Monday 25 February 2019

The Alpha-Centaury Connection: Could Atheists and Intelligent Design Folks Agree on This?

This who sent by Messier 13 to contact aliens. Image courtesy of Arne Nordmann, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

The problem with intelligent design advocates is that they leave out a God or don’t tell who created life.

Thus, John Zmirak tries to solve the problem – by inventing that extra-terrestrials could have invented live. Here on earth.

"Atheists have a problem. When they look at life on earth, every last trace of it — from single cells rife with complex microstructures, to the eagle’s eye and biologist’s brain — looks like the product of design.

“Stephen C. Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, recounts that Darwin admitted the apparent evidence for design. He wanted to find an alternate explanation.

And as Meyer explains in his rich, well-argued book, it was computer scientists who first raised the serious question: Is it really possible that random changes in DNA code would generate new structures and species? Because that never, never, never happens with computer code.


Zmirak tells of Charles Darwin and his daughter, who took away Darwin’s initial faith in God, prompting him to posit an explanation, of natural selection doing the things God does:

Atheists speak of materialism. That materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

How about we stipulate this? All the evidence piling up that random mutations couldn’t possibly have planted and grown the Tree of Life does not point to the God of the Christians and the Jews.
Instead, it points to the design of some higher, alien species. Say, a race of brilliant beings who live in Alpha Centauri, who have learned how to travel by wormholes. No, there’s no evidence for that, but there’s equally little evidence for the “Multiverse.” That’s a favorite fiction of atheists eager to escape the religious implications of the Big Bang. But that didn’t stop Stephen Hawking from touting it
.”

The problem with this, is that we can’t be sure if extra-terrestrials dwell on Alpha Centauri. And a second problem is that just getting rid of the evidence here will just posit that natural causes in effect caused intelligent life to turn up here.

Source:

Zmirak, John. 2019, At Last, Common Ground for Atheists and Intelligent Design Advocates.The Stream (22 February).