Would life on other planets be a problem for your old faith?

[Wertbag]

I saw an article saying the James Web telescope has detected gases on a distant planet which are usually signs of life.  They caveat the announcement that they need a lot more data to confirm, which could take a year to get, but it did make me wonder; if life was confirmed on another planet would that have been a problem for your old faith?

Not even talking intelligent life, but microbes of some kind.  Are we not unique?  Is life as possible as non-believers say?  Perhaps this is only a problem for fundamentalist types, or perhaps just the thought of us not being as special as many believe would be an issue.

Probably apologists would roll with the blow, saying its made for our wonderment or some such.  Obviously that becomes harder if the life is intelligent, but one hurdle at a time.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

Honestly, in my christian days, microbes on another planet would not have even registered in my mind.  Even some higher order of animal life would not have challenged my faith in any way.  If the life were intelligent, sentient, self-aware as humans are, I'd have simply declared that either that race had never sinned (i.e. they had a "test" similar to our Eden, but they passed),  or that, having failed their test like we did, god made some kind of provisions for their salvation just as he did for us.  For me, even as a christian, I was always open to the possibility of life on other planets.

[older]

3 hours ago, Wertbag said:

Probably apologists would roll with the blow

  

Of course they would. They could find a way to deny gravity if they wanted to.

[pantheory]

19 hours ago, Wertbag said:

I saw an article saying the James Web telescope has detected gases on a distant planet which are usually signs of life.  They caveat the announcement that they need a lot more data to confirm, which could take a year to get, but it did make me wonder; if life was confirmed on another planet would that have been a problem for your old faith?

Not even talking intelligent life, but microbes of some kind.  Are we not unique?  Is life as possible as non-believers say?  Perhaps this is only a problem for fundamentalist types, or perhaps just the thought of us not being as special as many believe would be an issue.

Probably apologists would roll with the blow, saying its made for our wonderment or some such.  Obviously that becomes harder if the life is intelligent, but one hurdle at a time.

 

Walter the First put this finding in the science section just last week. You will find it there.

 

In my Cristian days microbes on other planets would not have been a big problem, but intelligent life like us would have been a problem, like Star Trek and Star Wars movies and episodes.

 

I don't think this finding will bear fruit. I do think we will find microbial life in our solar system related to Earth life, but I think life in general is extremely rare. Even in the Milky Way with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, our corner of the galaxy may have the only life in the galaxy, hence the Fermi Paradox. But our Milky Way is only one of more than a trillion galaxies. It would seem certain that life of some kind exists at least in some other galaxies IMO.

[walterpthefirst]

17 hours ago, Wertbag said:

I saw an article saying the James Web telescope has detected gases on a distant planet which are usually signs of life.  They caveat the announcement that they need a lot more data to confirm, which could take a year to get, but it did make me wonder; if life was confirmed on another planet would that have been a problem for your old faith?

Not even talking intelligent life, but microbes of some kind.  Are we not unique?  Is life as possible as non-believers say?  Perhaps this is only a problem for fundamentalist types, or perhaps just the thought of us not being as special as many believe would be an issue.

Probably apologists would roll with the blow, saying its made for our wonderment or some such.  Obviously that becomes harder if the life is intelligent, but one hurdle at a time.

 

It would depend on how hard a line certain Christians take with their reading of the bible.

 

Hard-line literalists already deny so much science that the discovery of life in outer space probably wouldn't even faze them.

 

If they can't square the news with their beliefs then its just another Satanic conspiracy designed to deceive the world.

 

 

[walterpthefirst]

1 hour ago, pantheory said:

 

Walter the First put this finding in the science section just last week. You will find it there.

 

In my Cristian days microbes on other planets would not have been a big problem, but intelligent life like us would have been a problem, like Star Trek and Star Wars movies and episodes.

 

I don't think this finding will bear fruit. I do think we will find microbial life in our solar system related to Earth life, but I think life in general is extremely rare. Even in the Milky Way with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, our corner of the galaxy may have the only life in the galaxy, hence the Fermi Paradox. But our Milky Way is one of more than a trillion galaxies. It would seem certain that life of some kind exists at least in some other galaxies IMO.

 

Then there's the time and distance factors to consider.

 

Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, which means that if another intelligent civilization had stopped transmitting a million years ago we'd hear nothing.  Just static and dead air.  Their signals would have radiated far beyond us.  Little wonder that the universe seems to be silent.  The ether could be alive with messages from aliens but we need to be in the right place and the right time to be able to hear them.

 

So what are the ways the we could discover if there is life out there?

 

1.  Using instruments like the James Webb space telescope to detect what the scientists call biosignatures - chemicals that are associated with life. (As we know it.)

2. Listening for alien transmissions. (See above.)

3. Actually going out there to discover the aliens.  Or the ruins of their civilizations.

 

There are big, big problems associated with each of these methods.  Ones that I won't go into here, because that would mean taking this thread off topic.

 

In my opinion nothing revealed by science about life in the wider cosmos will ever impact the minds of those Christian who choose to close their minds to it.

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

 

 

 

 

 

[pantheory]

1 hour ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

Then there's the time and distance factors to consider.

 

Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, which means that if another intelligent civilization had stopped transmitting a million years ago we'd hear nothing.  Just static and dead air.  Their signals would have radiated far beyond us.  Little wonder that the universe seems to be silent.  The ether could be alive with messages from aliens but we need to be in the right place and the right time to be able to hear them.

 

So what are the ways the we could discover if there is life out there?

 

1.  Using instruments like the James Webb space telescope to detect what the scientists call biosignatures - chemicals that are associated with life. (As we know it.)

2. Listening for alien transmissions. (See above.)

3. Actually going out there to discover the aliens.  Or the ruins of their civilizations.

 

There are big, big problems associated with each of these methods.  Ones that I won't go into here, because that would mean taking this thread off topic.

 

In my opinion nothing revealed by science about life in the wider cosmos will ever impact the minds of those Christian who choose to close their minds to it.

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

 

 

 

 

With our present technology It seems possible that we might find life in the Milky Way, unrelated to Earth life. But it could take thousands of years. But it presently seems almost impossible to me for us to discover in the foreseeable future extra-galactic life, other than possibilities thereof.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

Is it possible life forms are visiting earth now, but not communicating with us?

[walterpthefirst]

5 hours ago, Weezer said:

Is it possible life forms are visiting earth now, but not communicating with us?

 

That's a difficult one, Weezer.

 

If we said Yes, then they would have to be thousands (not hundreds) of years more advanced than us.  The difficulties of travelling interstellar distances should not be underestimated and lie far, far in our future, assuming that we don't destroy the Earth first.   

 

Being thousands of years more advanced than us, it would probably be easy for them to conceal themselves from us.

 

But the bigger question that overshadows all of the above it is why?

 

Why would they expend so much effort to come here, conceal themselves and not communicate with us?

 

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

11 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

Why would they expend so much effort to come here, conceal themselves and not communicate with us?

 

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

 

I can see why they don't want to communicate with us.  Why would we try to communicate with apes in africa and possibly let them get hold of our nuclear weapons??  And what would we have in common??

 

Face it.  They may exist, and be thousands (millions)? of years ahead of us, and have technology we haven't even dreamed about.

[walterpthefirst]

On 9/19/2023 at 9:08 PM, Weezer said:

 

I can see why they don't want to communicate with us.  Why would we try to communicate with apes in africa and possibly let them get hold of our nuclear weapons??  And what would we have in common??

 

Face it.  They may exist, and be thousands (millions)? of years ahead of us, and have technology we haven't even dreamed about.

 

Ok then Weezer.

 

 

I take your point about them not having much in common with us.

 

I accept that they might exist.

 

And I also accept that they might have technologies undreamt of.

 

But are these three things really anything more than speculation?

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

 

 

 

 

[◊ Weezer ◊]

1 hour ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

But are these three things really anything more than speculation?

 

I guess that depends on how you define speculation.  It is more logical than the Bible stories.  And UFOs are more than speculation.  And since they seem to exist, suggests VERY advanced technology.

[walterpthefirst]

7 hours ago, Weezer said:

I guess that depends on how you define speculation.  It is more logical than the Bible stories.  And UFOs are more than speculation.  And since they seem to exist, suggests VERY advanced technology.

 

Ok, for the sake of argument I'm going to put my natural scepticism aside and tentatively agree that there is something to these reports of UFOs/UAPs.

 

Assuming that their activities are guided by beings of great intelligence, why is it that we cannot figure out what their intent is?  Encounters with UFOs range from them actively avoiding human contact to the other end of the spectrum, where they land and try to abduct human beings.  There seems to be no overall plan, no overarching theme, no common denominator and no particular logic to their activities.

 

And yet our SETI searches are based upon the notion that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings should behave logically.  Because the physical nature of the universe demands that living beings react logically to their environments.  Those beings that live illogically are rapidly deselected for extinction because they do not meet the criteria for survival.  They fritter away their chances to survive by making illogical choices about where to live, what to eat, how to procreate, etc.

 

I see a hidden trap here, Weezer.

 

If we postulate that these intelligent aliens are so far advanced that their activities would seem illogical to us, then we run the risk of doing exactly what Christian apologists do when confronted with a bible passage that shows god acting in an illogical or contradictory way.  The apologists will shrug their shoulders and just claim that god is so far above us that his ways are mysterious and they appear illogical to us because there is a lack or fault in our understanding.

 

I strongly recommend that in our keenness to believe in super-advanced aliens visiting us for reasons that we cannot fathom, we don't fall into the trap of making the same excuses for them as the Christians do for their god.  Also, we run a risk of reserving our strongest scepticism for religious matters while relaxing our scepticism when it comes to the possibility of advanced alien life.   This is surely an unbalanced position and therefore an untenable one.  Surely we should be equally sceptical, across the board?

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

1 hour ago, walterpthefirst said:

.

I see a hidden trap here, Weezer.

 

I see no need to be paranoid.  My brother-in-law, a nephew and I have been researching ETs for years.  And with what we have learned, none of us are scared.  We actually are looking forward to possible communication.  With the reports I have seen, no one has been injured (other than some uncomfortable probing) with abductions, and there was at least one report I saw of a guy being helped that had an accidential injury.  

 

2 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

  Surely we should be equally sceptical, across the board?

 

Everyone choses how skeptical they want to be.  I choose to be curious.  Frankly I don't understand why you are so scared of the possibility of ETs.  It appears they have been around for thousands of years, and any harm they might bring to us, they likely would have already done.  From most appearances, they seem benevolent, and some of the "reports" say they (my words) want to help us morally evolve.   If their technology is far ahead of us, their moral evolution may also be. 

 

Yes, it does sound like science fiction and at first I was very sceptical, but there is "something" out there.  

 

 

[walterpthefirst]

7 hours ago, Weezer said:

I see no need to be paranoid.  My brother-in-law, a nephew and I have been researching ETs for years.  And with what we have learned, none of us are scared.  We actually are looking forward to possible communication.  With the reports I have seen, no one has been injured (other than some uncomfortable probing) with abductions, and there was at least one report I saw of a guy being helped that had an accidential injury.  

 

Everyone choses how skeptical they want to be.  I choose to be curious.  Frankly I don't understand why you are so scared of the possibility of ETs.  It appears they have been around for thousands of years, and any harm they might bring to us, they likely would have already done.  From most appearances, they seem benevolent, and some of the "reports" say they (my words) want to help us morally evolve.   If their technology is far ahead of us, their moral evolution may also be. 

 

Yes, it does sound like science fiction and at first I was very sceptical, but there is "something" out there.  

 

 

 

I'm neither paranoid nor scared, Weezer.

 

But I am worried about being unbalanced in my scepticism, giving more credence to one type of extraordinary claim than another.

 

To me your last sentence sounds little different to an extraordinary claim that might be made by a Christian apologist or by our newbie AstralCat.

 

As such, to be fair and even-handed to ALL extraordinary claim makers, I must treat your claim with the same scepticism that I would treat theirs.

 

Therefore, as the extraordinary claim maker, it falls to you to support your claim with evidence.

 

You see?  This is EXACTLY the same response I would make to a Christian, to AstralCat or to any other extraordinary claim maker.

 

I am not being paranoid nor scared, but fair and even-handed.

 

So, can you make good on your extraordinary claim, Weezer?

[◊ Weezer ◊]

7 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

Therefore, as the extraordinary claim maker, it falls to you to support your claim with evidence.

 

I am NOT saying these are absolute truths as christians do with their faith.  I am saying that in my opinion, from all the study I and others have done, that there are some possibilities, and some probabilities.  NOT TRUTHS, or evidence based ideology. 

 

I am not an obsessive/compulsive scientist who is into exact hair splitting, and wants peer approved evidence before I will believe anything.  I am a guy from a red neck farm, and believe I have some logical "horse sense", and do have considerable and varied life experiences and education.  I try to look at he big picture of everything, and can see some logical possibilities with this ET stuff.  I have not kept copious notes on everything I have read as "evidence" for someone else to study.  If you are interested, you can study it for yourself.  If not, ignore it.

[walterpthefirst]

Well, this dialogue could have gone better, Weezer.

 

 

If I have been too inflexible then I'm sorry.  But we are talking past each other here, reading into each others posts what we think is there and not what is actually there.

 

If you were simply presenting your opinion and I took that as some sort of claim that needed to be supported by evidence, then, once again, I'm sorry for misreading you.

 

If so, then I was wrong to follow my usual approach in this forum and ask anyone making a claim to support it with evidence.

 

 

However, when an extraordinary claim is made in Ex-C, whoever makes it will usually be called upon to support that claim with evidence.

 

My error was in wrongly concluding that you had made one, Weezer.

 

Hence I took the standard line with you.

 

Sorry again,

 

 

Walter.

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

On 9/17/2023 at 7:16 PM, Wertbag said:

I saw an article saying the James Web telescope has detected gases on a distant planet which are usually signs of life.  They caveat the announcement that they need a lot more data to confirm, which could take a year to get, but it did make me wonder; if life was confirmed on another planet would that have been a problem for your old faith?

Not even talking intelligent life, but microbes of some kind.  Are we not unique?  Is life as possible as non-believers say?  Perhaps this is only a problem for fundamentalist types, or perhaps just the thought of us not being as special as many believe would be an issue.

Probably apologists would roll with the blow, saying its made for our wonderment or some such.  Obviously that becomes harder if the life is intelligent, but one hurdle at a time.

Hey wertbag,

 

I'm coming in late on this thread. But I think for the most part definitive life on another planet would be troublesome to my old church. But they probably would deny that the sciences could really know for sure on a planet that far away. 

 

However, me personally. It probably would have made me start to question if I hadn't already. Considering that the whole reason I started to question the accepted young earth time line was because I saw the moon,through a telescope, with my own eyes and knew it couldn't be as young as what the Bible said. 

 

I think it's really amazing what the James Web telescope is seeing out there. Maybe one day we will begin to see lights flicker on, on some of these planets they are finding and know that even intelligent life is out there somewhere. 

 

From my understanding of the scripture the writers of the Bible had no idea there were even other planets out there. Everything God created in the heavens was actually under the dome. The sun, moon, and all the stars. From reading genesis at face value I believe the ancient isrealites believed there was water above the earth. I think this is probably how they explained the reason the sky was blue. They believed there was water under the earth. And that we live basically in a bubble of life that God created. This explains all the extra water that was thrown on earth during the flood. Also they had no concept of the water cycle. They believed God opened windows in the dome to let water in in the form of rain. 

 

Compared to their babylonian counterparts who identified other planets. They were pretty dumb when it came to our solar systems Cosmology. Yet we still have people that believe their writting to the point they are getting sucked into flat earth theory. They see that the bible has a flat earth creation and instead of saying...... wait a minute. Thats not right. They just make it into some big conspiracy and world wide government cover up. I guess it's true. Stupid is as stupid does. Lmao  

 

Dark Bishop

[◊ Weezer ◊]

1 hour ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

However, when an extraordinary claim is made in Ex-C, whoever makes it will usually be called upon to support that claim with evidence.

 

Yep! Different people have different ideas about what an extraordinary claim is. 

[walterpthefirst]

2 hours ago, Weezer said:

Yep! Different people have different ideas about what an extraordinary claim is. 

 

 

Hmmm... I don't know, Weezer.  Not sure about that.

 

 

What are the implications for this forum if personal preference about what is extraordinary becomes the norm?  Bob could make what he considers to be an ordinary claim, while Alice considers it to be an extraordinary one.  If Alice calls upon Bob to make good on his 'extraordinary' claim he could then reply that he doesn't need to because his claim is not extraordinary - its just ordinary.  He has the right and the freedom to call his claim ordinary if he so chooses.

 

Not only would this lead to confusion, it might also lead to difficult and lengthy discussions about what constitutes extraordinary, with no real hope of agreement at the end of the day.  Furthermore, it would set a precedent that would help Christian apologists avoid making good on their claims.  They could simply state that they don't consider Jesus' miracles to be extraordinary.  Or they don't consider anything written in the bible to be extraordinary.  So there is no burden of proof upon them, no matter what they claim to be true.  

 

At a stroke they can negate what has been the basic principle within this forum for years - that any and all extraordinary claims should be supported with evidence.  And then the mission and reason this forum was created to fulfil becomes next to impossible.  Christians could no longer be held accountable for anything they claim.  The Ex-Christians, atheists, agnostics and sceptics here would be unable to ask the Christians to justify anything they claim.   

 

And this would leave new members who need help to deconvert poorly served because the people who should be helping them (us) by holding Christians to account, can no longer do so.  

 

 

I can see where you're coming from here Weezer, but I remain worried, doubtful and unpersuaded.

 

 

Thank you,

 

Walter.

 

[◊ Weezer ◊]

3 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

 

I can see where you're coming from here Weezer, but I remain worried, doubtful and unpersuaded.

 

 

So be it.

[TheBluegrassSkeptic]

TLDR if already stated, but my parents always attributed extraterrestrial life as God being mysterious. Who are we to say we know everything that God has been up to? I think that's how my dad put it, and he is a severe evangelical. We watched too much scifi in my household and enjoyed new tech to deny the possibilities out there. 

[TheBluegrassSkeptic]

On 9/19/2023 at 3:23 AM, walterpthefirst said:

 

 

Why would they expend so much effort to come here, conceal themselves and not communicate with us?

 

Maybe it's like that episode of STNG where you observe but do not interact. You know, to not unduly influence. Could you imagine how many cults would pop up overnight if aliens actually showed up here and said hello? OMG just don't even want to go there XD