extra-terrestrial oxygen in planetary atmospheres as evidence, although it wouldn't show up things like the organisms hypothesised to possibly exist under Europa's ice. Defining "life" as to exclude "stuff that's not like us" is a little selective.

- Chris.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
The Drake Equation is much more of a thought experiment than a statement of fact, and the "Great Silence" could be just an expression of the inverse-square law.

There is a school of thought that as civilisations progress to Type 1, they stop broadcasting and start narrowcasting using modulated lasers/masers, simply because it's more efficient.

The effect being, of course, that the civilisation literally drops off the radar.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Dash it all Chris, damn and blast your eyes in fact for being all gracious on me.

It won't wash Chris, I'm a Neanderthal. Psycho even, immune to another's sensibilities: I don't bugger about, life's too short.

Not being able to prove a negative in theoretical logic don't faze me in the slightest. Common sense empiricism is mah steam roller baby. Clinging to absurdities ain't rational. It's faith born of a quirk of disposition.

I got few principles but these I hold MOST holy: parsimony - K.I.S.S. - and strong uniformitarianism. Whatever happens in your back yard is cosmic. Average. The two together (or are they one?) cover physics-metaphysics for me. The creation reveals the creator, layer upon layer.

So, by materialism mind emerged from meat which emerged from matter which has always been. Averagely.

As soon as the average Earth was cool enough it teamed with life. Life is automatic, inevitable.

And where there's average, there's extremes. Always. It's the LAH. Where there was an Earth 4 billion years ago there were earths 7 billion years ago just after the first population I stars formed. Where there was just the last 600 million years of rapid 'macro' evolution, 1/6th of evolution, there was 5/6ths. They were us 5 billion years ago. Thousands of times. Concurrently. Millions of times over time. Ducks and DRAKE skipping over time. A LOT of time. Nearly half a trillion stars at a time. In just this galaxy.

And they've done EVERYTHING it's technologically possible to do. They've colonized the galaxy thousands of times. Conservatively. I mean you'd have to have Dawkins LACK of faith in his own faith not to face that.

He believes that there are 6 concurrent civilizations in our averagely vast galaxy.

They've strip mined it. Built space elevators, O'Neill Haloes, Orions, ram-scoop fusion drives, matter-antimatter drives, solettas, Dyson rings and spheres. Quantum entangled teleports.

They can Morse with stars. The MILLIONS of stars we can see with binoculars just 10,000 light years away.

And a billion years before they did any of that, their home worlds all had oxygen crises. Apart from the extreme, exotic worlds where life developed in silico, or in silico but not on worlds (Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud) or wet carbon not an a world (Larry Niven's Integral Trees).

Their fag packets, used condoms, abandoned pets, vermin, nuke pulsed maser-radio waves, nanites, Von Neumann machines, ruins, lost mobiles, oil stains, fossil DNA would litter the car park.

Not a trace. Martian methane! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Martian meteorite magnetite!! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Desperate or what.

As Enrico said, where are they then ?

Sterilized by gamma ray bursters ?

Uh huh.

Where's their OXYGEN. That's ALL we need. And it's increasingly NOT a lot to ask, is it ?

God was contentedly busy for (NOT outside) eternity before making this ONE, first and only stupefying universe. He planted just ONE seed in it.

Here we are. THE apple of His eye in a pristine universe groaning in anticipation of us.

Until we detect oxygen.

We won't. Will we ?

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Hang about! This entire thread is based on the report that the RAF suppressed reports of an unidentified flying object in wartime?

OF COURSE all such reports are secret. Because there is always the possibility that it was some sort of enemy action. And if you say you detected it but can't identify it you are telling the enemy the limits of your technology.

Posted by Mere Nick (# 11827) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Silver Faux:
So, would the knowledge of UFOs, if proven, destroy your belief in the Church?
Can you still believe the teachings of Christianity, and yet recognize that other life might exist?
Do visitors from other planets in way prove to you that God is not real? [/QB]

no
yes
no

Posted by Columbus (# 15792) on :

I don't see how the existence of ETI could possibly affect one's beliefs.

What I could see affecting it is what they say. If a ETI said, "OH yeah, God does that all the time. Every few thousand years He creates another set of sapients and puts them through their paces. Here is a list of the creatures from the last seven million years and how to reach them." I would have to reconsider my beliefs.

Tom

Posted by Herrick (# 15226) on :

Originally posted by Orlando 098

______________________________________
in fact we are the only one out of those millions who possess an advanced form of intelligence and communicative ability.
__________________________________________
You believe other creatures don't communicate with each other?

Posted by Orlando098 (# 14930) on :

No, but we have communicative and creative abilities of a level of complexity, and a culture and technology deriving from them, which creates a gulf between us and other animals on this planet.

However I increasingly see the line blurring between us and them as researchers find other species that have relatively complex communication systems, can use tools and demonstrate quite complex problem-solving abilities, display emotions etc, and learn (some chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught hundreds of sign language signs, I read - one called koko can supposedly use around 1,000 ). Some animal species also pass the "mirror test" (ie. they show awareness of the fact the image in a mirror is their own reflection).

Despite this Christianity has always seen a divide between man and animals - presumably with the latter having a different, lesser kind of soul, or none at all, depending on opinions. It certainly seems as though no one has ever really bothered to wonder if they can have eternal life or go to hell, or if they are judged in any way. No one really cares if, for example, a porpoise is evil or good, or has faith in anything or not... The question of what makes a being sufficiently intelligent and self-aware to need religion seems important if we are wondering if aliens would have one or not. Presumably, by definition, if they were advanced enough to come here or communicate to us, then they would be at least comparable to us.

Posted by Orlando098 (# 14930) on :

[ 07. August 2010, 10:39: Message edited by: Orlando098 ]

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Columbus.

I don't see how you can't see.

Just showing how dispositional it all is.

[ 07. August 2010, 15:19: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

Apologies in advance to everyone for OT rambling...

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Dash it all Chris, damn and blast your eyes in fact for being all gracious on me.

And thank you for returning the favour!

I found your reply very interesting. We share more assumptions than I thought: KISS, strong uniformity and common-sense empiricism get no argument from me (with the slight proviso that "common sense" can sometimes be misleading). I have no problem with the "cannot prove a negative" in this question: we're dealing with balance of probabilities, and we're guessing madly at the probabilities, for the most part. Also, kudos for including so many references to classic science fiction [Big Grin]

.

I'm afraid I've looked, and I can't find a reference for the "6 concurrent civilisation in this galaxy" quote. At best it has to be a guesstimate, and I'm afraid Dawkins would have been speaking out of his area of expertise here - he's guessing just as much as the rest of us. And I think that the Rare Eathers have a point: other "Earths" might not be nearly as plentiful as supposed by the earlier Drake-ers. Even a factor of 100 off puts your 6 civilisations down to 0.06 in the galaxy - in other words, probably none. Note that this isn't none in the universe!

If the civilisations occuring 7bn years ago did occur as your argument suggested - it supposed that they were interested in interstellar colonisation, and successful enough at it to come within spitting distance of us, and that the colonists or their artefacts still exist after a really long period of time. I don't know what are the odds of successful interstellar colonisation are (and neither do you or prof Dawkins) but I will confidently state it's not 100%. There's another factor into the Drake equation! The persistence condition (billions of years hence, humanity in its current state woukd be undetectable if we died off tomorrow) probably reduces it by another order of magnitude.

As to radio silence: even assuming a civilisation was isotropically broadcasting for all it's worth (another assumption, as Doc Tor pointed out), here's a back of an envelope calculation:

The milky way is around 100,000 light years across. Lets say that a civilisation was broadcasting in every direction from half that distance. SETI used Aricebo to transmit signals in 1974. The antenna has broadcast power of equivalent to 20TW at peak. Attenuated due to 50,000 light years distance, this would represent a signal 7 million trillion trillionths of a watt. Pioneer 10 was a billion times stronger than that in 2001, and barely detectable - and that was because we knew where to look.

Leaving aside things like teleportation and FTL drives as belonging to the realms of fantasy (or faith) more than known science fact, any civilisation at that distance would not be visible to us. We'd have to rely on colonies closer to us, and for that metter, the asssumption that interstellar colonisation would ever be feasable for anyone.

Not that any of this eliminates the possibility that we are alone! I think it just relegates it to the status of Russell's teapot before the invention of the telescope: we can't find out, and it doesn't make any difference to us one way or another.

- Chris.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Chris.

Not bad. But the anoxia is as intriguing as it is in reality.

Dawkins has no confidence in his own faith, I saw him say 6 concurrent civilizations on TV, outside his bailiwick as you said, some years ago.

My figure for concurrent communicable civilizations based on strongly uniform Drake would conservatively be 100,000.

Rare earth does NOT stand up to strong uniformitarianism in our average galaxy of at least 200,000,000,000 - two hundred billion - stars over six billion years. And life starting on earth as soon as it cooled. Yeah, yeah, snowball earth, the moon, etc, etc. 10 a penny. Oooh, gamma ray bursters!! Yeah yeah, yeah. And NOT.

We have the technology to get to the nearest stars within decades at 0.l c now. Project Orion. In thousand years or less we'll do it casually after terraforming Mars. Unless evolution completes our Islamization. Oh and if there are aliens, they'll be Muslims.

By strong uniformitarianism.

For every navel contemplating species there will be ten restless adventurers. Even if the ratio is a million to one the other way. Which is abusrd. We are typical. Average. Over the past five billion years there will have been billions of such species.

Not a trace.

And they don't need to broadcast omnidirectionally for 50k LY. Lased nukes playing Beethoven's 5th at every yellow dwarf in the Sagitarrius arm at 10k. (I'm grateful for the figures on attenuation. Any links on that?) Or use a soletta as an Asdic lamp. Make the sun wink.

But all of that palls in to insignificance with the failure to detect extrasolar planetary atmospheric oxygen.

That's ALL that's necessary to demolish the scientific certainty of God.

Don't hold your breath.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
We are typical. Average.

Which is an assertion that's basically unprovable. We have no means of measuring the distribution, much less determine our place on it, from a single sample. In fact, in the small number of parameters we can measure it, we can disprove it.

Take the number of stars in the system. Aprroximately 1/3 of all star systems are multiples (mostly binary). That makes the average number of stars in a system approximately 1.33, so we're below average on that count.

We can measure the absolute luminosity and sizes of different stars, and compare the Sun to those parameters. Again, the Sun is not average. iT's not even particularly typical - the majority of stars are much larger or smaller, much brighter or dimmer.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Ah, he stoops to conquer. I can't even do mediocrity Alan. Let alone average. But my old nuclear friend, why have you invoked the straw man of our second class yellow dwarf type G not being average in the old Hertzsprung-Russell ?

Such stars are obviously average life producers.

And you can't, but I can.

It's a matter of disposition mate, not intellectualistic rhetoric. Like being wowed by your being four conversations from Stalin. Five personal transcations from Hitler.

Utter silence, not a whiff of oxygen, no condoms in the car park, our complete inability to replicate what warm, UVeed, lightning struck puddles could do four billion years ago.

Just one sample eh ? That's the point.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Sagittarius ... strewth. Senility base, out.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
(I'm grateful for the figures on attenuation. Any links on that?)

I'm no expert, but I'd gladly PM you the back of my envelope to save boring everyone else to death. However, your PM box is full!

- Chris.

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

It seems to me that many people are indeed expressing their beliefs and hopes in this thread, while claiming they are speaking of science. In fact, this is exactly one of the aspects of existence about which we can say simply do not know for sure.

Are there extrasolar planets similar to Terra? As far as I can tell, the answer is "We don't know". The only extrasolar planets detected thus far are all quite large, not small like our world. Is it likely there are such planets? It's hard to address "likely" without expressing a hope or belief. If various theories of the formation of stars and planets are correct, then yes, there probably are such planets. Do we know those theories are correct? No--we have detailed data on exactly one stellar system.

Suppose such a planet exists somewhere. Will there be life on it? Again, our data is very limited. We know of exactly one planet anywhere that does have life. Do we know how life forms on a planet? There are conjectures and little more. (If a planet does have life, will we even be able to detect its presence? To what extent are you aware of rock-eating bacteria?)

Suppose there is a planet and it has life. Will intelligent life necessarily evolve there? The evolution of intelligence is a bit better understood than some of these other matters--but what kind of intelligence? Are we speaking of whales singing to one another? Or of ants with their elaborate homes and wars? Or of the impressive collective achievements of beavers? Or do you insist on a tool-using, tool-designing species with language and arts and religion?

If we stick to actual knowledge and not express hopes or wild optimism, then it is quite possible that Terra is unique in possessing life. That would make us far more special than otherwise, and far more alone. I hope (there's that word) we are not so alone.

Pardon me for the long post.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

All answered by strong uniformitarianism above HCH.

And disposition.

No amount of the empirically obvious will convince those of an endlessly rhetorical - Vicky Pollard - bent.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

Martin, you have a rather unique understanding of uniformitarianism.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

How so Alan ?

Another straw man coming up ?

[ 09. August 2010, 20:07: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

I side with Martin not on scientific grounds, but on theological ones. I think Martin's application of "the law of the average" to us is self-defeating even if all his data and estimates were correct (and I feel no pressing urge to check any of them). Surely an argument that goes "we are really very average and therefore utterly singular" makes no sense at all. If we can be so amazingly singular as to be the alone in the universe, then we surely can be so somewhat less singular as to be stuck in the equivalent of outer Mongolia, with all the action of the universe's New York being simply located sufficiently elsewhere.

Unlike C.S. Lewis, Vatican astronomers, Eliab and apparently most other Shipmates, I do think that there is a serious problem with the Incarnation if there are aliens. I do not think that it is fitting for humanity to be the spiritual village idiot. So if there are many different kinds of aliens, then I would expect that many, most, possibly all of them are fallen. But if they are fallen, then I would not consider it fitting if they were saved by Christ the God-human. I certainly would not feel particularly engaged by the incarnation of God as some bug-eyed many-tentacled monster from Vega, so why should such an alien feel any more engaged by a squishy-eyed two-armed monster from earth? Thus by fittingness I would argue for (almost) as many incarnations in (almost) as many shapes as there are aliens. But I would not consider such a multiplication of the incarnated Logos as fitting at all. Mass-production cheapens the value of every single item, and I can't feel other than underwhelmed by a relentless repetition of the supposedly greatest miracle. Thus I end up with a reductio ad absurdum by fittingness.

Of course there is no proof to be had by arguing from fittingness. But I feel that there's limited support for this from the fact that the Logos does not keep on incarnating regularly as human in time, though I see nothing that particularly speak against this other than precisely the fittingness of a singular greatest miracle.

Furthermore, there are some fairly clear indications in the bible that man's fate is entwined with that of the entire universe. In particular Rom 8:18-23 speaks of this clearly, but also Gen 1:26, Is 24, the whole flood story (which kills all life associated with the evil humans and keeps alive what is with and under the righteous humans, Gen 9 in particular), and probably others. One could interpret this as meaning that what we do is only relevant for the "universe" of earth, and admittedly most quotes only focus on this world (though in my opinion simply because that's what they thought the universe was back then). However, I do not see any simple "spiritual" way of defining a domain of human responsibility which does not become something trivially biological.

Once more, it seems ill-fitting to me that human stewardship means nothing more than that we should take care of what has terrestrial DNA. That sort of thing could stem directly from a UN charter, and I like my faith a bit deeper (and frankly, more spectacular) than such bureaucratism. And why precisely should the life of a fish on earth depend on the idiot species human, whereas the life of some aquatic monster on Vega depends on the enlightened monsters of Vega? Can the earth fish appeal to God to be transferred into the Vegan domain of responsibility? In particular once they land here?

If we were to find intelligent alien life, then I would have to seriously re-think my position on the Incarnation. And while my Church has not in fact said anything definite concerning the Incarnation vs. alien life, questioning the Incarnation of course would mean questioning what I've heard about that by the agency of the Church. So for me Churchill could be literally right. I see no particular reason to doubt the existence of God if aliens exist, but I sure would have some doubts about the Christian God, and hence about the Church who brought me news of Him, news that I thought were good.

Posted by Myrrh (# 11483) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

Of course there is no proof to be had by arguing from fittingness. But I feel that there's limited support for this from the fact that the Logos does not keep on incarnating regularly as human in time, though I see nothing that particularly speak against this other than precisely the fittingness of a singular greatest miracle.

One religion has this happening, the Hindu's teach that God incarnates when there is a degeneration of morality requiring another reminder.

quote:
And why precisely should the life of a fish on earth depend on the idiot species human, whereas the life of some aquatic monster on Vega depends on the enlightened monsters of Vega? Can the earth fish appeal to God to be transferred into the Vegan domain of responsibility? In particular once they land here?

Fish have already had God incarnate as one of them on earth, so they don't have to appeal to any other God, but that to which humans can appeal to, for the Hindus. (*)

If there are aliens it could be that they too have had or will have God incarnate as one of their kind in order to communicate if the Hindus get to write the story, however, according to the Hindus mankind is the highest form of life, so this wouldn't give them any angst.

(*)The first incarnation of Vishnu is Matsya the Fish who saved the Hindus think important bits in the world at the time of the flood.

Vishnu

Myrrh

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
How so Alan ?

Uniformitarianism simply states that the laws by which the universe operates are the same everywhere and at all times. It also states that if past or distant events that can't be readily observed directly can be explained by processes that are more readily investigated then those processes are the preferred explanation over more exotic processes.

It is also possible to interpret uniformitarianism to imply that no particular place or time is special. Which is what I'm assuming you're attempting to do by stating that "we're average" and appealing to uniformitarianism in support of that claim. The problem is that 'average' is a special condition. Why claim that the Earth, complete with supposedly intelligent beings, as it currently is is 'average'? Why not the Earth 100 million years ago with dinosaurs? Or 3 billion years before that with the most basic life forms? Or a billion years from now with whatever life is here then? Or why not claim that Mars or Venus are average, neither amenable to life as we know it?

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

Yes, I was agreeing with the definition of Uniformatarianism (or rather the Principle of Uniformity) as per Alan's first paragraph. Re averages, consider the weather on Earth, and try and find an actual place with average temperature, precipitation, wind etc - it probably doesn't exist.

I like the way IngoB phrased it. It occurs to me that in expressing opinion about the likelihood of life on other planets we're all basically talking about what seems "fitting" to us. Any point of view from "alone in the universe" to "several other civilisations in the galaxy, not interested in aggressively broadcasting their existence and not particularly close to us" are equally supported by the evidence. The only thing I think is "empirically obvious," Martin PCNot, is that nobody else has rolled out a red carpet or knocked on our door yet (I don't expect them to, but then I have Rare-Earthist tendencies [Big Grin]

). These speculations tell us more about the speculator (in all cases, including me) than the actual situation, which is mind-bogglingly vast and for the most part unknown.

Martin - you have a good point about the nuclear bombs: as I understand the gamma-ray laser proposals from 80's era SDI, you would get a burst of focussed and very intense energy, which should be detectable by us. If we're looking the right direction, at the right time. And if they're doing it at our system: of the 200 bn estimated stars in the milky way, about 7.6% are G-types. If you "wave" to a quarter of them (the slice of the galaxy your side of the core, say), that's still nearly 4 billion stars. That's a lot of nukes - and you'd have to keep doing it, or we might miss it. How much fissile material/antimatter do you have? There would be, if nothing else, a huge energy cost to doing this. Why are you assuming that civilisation would find it a worthwhile exercise? We could (technically) have put out a daedalus-style prove to alpha centauri now, but we considered that the vast amount of money involved would be better spent on other things (yeah: wars, shiny things, etc).

The "other sentient life would have announced its presence" argument only makes sense if you accept the assumptions that they would be like us, share enough of our assumptions, are (very) concerned to announce their presence and have technology from classic-era 1950s Science Fiction (or the Culture. But the Culture would be messing around with us via Contact/SC, and we'd be none the wiser [Paranoid]

). That's a raft of unprovable assumptions, and I'm afraid I don't think they're covered by any sort of Uniformity that I'd sign up to.

Ultimately, the only thing that will shed any light is experiment. If we'd studied every rocky planet around every potentially life-sustaining star within spitting distance and found no evidence of a biosphere (or far-from-equilibrium chemistry) Martin would have a stronger point - but we haven't. it seems a little premature to call the astronomers' efforts a waste of time.

- Chris.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

Thoughtful post, IngoB.

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I do not think that it is fitting for humanity to be the spiritual village idiot. So if there are many different kinds of aliens, then I would expect that many, most, possibly all of them are fallen.

That's my first point of disagreement. I think it could be fitting that humanity is the only rational species that fell, and that as a result, God become a member of that species and through that has poured his grace into the whole cosmos in a new way. We might be the only lost sheep, but our rescue blesses the rest of the flock by proving how far the shepherd was willing to go to save any one of us. That seems to me to be a good fit with what we have in the gospel.

But to apply fitness as a criteria at all here may be a mistake. We can well believe that God foresaw human rebellion ‘before' creation existed at all, but if we believe that we nonetheless fell by free choice, I don't think we have to believe that the number or proportion of fallen races was selected by God at all. God's ideal number of rebels might well have been zero. If he permits one fall, because he made us free, then he might also permit the Klingons to fall, even though it spoils the poetry of having only a single sheep go astray.

quote:
But if they are fallen, then I would not consider it fitting if they were saved by Christ the God-human. I certainly would not feel particularly engaged by the incarnation of God as some bug-eyed many-tentacled monster from Vega, so why should such an alien feel any more engaged by a squishy-eyed two-armed monster from earth? Thus by fittingness I would argue for (almost) as many incarnations in (almost) as many shapes as there are aliens.

I think you are right, here. There seem to me to two themes in scripture about how the incarnation affects us. Firstly, it is about God saving us by becoming one of us - our brother, part of our race, sharing in our nature. Secondly, there is (as you go on to say) there is a sense in which the incarnation is cosmic - God changes the whole of creation by becoming part of creation. It makes a difference to everything that God has made - it delights the host of heaven and shakes hell to its foundations. No way is the incarnation merely a local event, if Christianity is true.

So the problem for me is that I can't see how an intelligent alien could possibly be included fully in the first theme, AND that I can't see how they could possibly be excluded from the second. That's why I posed the question whether we should preach our gospel to other forms of life - if we met them. I don't know the answer.

quote:
But I would not consider such a multiplication of the incarnated Logos as fitting at all. Mass-production cheapens the value of every single item, and I can't feel other than underwhelmed by a relentless repetition of the supposedly greatest miracle. Thus I end up with a reductio ad absurdum by fittingness. once they land here?

I don't think its the repetition itself that I'd object to, as much as the localisation of the effects of the Incarnation/Resurrection/Ascension. If it needed to happen a billion times that would not (for me) diminish the importance of the story that especially applied to me and to my world. I would, however, feel that the importance was diminished in that I had once thought that one act of God had been enough to bring about a cosmic redemption, and I would have to readjust that to being the redemption of only one planet.

Are we disagreeing or just expressing the same point differently here?

quote:
Furthermore, there are some fairly clear indications in the bible that man's fate is entwined with that of the entire universe.

Yes, agreed. And I agree that it would be hard to apply that to mean just this planet.

But for all that, I don't think that my very real doubts and questions about how aliens fit into the story of salvation as I know it would be enough to shake my faith in God or the church. I think I would conclude that the incarnation had made a difference to them (even if I didn't know what) AND that it was likely that God was also redeeming them (if they needed redemption) in ways that I did not know about, and possibly would not understand. There's a whole lot of questions that I don't know the answers to. This, however important, would just be another one.

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

I actually don't have a problem at all with humanity being the village spiritual idiot. Somebody's got to do it, after all. And along the lines of "the last shall be first" and all that, it wouldn't disturb me either to have the incarnation happen among our own woeful species and benefit everybody else, alien or what have you. I can't imagine it being repeated elsewhere (God doesn't seem to go much for repetition, at least not in exactly the same form). Whether the aliens would be bothered by having their salvation come through the hairless, thick-legged squishy-bodied eggheads of Sol 3--well, I assume the Lord will have worked that out with them.

Posted by The Revolutionist (# 4578) on :

quote:
Originally posted by dj_ordinaire:
Erm... surely one could say precisely the same about the discovery of America? That doesn't seem to have dented Christianity too badly...

Or indeed the discovery of inhabited antipodes! In medieval times, it was believed by some that the Southern hemisphere was cut off from the Northern hemisphere by the Torrid zone, and so humans, descended firstly from Adam and then from Noah, couldn't have spread to the south.

I don't think there's any necessary contradiction between alien life and the Christian faith. The religious beliefs of aliens could have interesting implications, however. And if we got wiped out by invading aliens like those beloved of Doctor Who and Hollywood blockbusters, that would pose the problem of evil in an extreme form!

On the other hand, aliens who haven't heard of the Christian God would pose no more necessary threat to the truth of the Christian faith than the "discovery" of the Aztecs or Native Americans in America, I think. God might have something very different in store, or he could want us to evangelise them, or some other option.

It's an interesting thought-experiment, but it's all pure speculation unless we actually encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I got few principles but these I hold MOST holy: parsimony - K.I.S.S. - and strong uniformitarianism. Whatever happens in your back yard is cosmic. Average. The two together (or are they one?) cover physics-metaphysics for me. The creation reveals the creator, layer upon layer.

So, by materialism mind emerged from meat which emerged from matter which has always been. Averagely.

As soon as the average Earth was cool enough it teamed with life. Life is automatic, inevitable.

Have you read and absorbedThe Anthropic Principle by Barrow and Tipler?

I've tried. I don't have nearly enough math to understand much of it. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating book.

It's strange. They reason similarly to you above. A lot of what they say would lead a reader to suppose that they believe the galaxy to be teeming with life-- life fairly similar to our own, because of the physical conditions and constraints attending its development. Yet they conclude that there are probably no other races as intelligent as we.

Do you have any idea how they reach this seeming non-sequitur?

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Alogon (you other buggers can wait), I can only conclude that they (I read the review and articles in New Scientist) had fully grasped Fermi (unlike you aforementioned buggers): there cannot be older or concurrently smarter because SOME of them would have left condoms in the car park having (averagely, typically Alan) been here a million or a hundred million years ago.

Advanced contemporary aliens should be within a 1000 light years. Here within 10,000 years. Certain within 10,000 LY, a hundred times over, taking 100,000 years to get here. To deploy quantum entangled listening posts at least (no delay on reporting back).

Not a trace. Prime directives be damned.

Why would they ? Because it is THE greatest quest in the universe. WE have to know. So do, DID they. They don't. They didn't. There is no they.

Barrow & Tippler could not have not concluded the same, the same as Fermi.

They have NO material explanation for our being the apple of a blind cosmic eye, but rather than break Occam's razor once vertically they must shatter it laterally with Heath-Robinson contrivances (I don't think there's any advance on gamma-ray bursters is there? It's Stephen Baxter's only answer in Time.) to explain and preserve our endless material solitude.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I do not think that it is fitting for humanity to be the spiritual village idiot. So if there are many different kinds of aliens, then I would expect that many, most, possibly all of them are fallen.
That's my first point of disagreement. I think it could be fitting that humanity is the only rational species that fell, and that as a result, God become a member of that species and through that has poured his grace into the whole cosmos in a new way. We might be the only lost sheep, but our rescue blesses the rest of the flock by proving how far the shepherd was willing to go to save any one of us. That seems to me to be a good fit with what we have in the gospel.

But to apply fitness as a criteria at all here may be a mistake.

I would also agree that fitness is not an appropriate criterion, but not for the same reasons. Fitness in this case is a product of human opinion, whether of the individual brain or at a more collective level, and whether you glorify it with the backing of theology or not. To try to determine whether there may be alien species and their "spiritual" state on this basis is to take human opinions and expect the universe to accord to them.

quote:
But for all that, I don't think that my very real doubts and questions about how aliens fit into the story of salvation as I know it would be enough to shake my faith in God or the church. I think I would conclude that the incarnation had made a difference to them (even if I didn't know what) AND that it was likely that God was also redeeming them (if they needed redemption) in ways that I did not know about, and possibly would not understand.

This actually encapsulates one of my main objections to religion. It was one thing to believe that human affairs were of cosmic importance in a Genesis system centred on the Earth with humans placed at the pinnacle of it. However, we now have significant understanding of the immense size and age of the universe and how it works. Against that background to believe that something that happened to us impacted throughout the whole universe is really taking human arrogance and self-centredness to new heights.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
Against that background to believe that something that happened to us impacted throughout the whole universe is really taking human arrogance and self-centredness to new heights.

Some people just can't cope with the idea that we humans just ain't that special. For some reason, they need humanity to be the absolute pinnacle of existence, rather than the pathetic ragtag bunch of monkeys it is.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
Against that background to believe that something that happened to us impacted throughout the whole universe is really taking human arrogance and self-centredness to new heights.
Some people just can't cope with the idea that we humans just ain't that special. For some reason, they need humanity to be the absolute pinnacle of existence, rather than the pathetic ragtag bunch of monkeys it is.

Ah, but what if the absolute pinnacle of existence is this pathetic ragtag bunch of monkeys?

Simply put (and echoing Martin and Alogon), someone has to be first. The Fermi paradox is solved by positing that it is us.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Surely an argument that goes "we are really very average and therefore utterly singular" makes no sense at all... Unlike C.S. Lewis, Vatican astronomers, Eliab and apparently most other Shipmates, I do think that there is a serious problem with the Incarnation if there are aliens. I do not think that it is fitting for humanity to be the spiritual village idiot. So if there are many different kinds of aliens, then I would expect that many, most, possibly all of them are fallen.

But Christ did say "Other sheep have I which are not of this fold." It is certainly arguable that the Incarnation cheapened God. According to some writers, the very idea scandalized someone: Satan. The faithful, therefore, shouldn't go there. Obviously, if one incarnation cheapened God, then multiple incarnations would cheapen God even more. But if doing it once did not cheapen God-- contrary to all appearances-- then why should we think that it would be cheapened with repetition (more or less) elsewhere in the universe?

I agree with you, however, that alien intelligent races are also liable to be fallen. If our experience is any indication, then among the natural consequences of fallenness is fouling one's planetary nest in various ways, and being unable to co-ordinate ourselves to the extent of reaching even a nearby star. (One of the notable weaknesses of the bad guys in Tolkien is their infighting. Isn't this totally true to life?) Such a project, aside from not being very rational, is quite out of our reach for the foreseeable future. Dreaming about it and writing works of fiction don't make it possible. We might not even be a technologically advanced species in another hundred years. If all or most races similar to ours are also fallen, then our lack of evidence for their presence is unremarkable, especially considering that we haven't been looking for it very long.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

We are talking about four immense dimensions here in which extraterrestrial civilisations could rise and fall. In addition, taking humans as an example, we have only had the technology to communicate in a proactive and small scale way beyond the confines of this planet for about 100 years. Therefore I would suggest that the Occam's Razor response to the Fermi paradox is that there is no paradox.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
This actually encapsulates one of my main objections to religion. It was one thing to believe that human affairs were of cosmic importance in a Genesis system centred on the Earth with humans placed at the pinnacle of it. However, we now have significant understanding of the immense size and age of the universe and how it works. Against that background to believe that something that happened to us impacted throughout the whole universe is really taking human arrogance and self-centredness to new heights.

My argument was that (contra IngoB) I thought it quite plausible that we might be the universe's spiritual village idiot, that of a multitude of wonderful forms of life made from the mind of God, we are the one failure, the one fuck-up, in all creation.

And what you take from it is a point about the greatness of what GOD has done by involving himself directly as part of his own creation, and the effects of that DIVINE act, and imagine me to be saying something in favour of human arrogance, or arguing that we are the pinnacle of existence? [Confused]

How? It makes no sense at all.

No orthodox Christian thinks that God became man because we are the best. We think he loves us, we think that he did a great thing in saving us, and we think that because God is so extravagently good and overflowing with grace and life, that he raised not just one fallen and failing race, but the whole cosmos, when he won the victory over sin and death, but we do not think that any of this implies that we are the most important thing there is, or that we get to congratulate ourselves for it.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
And what you take from it is a point about the greatness of what GOD has done by involving himself directly as part of his own creation, and the effects of that DIVINE act, and imagine me to be saying something in favour of human arrogance, or arguing that we are the pinnacle of existence?

How? It makes no sense at all.

This from your earlier post:

quote:
I think I would conclude that the incarnation had made a difference to them (even if I didn't know what) AND that it was likely that God was also redeeming them (if they needed redemption) in ways that I did not know about

What you are saying is that something that happened to humans has an impact on aliens millions of light years away. The village idiot may be a village idiot but he still thinks the universe revolves around him.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
What you are saying is that something that happened to humans has an impact on aliens millions of light years away.

No, I'm saying that what God has done in creation affects the whole of creation. Not because it had to in order to save us, nor that it was a proper response to our merits, but because God is profligate with his gifts. It's all about what I think of God, not about what I think of humanity. There's a difference.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
I'm saying that what God has done in creation affects the whole of creation.

According to some earthling's idle theory.

quote:
because God is profligate with his gifts. It's all about what I think of God, not about what I think of humanity. There's a difference.

So God was profligate enough with his gifts to redeem aliens in other galaxies at the same time as he redeemed the human race, but not profligate enough to tell them?

Jesus didn't just redeem us. He also taught us and left the church behind for continuing testimony and assistance.

[ 11. August 2010, 16:35: Message edited by: Alogon ]

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

Do-er or do-ee it's still raising the cosmos in a little corner of this planet 2000 years ago, according to the beliefs of some of the inhabitants of this planet. It leaves me somewhere between [Roll Eyes]

and

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

I keep managing to cross-post with Alogon. That was in response to Eliab.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alogon:
So God was profligate enough with his gifts to redeem aliens in other galaxies at the same time as he redeemed the human race, but not profligate enough to tell them?

Says who?

I don't know that there are aliens at all. I don't know if they needed to be redeemed. I don't know what they've been told by God.

The only one of those I've even guessed at is the first - I think there probably are other intelligent moral agents in the universe. If there are, that raises theological questions that I don't have the answer to.

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
Do-er or do-ee it's still raising the cosmos in a little corner of this planet 2000 years ago, according to the beliefs of some of the inhabitants of this planet. It leaves me somewhere between and

Well, that's Christianity, isn't it? God acted in a unique way and one particular time and place, and that has changed the way that I (and anyone else) can relate to my creator, even though many miles and years separate be from that act.

It's either absurd, or awesome. Those who would find it absurd today, would have found it absurd to hear it suggested, 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, that the Messiah came from as remote a backwater as Galilee. The fact that we now have some more accurate numbers to put to the concept which humanity has always known (Space is big) and have also discovered to a far deeper understanding that the planet is old, makes no difference in principle. Either you think it's wonderful that God does something important, once, at one otherwise-ordinary time and place, or you think it's silly. Either way, it isn't a new issue.

Posted by goperryrevs (# 13504) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
UFO's
Turnip's.

UFO is an acronym, so the apostrophe is perfectly acceptable

Posted by Bane-of-piety (# 15267) on :

In the Church Hell yes. In God, of course not.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
Those who would find it absurd today, would have found it absurd to hear it suggested, 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, that the Messiah came from as remote a backwater as Galilee.

Even though they had the testimony of God that he hadn't chosen the nation of Isreal because they were the largest, most powerful nation.

I find it hard to figure out why people who believe in a God who chose to adopt such a puny, insignificant, and frankly more trouble than they were worth people like the descendents of Israel would have trouble thinking that the human race isn't the pinnacle of creation.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
This actually encapsulates one of my main objections to religion. It was one thing to believe that human affairs were of cosmic importance in a Genesis system centred on the Earth with humans placed at the pinnacle of it. However, we now have significant understanding of the immense size and age of the universe and how it works. Against that background to believe that something that happened to us impacted throughout the whole universe is really taking human arrogance and self-centredness to new heights.

That is the golf-ball fallacy.

Golfer hits ball. It lands on a blade of grass. There are maybe five or ten million grass plants within range of the golfer. The odds against that particular blade of grass being hit are ten million to one! Must be something very special about it.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

The unfortunate thing about this fallacy is that it has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. The implication of Eliab's argument was that when the golf ball hits a blade of grass on the 13th fairway it benefits a grain of sand in a bunker on the 15th green. Nobody has raised the probability of that blade of grass being hit.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
The implication of Eliab's argument was that when the golf ball hits a blade of grass on the 13th fairway it benefits a grain of sand in a bunker on the 15th green.

Correct.

The only misapprehension that you are (or were) under was that I was saying something about the importance of the blade of grass, rather than something about the importance of the ball.

To change the metaphor slightly - suppose you were a regular at a bog-standard golf course, and one day Tiger Woods turned up to play a quick 18 holes. You might (if you were a fan) put up a picture of the great man on the club-house notice board with the words "Tiger Woods played here".

The fact that the visitation occurred for one day only, and that Mr Woods' ball only touched a miniscule area of the total, would not stop you claiming the honour for the whole course. Every blade of grass, every grain of sand, would be part of the course on which Tiger Woods once played. The extent to which that mattered to you would depend on the esteem in which you held him - it would say nothing at all about the merits of the particular patches of turf on which his ball rested.

Your argument about the size of the universe is rather like an assertion that the older members of the golf club were under the delusion that the course was a 9-hole municipal pitch-and-putt, whereas modern science has established that it is in fact composed of three enormous 18-hole circuits. You might be right, but in fact it makes no difference. Everyone is agreed that Tiger Woods actually came into contact with a tiny part of the whole course, even if the whole is rather bigger than was hitherto imagined. The appropriateness of the club-house boast depends on how big you think the champion is, not on the dimensions of the playing area.

Posted by Nicolemrw (# 28) on :

Christus Apollo by Ray Bradbury

quote:
And wonder as we look among the stars
Did He know these?
In some far universal Deep
Did He tread Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that knew His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet Pronouncements?
Annunciations? Visitations from angelic hosts?...

...It must be so.
For in this time of Christmas
In the long Day totalling up to Eight,
We see the light, we know the dark;
And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night
No matter what the world or time or circumstance
Must love the light,
So, children of all lost unnumbered suns
Must fear the dark
Which mingles in a shadowing-forth on air.
And swarms the blood.
No matter what the color, shape, or size
Of beings who keep souls like breathing coals
In long midnights,
They must need saving of themselves....

(This is a long quote, but the original is longer still, so I feel this isn't too much)

One of the most beautiful examinations of the possibility of Incarnation on other worlds that I've ever seen.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bane-of-piety:
In the Church Hell yes. In God, of course not.

So you believe in the Church now, but wouldn't if we found life on other planets. Why?

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Because it's orthodox Alan. And your disposition isn't.

Because IngoB is sort of right (apart from inferring somehow that my faith is predicated on top of the obviously lifeless cosmos). God the only and eternally begotten Son came ONCE as a human and continues to be one.

The parsimonius fact from self-refuted materialism that there is NO extraterrestrial life complements this.

Must resurrect your upstream assumptions and reasoning some time.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
I think it could be fitting that humanity is the only rational species that fell, and that as a result, God become a member of that species and through that has poured his grace into the whole cosmos in a new way. We might be the only lost sheep, but our rescue blesses the rest of the flock by proving how far the shepherd was willing to go to save any one of us. That seems to me to be a good fit with what we have in the gospel.

First, if we do take serious the connection between the fall and death, then we have unequivocal evidence that this is not the case: death is everywhere we look in the universe, and given finite light speed, death is there at all times. Of course, we are only observing stars, galaxies, quasars and the like. But even if one does not want to attribute "life" to those (and I do wish to do so, in this context: I do not believe that suns will cease to shine in New Creation), then certainly whatever life may exist around a sun will see its existence challenged if the sun blows in a supernova (or "fails" in less dramatic ways). As far as we can see, where "far" is both spatiotemporal and logical, it's the same old all over the place. Thus if there are non-fallen aliens out there, then either they are protected in localized bubbles of non-fallen universe, or St Paul has it wrong. I find neither convincing, so very likely the entire (visible-to-us) universe is fallen and all potential aliens in it hence as well.

Second, we are not particularly desperate to interpret the parable in this way, are we? It is not like our eyes are finally opened to this part of scripture because we consider it to refer to aliens. Rather, we know several standard interpretations for this parable, and we are just possibly adding yet another meaning. It is of course possible that Christ's parable had this additional layer of meaning, but it is neither necessary nor does it follow out of the text and the times. Whereas in fact our standard interpretations do fit easily into the historical and textual context.

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
God's ideal number of rebels might well have been zero. If he permits one fall, because he made us free, then he might also permit the Klingons to fall, even though it spoils the poetry of having only a single sheep go astray.

That does not work for me. It makes free will something external to the will of God. God has to wait and see what we or the Klingons do, and if it screws up His designs, too bad. Adam was responsible for his actions, since he in fact had free will. But if God had willed the universe to be free of rebels, then it would be free of rebels. There is no such thing as resisting the will of God - not because He's such a powerful being, but because God's will is existence itself. God willed that Adam freely willed his fall. That's mind-bending, but only because God is the Author of reality. If we talk about a human author writing a story, then we have no problem seeing the two levels: one one hand the will of the author, who is responsible for inventing dramatic characters to make an interesting story, on the other hand those dramatic characters within the story, who are in the story responsible for their actions. Otherwise drama would cease to be. If we look at a play of Shakespeare, then it is not helpful to say "the actor does whatever Shakespeare wants". That's true, but ignores the levels involved, and hence does not tell us much.

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
I don't think its the repetition itself that I'd object to, as much as the localisation of the effects of the Incarnation/Resurrection/Ascension. If it needed to happen a billion times that would not (for me) diminish the importance of the story that especially applied to me and to my world. I would, however, feel that the importance was diminished in that I had once thought that one act of God had been enough to bring about a cosmic redemption, and I would have to readjust that to being the redemption of only one planet. Are we disagreeing or just expressing the same point differently here?

I would say that we are ultimately agreeing, because you are contradicting yourself...

Let me add that I see only one strong counter-argument to my thesis of no alien life from scripture: the plan of salvation is clearly ever expanding around a specific center. "God's people" went from one couple to a family to tribes to nation to world, while at the same time retaining a focus on particular people (culminating in a historical human being, Jesus Christ). The interface between the many and the few (or now the one Christ) is provided by layers of representation, which we call "Church" these days. So if there are aliens out there after all, then I expect them to be fallen, and I expect that it is up to us, in particular up to us as Church, to bring salvation to them in the form of Jesus Christ the human Messiah. This is in strict contradiction to the "democratic" view of salvation must people seem to have here. I think that is completely wrong. If there are aliens after all, then Starship Enterprise should be stocked to the rim with Christian missionaries and the Prime Directive is revealed as a work of the devil. If there are aliens, then they will bend their tentacles to Jesus Christ, the God-human.

That said, I think there are no aliens. And that's because God is merciful. For I also think that it is likely correct that the angels fell because of us, as some traditions hold. Basically, Lucifer - foremost angel that he was - could see the Incarnation coming, and he said "You've got to be kidding me. Over my dead spirit!" A human is a Divine Person, and Our Lady is set above all angels, which is just stunning, a bit like humans making a nematode president of the world. I think God made a point, a point important enough to spiritually kill a significant part of His angels, and He is not likely to let more persons burn in hell just because they cannot deal with the outrageous primacy given to humans in salvation - in particular not more corporeal persons, who cannot ever be expected to act with the clarity of incorporeal ones.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
[QB]First, if we do take serious the connection between the fall and death, then we have unequivocal evidence that this is not the case: death is everywhere we look in the universe ... Thus if there are non-fallen aliens out there, then either they are protected in localized bubbles of non-fallen universe, or St Paul has it wrong.

Or, the connection between physical death and fallenness is not as certain as the two options you give would suggest.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Basically, Lucifer - foremost angel that he was - could see the Incarnation coming, and he said "You've got to be kidding me. Over my dead spirit!"

I'm pretty sure I remember a part of the Screwtape Letters which said this, and gave it as reason for the Fall of Lucifer. Of course, Screwtape's take on events is not entirely to be trusted... [Razz]

I'm not quite sure what to make of what you say equating stellar death to the physical death of organisms. My first thought was that they are very different things, as different as nuclear physics and biochemistry. My second was that I rather liked the Narnian imagery. The third was that, if it were true, the Fall of Man actually onotogically effected the transformation of the entire universe, very basic laws of physics included. In fact, it could be said that it destroyed the universe and replaced it with a new one (or at least, placed us in a new one) as a universe without stellar death is one in which the very fundamental laws would be unrecognisable.

I just don't think we have the sort of power to take the universe down with us. I don't think we are cosmically the most significant thing in the entire universe, and that if God loves us, it's because "not a sparrow falls from the branch" rather than because we're the big Kahuna. But I'm not a big fan of anthropic hubris in general. In the absence of factual evidence, this is more about my personal disposition than the way the universe is.

- Chris.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

It was not C.S. Lewis who first thought of Lucifer being enraged by human primacy...

There is a very, very peculiar pain attached to being the only ones. It is a very, very peculiar craving to wish that it be otherwise. We would prefer being eaten by truck-sized cockroaches over being alone. We would prefer the world of Starship Troopers over just us. People often claim that we are looking for companionship among the stars. But giant cockroaches are no companions, and our Avatars are laughably human. Perhaps we are looking for someone to share the blame.

Let's also not forget how hysterically trapped we are. It takes all human ingenuity to even escape the gravity well we call home. The stars? They are not ours. They may as well be candles lit in the sky, for all the chance we have of getting to them.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
First, if we do take serious the connection between the fall and death, then we have unequivocal evidence that this is not the case:

Of course, we don't have to take that connection seriously. Many of us don't.

Besides which, according to Christianity Jesus has already defeated death. Yet we still die. Hm, maybe physical (as opposed to spiritual) death isn't the death the fall is linked to?

quote:
Thus if there are non-fallen aliens out there, then either they are protected in localized bubbles of non-fallen universe, or St Paul has it wrong.

Even accepting that the fall and death are inextricably connected (which I don't), it's not that hard a concept to think that one silly little fallen human got something wrong.

quote:
There is no such thing as resisting the will of God - not because He's such a powerful being, but because God's will is existence itself. God willed that Adam freely willed his fall. That's mind-bending, but only because God is the Author of reality. If we talk about a human author writing a story, then we have no problem seeing the two levels: one one hand the will of the author, who is responsible for inventing dramatic characters to make an interesting story, on the other hand those dramatic characters within the story, who are in the story responsible for their actions. Otherwise drama would cease to be. If we look at a play of Shakespeare, then it is not helpful to say "the actor does whatever Shakespeare wants". That's true, but ignores the levels involved, and hence does not tell us much.

That's only the case because the characters in a play or novel aren't really real. The only way your comparison works is if we are as real to God as characters in a book are to the author, and every reading of Christianity I know of says we're far more that that to Him.

quote:
So if there are aliens out there after all, then I expect them to be fallen, and I expect that it is up to us, in particular up to us as Church, to bring salvation to them in the form of Jesus Christ the human Messiah.

This is in strict contradiction to the "democratic" view of salvation must people seem to have here. I think that is completely wrong. If there are aliens after all, then Starship Enterprise should be stocked to the rim with Christian missionaries and the Prime Directive is revealed as a work of the devil. If there are aliens, then they will bend their tentacles to Jesus Christ, the God-human.

My god, the arrogance is blinding.

Though I genuinely do believe that you'd rather lead a Holy Crusade across the cosmos than allow any puative ETI to change your dearly-held beliefs.

quote:
That said, I think there are no aliens. And that's because God is merciful. For I also think that it is likely correct that the angels fell because of us, as some traditions hold. Basically, Lucifer - foremost angel that he was - could see the Incarnation coming, and he said "You've got to be kidding me. Over my dead spirit!" A human is a Divine Person, and Our Lady is set above all angels, which is just stunning, a bit like humans making a nematode president of the world. I think God made a point, a point important enough to spiritually kill a significant part of His angels, and He is not likely to let more persons burn in hell just because they cannot deal with the outrageous primacy given to humans in salvation - in particular not more corporeal persons, who cannot ever be expected to act with the clarity of incorporeal ones.

And you know what? I also genuinely believe that you'd rather burn in Hell than change your dearly-held beliefs to fit any new facts that came about. I mean, look at what you've just posted: you're identifying with the attitude displayed by Lucifer!

It's truly scary that your beliefs are more important to you than the truth. Alright, so while that truth is purely hypothetical either one of us could be wrong, but somehow I sense that were ETI proved to exist you'd still choose to cling to your worldview, however incorrect it had been proved to be.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
It was not C.S. Lewis who first thought of Lucifer being enraged by human primacy...

No - but in any case, that wasn't quite the point that Lewis was making:

quote:
Originally written by Screwtape in a PM to Wormwood:
"When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage the Enemy [God] freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father [Lucifer] very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation... It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father's disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of heaven."

I read this as Lucifer protesting against the profligacy of Divine disinterested love rather than a protest about humanity being promoted over his head. I can see how you get that from Catholic theology, but I don't think that was what Lewis said. However one reads it, it still stands as an example of the creation of man occasioning the fall of Lucifer (although Lewis' Interplanetary Trilogy "theology" has Lucifer as the ruling spirit of Earth only, so no universe-wide fall there).

quote:
Let's also not forget how hysterically trapped we are. It takes all human ingenuity to even escape the gravity well we call home. The stars? They are not ours. They may as well be candles lit in the sky, for all the chance we have of getting to them.

Yes, I agree. Look how much effort it took us to get to the moon - then consider that that was only done as a propaganda blow against a Cold War enemy. I don't think we have the motivation or the capability, and I see no sign of either changing outside of SF. The distances involved make a pretty good prison wall (Cygnus Alpha?).

- Chris.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Besides which, according to Christianity Jesus has already defeated death. Yet we still die. Hm, maybe physical (as opposed to spiritual) death isn't the death the fall is linked to?

Or maybe Christ hasn't come again yet, and this isn't New Creation, but the old.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
it's not that hard a concept to think that one silly little fallen human got something wrong.

I happen to believe that scripture was inspired by God. That leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding, of course, and maybe I'm misunderstanding St Paul. However, you have not argued that. Instead you simply assert that the letters of St Paul contain an actual falsehood concerning an important teaching about faith. I cannot believe that, sorry.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
That's only the case because the characters in a play or novel aren't really real. The only way your comparison works is if we are as real to God as characters in a book are to the author, and every reading of Christianity I know of says we're far more that that to Him.

We are, of course, much less real compared to God than characters of fiction compared to their human author. For once written and published, fictional characters do not depend on their human author anymore. Others can make them come alive by reading the story. And these characters can even develop a kind of life of their own, by influencing other humans. However, if God ceases to support our being, then we instantly are no more. And there is nobody but God for us to live in, since there are no gods beside Him. We are nothing held in existence by the explicit and continuous will of God alone. God has chosen to maintain this figment of His imagination for ever. And that is indeed greater than what a human author does...

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
My god, the arrogance is blinding. Though I genuinely do believe that you'd rather lead a Holy Crusade across the cosmos than allow any puative ETI to change your dearly-held beliefs.

Do you have any factual rationale for calling me arrogant here? No, of course not. We have no facts on aliens, much less on God's will for aliens. The only thing you have is some ideology in your head that suggests that democracy is the ultimate good, therefore salvation must be organized democratically, and since aliens are "people" of some kind, they must participate equally in salvation. Well, news flash, not once in salvation history has God acted according to you ideology. Not once. Salvation comes from the Jews, in fact, ultimately just from one particular 1stC Palestine Jew. So, are you going to complain to God that He isn't following your democratic ideology? How arrogant is that?

As for Holy Crusades, I'm not sure where you are getting that from. Unless perhaps if you consider all missionary activity to be "crusading". In which case - oh yes, I'm all for such "crusading". In fact, as far as earth itself is concerned I think lots of such activity is still needed, because I'm told not everybody is Christian (and indeed Roman Catholic...) yet. Clearly this is not an acceptable state to leave humanity in.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
And you know what? I also genuinely believe that you'd rather burn in Hell than change your dearly-held beliefs to fit any new facts that came about. I mean, look at what you've just posted: you're identifying with the attitude displayed by Lucifer!

You heap deadly insult on utter bullshit. I've already said what I would do if aliens were discovered: I would think hard about the Incarnation, quite possibly leaving the Church over my conclusions. How that supports your claims of inflexibility I do not know. Me thinks you confuse intensity with inflexibility, as if only the lukewarm could change. I have changed religion (not denomination) twice in the last ten years. However, I have no time for half measures. And where the heck do you see anything remotely like Lucifer's attitude in what I say? If God would happen to reveal His plans to me, I would bow to them without the slightest hesitation. Yet if God only reveals to me that there are aliens, then it is still up to me to come to some conclusion what that means. I'm talking here about that latter case.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
It's truly scary that your beliefs are more important to you than the truth. Alright, so while that truth is purely hypothetical either one of us could be wrong, but somehow I sense that were ETI proved to exist you'd still choose to cling to your worldview, however incorrect it had been proved to be.

I'm going to look at an alien and claim that it does not exist, or what? I feel insulted personally and professionally by this. I'm a natural scientist, and I consider that to be more than a job. And as far as Christianity is concerned, I'm essentially a Thomist. Thomists face many criticisms, for sure, but that they are not interested in intellectual truth is a new one. Really. And if it were so, I would be Thomist no longer...

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
That's only the case because the characters in a play or novel aren't really real. The only way your comparison works is if we are as real to God as characters in a book are to the author, and every reading of Christianity I know of says we're far more that that to Him.
We are, of course, much less real compared to God than characters of fiction compared to their human author. For once written and published, fictional characters do not depend on their human author anymore.

Those are two quite different meanings of "real." You're guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Those are two quite different meanings of "real." You're guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.

Firstly, we were discussing an analogy. Secondly, I was defining how reality can be graded. Thirdly, you are not helping.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

Just stumbled (via Boing Boing) on a topical interview Senior astronomer Seth Shostak on the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence". It is actually quite good, thanks to a reporter actually doing her job... Some snips:

quote:
BABA: What makes you so sure there is extraterrestrial life - that might be a very basic question, but what evidence, to you, is most compelling?

SHOSTAK: Well, there isn't any evidence of extraterrestrial life, compelling evidence, yet; in fact, the bottom line is, there isn't - we haven't found ET and frankly, we haven't found pond scum. We haven't found dead pond scum. ...

But if you found life on Mars then you would know that life is just some sort of cosmic infection, it's not something miraculous because look, two worlds have it, so there must be many more.

...

BABA: So to me, it sounds like, since we haven't yet found evidence, as you're saying, of alien life, that this search may actually be driven by a belief that there's life out there, rather than scientific proof. Which to me would seem ironic, that the scientists, many of whom consider faith and belief to be non-scientific values, are throwing all of this behind a belief rather than science. Has anyone said that to you before?

I don't report his answer to the last question, because I think in a deeper sense he answered it above, second quoted paragraph.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Bliss Mr. B. Sorry Doctor B. Bliss.

Their faith - materialism - refutes itself and yet they still believe.

Touching isn't it ?

[ 16. August 2010, 18:44: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

It's a bit late in the thread to be saying "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But it seems to be necessary.

- Chris.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Sophistry. Get REAL. WHERE ARE THEY THEN ? You'll be telling us that you can't prove a negative next. I seem to recall Alan doing that some years ago without a TRACE of irony.

Intellect is no defense against disposition.

This is ALLLLL about the game of rhetoric and I'm so far ahead it's embarrassing.

To fanatically, irrationally believe that there ARE aliens, that there IS ET pond scum (or was: that those microscopic iron nodules in Martian (ooh, and the METHANE!!!) meteorites could ONLY have been made by life NOT from Earth), that the more planets whose atmospheres are anoxic means we're ever closer to detecting the ones that aren't because there HAS to be, that there IS only, life by materialism is ... strange, ESPECIALLY in theists.

It's not strange at all of course. Just amusing, that in the the rebellious desperation to rationalize and liberalize God away from being anything like the somewhat demanding one of the narrative, rationalization and liberalism fail.

[ 16. August 2010, 21:31: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

You're right, Martin. you are ahead on rhetoric [Razz]

.

- Chris.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Well I WAS!

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
You'll be telling us that you can't prove a negative next. I seem to recall Alan doing that some years ago without a TRACE of irony.

Yes, science can no more prove a hypothesis is false than it can prove it to be true. Science can significantly alter the odds of a hypothesis being true or false.

Fermi's Paradox simply states that if you take a hypothesis that leads to the conclusion that intelligent life is (relatively) common and persistent then the evidence we have (ie: no ET visitors or radio signals) makes the truth of that hypothesis less likely. You can't prove from the observation that we've had no ET visitors that therefore there's no ET - because ET may call in tomorrow. Likewise, if we have an ET visitor that doesn't mean that ETI is common - we may be the only other life they've found as well.

Basically, the observational data set we have available is too small to conclude very much, except that the simpler hypotheses that conclude ETI is common are likely to be faulty somewhere by the fact that they aren't here.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I happen to believe that scripture was inspired by God. That leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding, of course, and maybe I'm misunderstanding St Paul. However, you have not argued that. Instead you simply assert that the letters of St Paul contain an actual falsehood concerning an important teaching about faith. I cannot believe that, sorry.

I can, quite easily. I can even believe it while still believing that scripture was (is) inspired by God.

All it requires is human free will, and human fallibility.

quote:
God has chosen to maintain this figment of His imagination for ever. And that is indeed greater than what a human author does...

So you don't think we're actually any more real to God than characters in a book are to the author? Just that in this case the author is much more attached to his work than usual?

quote:
Do you have any factual rationale for calling me arrogant here? No, of course not. We have no facts on aliens, much less on God's will for aliens. The only thing you have is some ideology in your head that suggests that democracy is the ultimate good, therefore salvation must be organized democratically, and since aliens are "people" of some kind, they must participate equally in salvation.

And the only thing you have is some ideology that suggests that your personal understanding of the incarnation is 100% correct, therefore if aliens exist they must be converted.

quote:
Well, news flash, not once in salvation history has God acted according to you ideology.

Not once in salvation history? We have only slightly more evidence for that than we do for aliens, and it's all made up of one book that, regardless of inspiration, was written by fallible humans.

quote:
Not once. Salvation comes from the Jews, in fact, ultimately just from one particular 1stC Palestine Jew.

Or so says that book, which was written by... Jews.

quote:
So, are you going to complain to God that He isn't following your democratic ideology? How arrogant is that?

I won't have to.

quote:
As for Holy Crusades, I'm not sure where you are getting that from. Unless perhaps if you consider all missionary activity to be "crusading". In which case - oh yes, I'm all for such "crusading". In fact, as far as earth itself is concerned I think lots of such activity is still needed, because I'm told not everybody is Christian (and indeed Roman Catholic...) yet. Clearly this is not an acceptable state to leave humanity in.

I think those few pockets of humanity that haven't been exposed to Christianity are lucky. But then, I've never felt the need to convert everyone else in the world (and/or cosmos) to my beliefs. Live and let live, I say.

quote:
I've already said what I would do if aliens were discovered: I would think hard about the Incarnation, quite possibly leaving the Church over my conclusions. How that supports your claims of inflexibility I do not know.

Inflexibility means not being able to bend without breaking. Which is exactly what you describe!

quote:
Me thinks you confuse intensity with inflexibility, as if only the lukewarm could change. I have changed religion (not denomination) twice in the last ten years.

Yes, but when you change it's a complete dscarding of the previous and a complete uptake of the new. What's wrong with simply adapting ones xisting beliefs to fit new information?

I mean, OK I can accept that aliens may change your beliefs about the incarnation. But that doesn't make everything else in Christianity wrong as well! It's not all or nothing!

quote:
However, I have no time for half measures.

Ah right. It is all or nothing.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Alan, you are a nuclear physicist. I am a pleb on the bus. But again you miss the irony. Or don't deign to stoop. Tell me you see it. Do. Please.

You don't do you ? Otherwise you wouldn't trot out that all it takes is one alien to drop in tomorrow.

Your little treatise on probability doesn't score well on the rhetorical front and reveals your disposition and intellectual inadequacies.

And I am POND SCUM saying that to a nuclear physicist. Wait till I get back at IngoB who's even smarter than you! Like you he believes in Augustine's faceless omnibot. Bender without the three layers of teeth and with every Planck tick of eternity spooled on the floor of his chest. Just a tad unparsimoniously. Unscientifically.

You MUST stoop to conquer, Alan.

You have no FEELING, no PATHOS - Ingo has some - in your narrow LOGOS for the deafening silence of the universe. Your logos is suspiciously, Aspergersesquely unwowed. Unspooked. I bet your frontal lobes just aren't polarized like poor old Dawkins' aren't.

There's a retired NASA rocket scientist on Premier, I mean he really IS savant, but not you, surely ? You're a liberal for heaven's sake.

Come on man, you can wipe the floor with me, we've been doing this kind of thing for over ten years ("That's what they call a decade.", the movie?).

My appeal is to incredulity, surely; which we ALL know is intellectually invalid. Because that's the consensus. That's 'mere' pathos. Logos trumps pathos, surely ?

I agree ! When it suits me. And it does.

You CAN'T do strong uniformitarianism, which is your unparsimonious, awkward, stubborn, rebellious disposition, I understand that. You're a rationalist and can't do God's pragmatism. Hmmm. VERY Aspergers.

And you CAN'T do it over deep time. That is intriguing. That's how Spock defeated Khan. With one less dimension of course.

The sample is 14 GY old. The local speck of it has a stellar population of easily two hundred thousand million stars. A hundred then. With a trillion planets, ten trillion moons. Easy. All within 75,000 LY. 3/4 of a million years at 0.1 c. 4% - a mere 400,000,000,000 - within 10,000 LY, 100,000 years.

Extrasolar planetary discovery has gone from 0 to 100 a year, exponentially, for 20 years. That's 1000 a YEAR in 20 years time. 10,000 if you like.

I should still be alive then and I wager you ANYTHING you name that I can possibly deliver that NONE of those 10,000 - 100,000 planets will have an oxygen atmosphere.

How rare does rare have to be and still be strongly uniformitarian ?

A purely theoretical question to you as you don't do strong uniformitarianism, which is most unparsimonious of you. Most unscientific.

C'mon Al, I WANT the rigour. I want my house of cards based on my polarized frontal lobe disposition to fall.

Or is the answer intellectualist ? Pond scum just can't see ? It's all in the Bayesian analysis, the sentential logic ? I'm not entitled to an answer as I haven't done the math ? QED.

Your man Enrico understood. But then again, he really was smart. NOTHING got in the way.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Your little treatise on probability doesn't score well on the rhetorical front and reveals your disposition and intellectual inadequacies.

Cresswell? Intellectually inadequate? In other news, black is white and up is down. Film at 11.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard, in reply to Alan:
You CAN'T do strong uniformitarianism, which is your unparsimonious, awkward, stubborn, rebellious disposition, I understand that. You're a rationalist and can't do God's pragmatism. Hmmm. VERY Aspergers.

Martin, I'm not trying to have a dig here, but I genuinely can't understand what you mean by "strong uniformitarianism," and how it might relate to Alan's definition of it on the previous page. I can't see how any principle of uniformity does what you claim of it. Could you give us poor mortals a definition of what you mean by it? I feel we're talking past each other here.

Also, could you comment on the fact that your argument seems to assume that at least a proportion of ET civilisations will go on to develop god-like SF technology? An alternative hypothesis would be that such technology is all a pipe dream, and that civilisations never reach out into space much more than we've done before destroying themselves in resource wars or learning to live within their planetary means - which may preclude a lot of space travel.

I know we're in the realm of pure personal preference here, but I don't understand why you'd prefer that SF technology is possible, but we're alone, rather than allow it for a flight of fantasy and leave the possibility of ET races open. Is it just the theological considerations, or do you seriously think humanity will eventually build Dyson spheres, ringworlds, and all that glorious stuff?

- Chris.

PS: I do wish you'd leave off calling Alan 'unscientific.' If he was claiming ET must exist the mud might stick, but pointing out that you shouldn't make definite statements on the basis of a lack of evidence seems to be very scientific to me.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Ess 'n' Emm.

Go wan, go wan, go wan. Stick a spade in me head and be done with it.

Alan is good and pure and true, logos through and through.

He's ABSOLUTELY right and so are you to defend him.

So ?

I'm right too. Using logos. And I'm a nasty piece of work. Old and stupid and insanely self-confident. This is all a GAME Ess 'n' Emm.

My flights of fancy are NOT fantasy. Don't break the laws of physics. We can get to the nearest stars NOW within decades. So we will. Our probes will. Your great grandchildren will see other worlds. Computing power and a 200 million mile diameter array of Hubbles will make the voyages unnecessary hubris I'm sure.

Economic growth, creeping technology (growing diamonds and/or bucky tubes from a thousand clicks out down to the surface) will make us masters of the solar system unless eschatology has any basis. Or unless Islam wins.

Strong uniformitarianism means we are AVERAGE. What YOU see out your window is AVERAGE. YOU are part of the average. Where there is average there is always extreme. Older. Smarter.

It won't mean that to Alan. So ?

And I want me dinner and 'ave ter fone me bird.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

And Ess 'n' Emm. Don't feel sorry for Alan.

He's about the second smartest human being you will ever encounter. IngoB is the first.

I am pond scum and I'm the ONLY one here flogging this all but dead horse. Ever. There's no need for you to be Nietzsche (even though we're the same age) and come and cuddle it. I'm in a minority of ONE. Nobody agrees with me, It's my only pleasure. And I'm vicious and I'm DUMB. Mediocre. 3rd rate.

Looking for orthodoxy, I ask you. I mean, come on, I have ZERO credibility as I ACTUALLY entertain (which is a bit of an understatement) the validity if not the veracity of Genesis in ALL regards (careful now, I'm NOT a letterist). I'm a laughing stock. And that is overrating myself. A toothless gnat.

Of course NONE of that doesn't mean I'm right.

And that Alan, with whom I go wayyyyy back on this, is able to actually make a FULL, rhetorical if not antithetical case for God being bound by materialism.

Which is one step away from the Calvinist insanity of Him being bound by His arbitrary, meaningless sovereignty, not surprisingly as they have the same higly infectious Greek pagan roots.

[Devil]

This thread will just dry up if you don't pick at it.

But it will reincarnate and I'll be there.

Older, dumber, nastier.

[ 17. August 2010, 21:23: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

Martin,

I don't think you're as dumb as you make out. Eccentric and often enigmatic, certainly, but that's part of what makes your contributions to discussions here so interesting.

OK, I'm going to take a step back to Fermi and his 'paradox'. It was something he thought up over lunch following a chat about UFOs on the walk to the canteen. He'd made a few mental calculations based on some approximations (and, one thing Fermi was very good at was getting a grasp of the general principles of something and making quick approximations that were almost always not too far off), and reached the conclusion that if the Earth is typical then ET should have been here by now ... no ET, hence "where are they?" and the paradox.

But, his 'paradox' is only a paradox if all his assumptions were basically correct. Those assumptions include that the Earth is fairly typical (which is, I guess, what you're meaning by "strong uniformitarianism"), that the human desire to explore is going to be shared by a large proportion of any ETIs etc. If we remove those assumptions then the paradox disappears. If the Earth isn't typical and sits at an extreme end of the spectrum of possible planets (obviously the habitable end of the spectrum) then the number of potential ETIs from Drake drops to something very small. If the vast majority of ETIs are happy to just potter about on their own world without exploring beyond their gravity well, then the chances of one of them coming here is also very much lower. In both cases, the 'paradox' simply vanishes.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Absolutely near perfect Alan (damn your gracious eyes by the way), see, I told you you were smart.

Yes that is exactly what I mean by strong uniformitarianism (SU), that is a premiss I have always fessed up to.

If we posit SU, then the paradox stands. Why would we not ? Fermi implicitly did.

What do we have to do to Drake, maintaining SU materialism, to duck The Great Silence ?

I must dig up the New Scientist article explored by Stephen Baxter in Time, that posits why NOW - us looking out of the window NOW - is important which supports SU.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Ooh, and the exploratory urge is SU of course. And if it weren't, how non-SU rare would it have to be to explain what we see ? We need a new Drake with that coefficient.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
If we posit SU, then the paradox stands. Why would we not ?

Why would we? For a start, the extrasolar planets we've discovered so far* point to the Earth being very much not typical.

Besides which, there's no reason to suppose that humanity itself is in any way typical. We may be far in advance of every other civilisation, or we may be so far behind the rest that we can't even percieve their existence. The assumption that if life out there exists it must be more advanced than us is as insupportable as the assumption that we're typical in the first place!

*= which isn't necessarily a good sample to be using, since our limited detection ability may well be artificially selecting for gas giants.

Posted by Myrrh (# 11483) on :

Because we like being crepes and not blinis.

Myrrh

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
If we posit SU, then the paradox stands. Why would we not ? Fermi implicitly did.

If we posit SU, that the Earth and humanity are typical, then the obvious conclusion (which Fermi reached) is that there are a large number of ET civilisations - many older and more technologically advanced than ourselves. And, that even with conceivable technology (eg: generation ships) enough of those civilisations would have spread out to explore and colonise the galaxy that the chances of one or more civilisation having already visited Earth is almost certainty. The 'paradox' is that there's no evidence of any ET visitors to Earth - assuming that they're not just playing games buzzing individuals in lonely areas and would, instead, make their presence very clear.

A scientist faced with having a hypothesis that predicts something to happen with almost certainty yet finding no evidence for that result happeing would examine the hypothesis. You can tweak the Drake equation with extensions to cover civilisation spread, but any reasonable numbers in the parameters will result in large numbers of ET civilisations if you hold onto the "strong uniformitarian" position that the Earth and humanity are typical. It's only if you posit that the Earth and humanity are atypical, and that intelligent life is very unusual in the universe, that you can explain the observed absence of ET visitors on Earth. In terms of the Drake Equation you need to set one or more of the parameters as very low, the obvious candidates are:

proportion of planets that develop life (Drake had that as 2 per solar system - which would only make us typical if there was life on Mars, Titan etc as well)
proportion of planets with life that develop intelligence (Drake had that as unity - once life starts it will inevitably result in intelligence. Though, if we're typical then that's inconsistent with the chances of life starting he'd estimated - though there's an outside chance that there is life on another planet in our solar system on only one has that progressed to intelligence - ie: if he wants to have 2 planets per system developing life he needs to have half of those going onto develop intelligence)
proportion of intelligent civilisations that seek contact with other intelligences. IIRC Drake had that at 10% ... though again, if Earth is typical then that should be much higher.
Lifetime of a communicating civilisation. Drake had this at 10,000 years. Which is significantly longer than the few decades we've been capable and (more or less) willing to attempt communication. A very short communcating time (ie <500 years) would significantly reduce the number of civilisations attempting communication at any one time

But, and here's the rub, if you set the proportion of planets that develop life or intelligence very small then you can only do that by rejecting the notion that Earth is typical.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
But, and here's the rub, if you set the proportion of planets that develop life or intelligence very small then you can only do that by rejecting the notion that Earth is typical.

Indeed. SU is the hypothesis, "tested" by the thought experiment of the Drake equation, and the hypothesis is rejected. Modus tollens, and all that.

Martin: as you believe that Earth is unique, you must also reject SU. Why do you think everyone else should cleave to it so tightly?

- Chris.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Thanks again Alan.

If SU materialism IS operational then we're missing something that is exterminating life. Gamma-ray bursters. Huge, rare ones, sterilizing thousands of cubic parsecs at a time. As explored by Stephen Baxter in Space. They have to be rare as we just don't see them.

Where are their fossils ? They are imparsimonious AND weakly uniformitarian.

Chris

I can't possibly reject SU: as soon the Earth could support life, it did. And SU is parsimonious with that.

So what 'has' to give is materialism is the explanation of life, which is then pivotal to what comes before: matter and after: mind.

That breaks Occam's razor once vertically - with God - and it would seem that materialists would rather it shatter infinitely horizontally.

If life is not automatic, emergent, inevitable then neither, necessarily, are universes or consciousnesses. If life IS emergent then material is far more likely, more parsimoniously to be eternal and mind is similarly probably emergent from life.

If life were emergent ... where are they then ?!

And round we go.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I can't possibly reject SU: as soon the Earth could support life, it did. And SU is parsimonious with that.

With only one sample, we can't really say very much. Now, if we get to Mars and find conclusive evidence that life started there independently (even if now extinct), and even more so if we find life on Titan or elsewhere in the solar system, then the parameter in Drake about life emerging will be high - that effectively any near-Earth sized object in the habitable zone of a star would devlop life. On the other hand, on the evidence we might have (assuming evidence for life elsewhere in the solar system) there's also a reasonably high probability of that life being extinguished as planetary conditions change.

On the other hand, from our single sample, it takes a long time for life to move from very simple to more complex multi-cellular. And, a while to move from there to intelligence. That would suggest a low probability of life developing intelligence, even in a SU worldview.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

With SU one is enough.

And the sample ain't one no more:

HD 209458b, provisionally nicknamed Osiris
HD 189733 b
HR 8799c

in 10 years.

That's planets with atmosphere's we've analyzed.

That will exponentially accelerate.

And by SU, 3 GY to the Cambrian is average. So there will be older, quicker evolution.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

If you accept the SU conjecture, then a sample of one world may be enough. It means that you can estimate average values for the Drake parameters on the assumption that the Earth is (approximately) average. But, an average by itself tells you nothing about the distribution.

Take the time for multi-cellular life to appear. On Earth than was 3-3.5 billion years after the first life appeared. That average (if it is an average) tells us nothing about what the shortest time between first life and multi-cellular life is, except that it must be less than 3 billion years. Nor does it tell us how long life can remain at the single cell stage and never progress to multi-cellular forms, or indeed whether some planets will have life that never progresses to multi-cellular forms. And, that's without even considering whether planets might produce simple life forms, but all life is then made extinct relatively quickly (which, if there ever was life on Mars would appear to have been the case there).

You can make similar arguments about the time it takes life to emerge at all. On Earth a mere 0.5 billion years after planetary formation. How much faster could it have been? How much slower could it have been?

SU simply doesn't provide an answer to these questions. Indeed, the questions can never be answered without detailed study of other planetary systems (of the sort that would be impossible without teams of scientists visiting them - or ET visitors coming here and telling us about their home world and others they've visited). The biggest flaw with SU is that it starts with an assumption about a part of the answer (what the average is), and assumes that that is sufficient to proceed. Without a more complete answer we can't even assess whether SU is right and we are "average".

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
If you accept the SU conjecture, then a sample of one world may be enough. It means that you can estimate average values for the Drake parameters on the assumption that the Earth is (approximately) average.

But that's one hell of an assumption to make, especially as there's no evidence whatsoever to support it. There's no more reason to think we're average than there is to think we're top (or bottom) of the class.

I cannot accept Fermi's Paradox, because I just cannot get past the huge leap of faith that assuming that we're so average requires. And without that assumption, the whole premise falls to pieces.

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I can't possibly reject SU: as soon the Earth could support life, it did. And SU is parsimonious with that.

One of the biggest problems with the Drake equation is that while we've got a pretty good value for one of the factors (rate of star formation) and are getting more data all the time on a second (fraction of stars that have planets), the remaining five factors are wild guesses. Even worse, they're wild guesses about biology usually made by astronomers or physicists with no special understanding of biology. Garbage in, garbage out.

For me the biggest misestimation is the probability of the formation of intelligent life, which seems to be quite low given the history of our own world. [insert joke here] There are a lot of adaptations that arise independently over and over again; certain camoflage patterns, wings, the similarities between a mammalian and cephalopodian eye, etc. In other words, these adaptations are both widely useful and arise fairly easily. Human-level intelligence does not seem to fall in this category. In the four billion year history of life on Earth (and the ~500 million year history of multicellular life), human-level intelligence has developed exactly once, in one genus of one particular lineage. This indicates that the development of that level of intelligence is both highly unusual and quite possibly contingent. It may also indicate that whatever the early contingent factors are for the development of intelligence, they're likely either evolutionarily neutral or slightly disadvantageous.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

Another enormous gap in the Drake equation but much more in the popular interpretation of it is the absence of any sense of time. Even if the figures put in were correct all they would indicate is the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that would exist in the Milky Way at some point during the whole of its existence. But the chances are that through an overwhelming proportion of the Milky Way's existence there would be none.

Just taking one of the equation's factors and applying it to Earth illustrates the point: the fraction of planets that develop life that then go one to develop intelligent life. Taking a generous interpretation of intelligence in human evolution perhaps we could place Earth in the intelligent life tally for the last 2 million years. This compares to the 4 billion minus 2 million that Earth was in the non-intelligent category. I.e. a c.99.95% history of unintelligence. It shifts the odds considerably against contemporaneity.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
Another enormous gap in the Drake equation but much more in the popular interpretation of it is the absence of any sense of time. Even if the figures put in were correct all they would indicate is the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that would exist in the Milky Way at some point during the whole of its existence. But the chances are that through an overwhelming proportion of the Milky Way's existence there would be none.

Actually, the Drake equation produces an estimate (with enormous uncertainties) of the number of civilisations currently existing in the galaxy seeking to communicate. The equation has a time element. With his initial estimates, Drake concluded that at the moment there are 10 civilisations in the galaxy with the technology to send an interstellar message and the desire to do so. The equation would hold true at most times ... 500 million years ago, or in 500 million years there would still be 10 civilisations in the galaxy trying to communicate (just not necessarily the same ones).

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Weak uniformitarianism: materialism's god of the gaps.

The drinks are on me at The Winged Boar the day an oxygen world is detected.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
With SU one is enough.

And the sample ain't one no more:

HD 209458b, provisionally nicknamed Osiris
HD 189733 b
HR 8799c

in 10 years.

That's planets with atmosphere's we've analyzed.

Unsurprisingly, all these planets are bigger than Jupiter, larger things being easier to spot. This will result in a systematic bias against spotting Earth-like planets, unfortunately.

Osiris is a gas giant orbiting much closer than Mercury is to Sol, with a surface temperature estimated at 1000C.
HD 189733 b is another hot Jovian
HR 8799 c is another gas giant massing 7-13 times Jupiter.

Unless we can start seeing some roughly Earth-similar planets, it's a bit early to start taking bets. Apparently there are "around 5,000 [stars] that have been estimated to be located 100 ly of Earth, [identified] as the best nearby candidates for hosting complex Earth-type life" (source). Outside of 100 light years is probably too distant to have a chance of seeing anything. So our sample size is dropping alarmingly, and we haven't detected any Earth-type extrasolar planets yet. Keep the champagne on ice [Razz]

.

- Chris.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

All true Chris.

I'm not optimistic at all that we'll ever spend the trillions necessary for a Moonbase to start massive engineering in space (maglev launching Lunar ore for smelting in space by photo-electrolysis, capturing anti-matter on the Lunar surface for zipping about the Solar System): no space elevator, no fleet of Daedalus probes, no asteroid capture, no O'Neill Halo, no terraforming Mars, Venus. Titan. The other gas giant moons. We won't even build vast photomultipliers, optical phased arrays.

Energy security and the clash of cultures is going to dissipate us. If eschatology has any teeth it will do more than that.

The need for energy may force us to industrialize near space. But not until we've paved the deserts with photovoltaics, turned all of the rain forests and wetlands to palm oil and sugar production. Built a quarter of a million windmills in Britain alone.

Unless, unlikelily, our present limited technological momentum does actually detect an oxygen world, which is currently + 100 years impossible, or we do get an ET signal from over a 1,000 LY (lased nuke) even with SU (20,000 concurrent civilizations) or even more unlikely a probe from an expanding civilization arrives. Or something in-between like A For Andromeda or Contact.

In which case we'd launch an Orion within a decade.

Whatever we need to end the doubt, tantalizingly, suspiciously, won't happen.

So you guys can carry on being materialists.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
First, if we do take serious the connection between the fall and death, then we have unequivocal evidence that this is not the case: death is everywhere we look in the universe, and given finite light speed, death is there at all times. [...] Thus if there are non-fallen aliens out there, then either they are protected in localized bubbles of non-fallen universe, or St Paul has it wrong. I find neither convincing, so very likely the entire (visible-to-us) universe is fallen and all potential aliens in it hence as well.

I agree that the link between the fall (sin) and death needs to be taken seriously. But if we are assuming an actual historical fall (not necessarily a literalistic interpretation of Genesis, but at the very least some originally innocent first human or population of humans who by deliberate fault disobeyed God), then we also have to postulate from what we know from the sciences that there was death – of individuals, species, planets and stars, long before there was a putative ‘first man’ and certainly before there was a first human sin.

That’s not in the least fatal to a Christian world-view. It might be that Adam’s sin was so serious that it worked outwards and backwards in time and space to touch the whole of creation. It might be that those things were caused by an earlier angelic fall. It might be that mere physical death required for the formation of planets and the origin of species would not have involved conscious suffering and would not have been a moral evil. It might be that sentient life would have been miraculously preserved from its effects, or would have been so formed as to have accepted them as a necessary and joyful transition. I’m not saying that any particular one of those convinces me – my point is that there is a whole range of possible ways of reconciling a cosmos that appears broken and an unfallen rational creation within it.

And if we grant that, then there is no necessary objection to the Klingons continuing unfallen even though the humans did not. Both races start off guiltless in a universe which knows death. The defection of either from God’s service might taint the whole (and St Paul has it right) but the mere fact of a universe observably subjected to mortality is not a bar to there being innocent intelligences, because (if the Christian account is true) we know that there was at least one, once.

quote:
Second, we are not particularly desperate to interpret the parable [of the lost sheep] in this way, are we? It is not like our eyes are finally opened to this part of scripture because we consider it to refer to aliens. Rather, we know several standard interpretations for this parable, and we are just possibly adding yet another meaning. It is of course possible that Christ's parable had this additional layer of meaning, but it is neither necessary nor does it follow out of the text and the times. Whereas in fact our standard interpretations do fit easily into the historical and textual context.

Agree entirely. The point was that a ‘one fallen race’ model is not obviously contrary to the way God works, and not that this was what the parable means.

quote:
That does not work for me. It makes free will something external to the will of God. God has to wait and see what we or the Klingons do, and if it screws up His designs, too bad. Adam was responsible for his actions, since he in fact had free will. But if God had willed the universe to be free of rebels, then it would be free of rebels. There is no such thing as resisting the will of God - not because He's such a powerful being, but because God's will is existence itself. God willed that Adam freely willed his fall. That's mind-bending, but only because God is the Author of reality.

I think it mind-bending, and true as far as it goes, but I would add my conviction that Adam could have done otherwise. His fall was not scripted. God made him knowing (obviously) what he would freely do, but his fall was genuinely free.

And therefore I think that if God had it in mind to make the Klingons under the same conditions as he made us, they also had a genuinely free choice. If they were going to choose to rebel, God could have written them out of the script altogether, and never made them, but he could not have made them free, capable of falling, and scripted never to fall.

quote:
I would say that we are ultimately agreeing, because you are contradicting yourself...

I’m glad we have some common ground in the idea of a once-and-for-all Incarnation with cosmic redemptive effects.

I readily acknowledge that the idea of a universal salvation event does not sit very easily with the purely local effects of the first sin, and that the idea of one sentient race only being made, rebelling, and spoiling the whole is a better fit. That’s why I think that the existence of aliens would raise difficult questions. I don’t think it reaches the level of self-contradiction.

It would, in my view, be no more of a difficulty than the point you make above, that Adam both freely sinned, AND that he could do nothing outside God’s will. It seems to me that if we encountered other intelligences, and had to fit them into the story of a salvation which is the story of our race but which somehow involves all creation, there might well be things that we simply would not know. The fact that we would not know would not, for me, be enough to reject the truth of a faith that I had already accepted for good reasons.

quote:
Let me add that I see only one strong counter-argument to my thesis of no alien life from scripture: the plan of salvation is clearly ever expanding around a specific center. [...]
That said, I think there are no aliens. And that's because God is merciful. ... I think God made a point, a point important enough to spiritually kill a significant part of His angels, and He is not likely to let more persons burn in hell just because they cannot deal with the outrageous primacy given to humans in salvation - in particular not more corporeal persons, who cannot ever be expected to act with the clarity of incorporeal ones.

That God permits the damnation of any creature is a problem for any form of Christianity except universalism*. I don’t think that the answer can be that God thought the creation and exaltation of humanity worth a certain fixed number of souls in torment but no more – if in principle the existence of Hell at all is a price worth paying for whatever final state God has in mind, it seems to me that the (non-zero) number of persons in it would not make a difference of principle, only of degree.

(*Universalism has a completely different set of problems, of course.)

UBB.classic^TM 6.5.0