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Where Does the Bias Toward Alien Life Come From?
I was watching an Olympic event this week and a commercial came on screen for Netflix with an alien on its craft, watching a stream of shows from space. Some might say it was just a joke, except that it isn’t for many, many people. It works as a concept because people think life out there is paying attention to what’s happening on earth. It’s a tolerable option now pushed by multitudinous science fiction productions.
Richard Dawkins said publicly in 2008, caught for the film Expelled, that since we don’t know how life originated in the first place, an “intriguing possibility” is that alien civilization evolved elsewhere and then “designed” and “seeded” the first life on earth. He may have taken that idea from a scientific paper in 1973 by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, which they called “directed panspermia.” Crick later revised this position, but these speculations highlight the trouble with the existence of evidence of design in the massive amounts of genetic information in DNA, what Dawkins, the famous atheist scientist, slipped out as an apparent “signature of some kind of designer.”
I actually hear often the alien explanation for life on earth when I’m out preaching the gospel. People know it isn’t an accident that we got here or that we are who we are with all of our complexity. They are unwilling to say it’s because of God, but they also don’t accept that we evolved at least here on earth from a common ancestor.
Are aliens a good answer for the existence of the colossal and labyrinth of complicated information at the core of human existence? Where does that bias toward alien life come from? Is it scientific?
The reach for alien life as an explanation for human origins defers to intelligent cause. The presence of the functionally specified digital explanation in DNA infers intelligent design. Are aliens an even reasonable explanation as the designers behind life on earth? Are aliens an adequate cause with the known power to produce the kind of effect of large amounts of specified information?
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists start with presupposition then of specified information contained in electromagnetic signals coming from space. However, radio astronomers have never yet found such information bearing signals. All of life on earth does have such information inscribed even in its simplest living cells. No evidence exists that infers anything from space is the causal agent for life on earth.
The speculation of alien origin of life on earth springs from a bias against a divine causal agent. It isn’t science. No science backs alien origin of life on earth.
The Feeding of the Five Thousand: How Old Were the Bread and the Fish the People Ate, That Jesus Gave Them?
When I go to the grocery store and I select my items, I don’t very often think of the process. I just push the cart and put into it what’s on my list. My wife was gone for quite awhile recently, so I grocery shopped. A few times I picked up one or two of those tubes of hamburger you’ve maybe seen. It didn’t occur to me when I did that a calf was born, it grazed in a field, grew to full grown size, was herded into a truck, shipped to a meat plant, driven into a building and was butchered, then parts of that full grown cow were ground into beef, which was squeezed into a tube and through various machinations of the supply chain, arrived in my store in Southern Oregon.
I didn’t look at that tube of hamburger and assume that it just sprung up there in the meat department of Walmart with the appearance of age. I know it didn’t. However, something different happened when the Lord Jesus Christ served the five thousand bread and fish in Matthew 14:13-21. I now know that just one cell of a fish exists according to a very complicated code of DNA, information from powerful and intelligent design antecedent to its emergence, let alone the origin of the matter from which it formed. Further along, there’s the fish eye, it’s gills, brain, internal organs, scales, and fins. Its musculature, that allowed for its under water propulsion, becomes the fleshly substance of a meal, also the subject of future digestion and incorporation into a human body.
Everything everyone ate at the feeding of the five thousand had the appearance of age. That was the miracle of it. Sure, it would have been a great miracle if everyone was able to stand or sit there that day and wait for a seed of wheat or corn to grow into the grain necessary to mill to flour, work into dough, and baked to yummy goodness. How long would that take? Perhaps the moment of the feeding was actually an age, once we’ve decided that we’re permitted to conform measurements of time to our preferred version of a scriptural narrative. We all know that a loaf of bread couldn’t have appeared in a moment according to known dating systems, so to help with the believability of Matthew 14:13-21, we allow for our own adaptation and maneuverability of the story.
No. Jesus created bread and fish, skipping the time and the process. He went straight from point A to B or A to Z, depending on how many steps you want to imagine were skipped. That’s the wonder of His power, wisdom, and love. God by nature is supernatural and He divinely intervenes in His creation however He wants. He is not bound by the very natural laws He originated. He’s more than the state highway police traveling as fast as He wants to enforce His own laws.
What’s harder? An instantaneous universe with an apparent appearance of fourteen billion years or thousands of separate bread loaves and fully grown fish? Think of even the milling process for flour. Where was the mill stone? There was none. Flour itself was skipped. What’s harder, the instantaneous creation of matter or the instantaneous formation of that matter to a mature appearing universe? Both are impossible, except with God. If you can believe the first, you can also believe the second.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
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