Posted on 06/22/2016 12:51:26 PM PDT by Heartlander
There may never have been another intelligent, technologically advanced alien species in the entire history of the Universe. Last week, in the New York Times, scientist Adam Frank emphatically wrote that Yes, There Have Been Aliens, concluding that given all the potentially habitable worlds we know must be out there from our astrophysical discoveries, intelligent life must have arisen. What he fails to account for, however, is the magnitude of the unknowns that abiogenesis, evolution, long-term habitability and other factors bring into the equation. Although it’s true that there are an astronomical number of possibilities for intelligent, technologically advanced lifeforms, the huge uncertainties make it a very real possibility that humans are the only spacefaring aliens our Universe has ever known.
[SNIP]...But that’s where our optimism, if we’re being scientifically honest and scrupulous, ought to end. Because there are three big steps out there, in order to get a human-like civilization, that need to happen:
[SNIP]...And even if life does occur, how fortunate do you need to be to have it survive and thrive for billions of years? Would a catastrophic warming scenario, like Venus, be the norm? Or a catastrophic freezing scenario ...
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
I agree with your observation. The Lord went out of love to create us a planet to live on
Gives another meaning to the Bible verse “Go forth and multiply”.
PING!!
Article and comments & check out #16
thanks, LucyT & Talisker
Just what I was thinking. As if the idea of "Global Warming" isn't arrogant enough.
Don’t forget Mork!
Git bizzy, Muddog, & do something constructive every day &
quit moaning about being lonely. Things are tough all over
for all of us; but you don’t hear Twinkie moaning & groaning! No sirreee! I just took the compost out & emptied
it in the bin. In hot weather, flies lay eggs in my compost
and maggots hatch. I tried to clean them out of the
compost container & got most of them out. Then I fed the
perpetually hungry Dubbers, then gave the cat, Boo-Boo
some more treats. I put a few treats in her regular food
bowl so she would eat that up. Then I wet the restroom
floor because I misjudged the urgency of my situation; so
I had to wipe that up & wash my plastic Crocs & put my
ballet slippers back on & changed out of the dress I had
wet and into another dress. Then I sat down. That won’t
last! SEE?! It is NOT lonely!! I will expect a progress
report on all the useful things you are doing now that
you’ve realized you are NOT lonely!
Very well said.
Further, He created us in His image ...and then transforms us into "new" creatures. (2 Cor. 5:17).
I like the critters in the yard.
The lightnin’ bugs put on a good show tonight.
Dude..... we are alone.....
There has never been one certifiable sherd of evidence since the beginning of mankind to document an alien life of any type....
Another certainty is that somewhere out there is a planet shaped just like Alfred E. Newman’s head. With craters for freckles and iron oxide hair (that’s even parted on the correct side). Obviously such a planet is unlikely, but probability guarantees its existence. Someday we will find it.
“Just shows what a truly great and loving God we have.”
Amen. He is, and this universe is fine-tuned for us.
The universe to Him is just His handiwork, and the physical wonders an expression of the greater wonders that He is.
In the same way are all the spiritual wonders of our existence, which we experience from moment to moment.
The vastness of the heavens give us something to be gaze at in wonder, and to contemplate. They give us a sense of God’s power, and of eternity. They stir our souls.
And God gave His own Son for us. It is nothing by comparison that He would create this universe for us.
“The Earth is 4b years old and the universe is 13.3b years old.”
Maybe in a naturalistic sense.
But on the day Adam and Eve were created, they would have had a “natural” age, meaning organically, as they were created as mature human adults.
But although adults, they were also “newborn,” having not existed before the moment God created them.
In effect they had two ages, and that would hold for everything else that God created during the six days of Creation.
Just shows what a truly great and loving God we have. The anthropic principles (from oxygen levels, to gravity, to water vapor, to the expansion of the universe) are all so fine tuned as to suggest this IS the place God chose for humanity.
Yes.
Scripture says, The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. (Ps 19:1)
The exciting advances in physics and cosmology during the past two decades strongly indicate that the Universe is not random. It seems to be designed, and very carefully so. Big hint: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
The UDF is impossible without a super-finely tuned matter density gradient and alpha opacity function that is absolutely perfect. It does not require the Anthropic Principle. (AP is the last, desperate, refuge of the cornered atheist.) The UDF is basically God showing his handiwork to us.
Our universe has basic minimal rules and structure (a closed simulation, like a video game.) Ask a physicist how elegant and minimalist it all is. Gravity is the ugly duckling of the four forces, seemingly a standalone force, with weird behavior at cosmological distances. (Dark Matter is a design hack.)
This means that there has to exist a higher level of reality somewhere (running the video game). Call this Heaven, or whatever.
And that in turn implies there is no way for you to reach Heaven on your own. It would be like a video game character trying to step out of the screen. (Secular Humanists and Gene Roddenberry think this way.)
Therefore you must be pulled up. No way to get there on your own. Instead, God shoved His own hand inside the screen, over 2000 years ago, to grab us and pull us up.
But why? Why does He offer His hand down to us? Dunno. Grace. (Aside: The difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that I think God wants friends to chat with. The Buddhist wants to merge with the Godhead and lose self-identity.)
God is definitely watching you. Why? The video game analogy. But there is an even better way to prove it: Observation is the key to Quantum Mechanics. We are living inside a closed QM system with a collapsible wave function. So who collapsed it? Answer: Whoever observed us from outside the box. So, like Schrödinger's cat, we are alive and not dead. We are literally alive because of Him. (That's a pun.) Yeah, I'm oversimplifying a bit. Observation is the key to everything. I say 'I think, therefore I am,' and since I am aware of myself right at this moment, therefore somebody must be observing me doing it. QED.
God wants a relationship with you. Why? Because you are hardwired for it. You feel it. You are an instinctive seeker. No other animal thinks this way.
That's basically it.
God gave you eyes and a brain for a reason. He wants you to see and marvel at His handiwork, which is an expression of His unfathomable Glory. And He wants us to glorify Him as separate independent creatures who exist apart from Himself.
Pick up an NIV Bible and start with the Gospel of John. He really gets it, the gestalt, the head space, the intuition, the heart, better than anybody. God wants a relationship. With us. Love is the key. Our minds cannot grasp the infinite so He had to downsize it to something finite that we could understand. Basically, Christ is a hack to make it all work, the same way that Dark Matter is a hack. (I use the word 'hack' in the following sense: Not an error or a mistake, but a necessary special modification to the rules to make everything work right.)
Go see the following YouTube video, The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D by Deep Astronomy. Watch this video carefully. Or just look out your window. Then pick up a Bible, start with the Gospel of John, and go from there.
— “Sorry, that is romantic and poetic and all, but in reality, if an evolutionist was correct, and we came into existence because of our environment, then exactly where else would you -expect- to find us? —
Your argument is way off. Even secular scientists see something to the “fine-tuned universe argument,” something they have to try to explain, or explain away. And if they can’t ignore it, then that tells you a bit of how compelling the evidence for it is.
Life is not some simple thing, which rather easily exists in our universe.
Right now, in the Northern Hemisphere of our planet, it is quite hot. In winter, it will get quite cold here. For us creatures here on Earth, just the slightest variation in temperature, universe-wise, can easily freeze us to death or cook us to death, since a mere 50 degrees Fahrenheit shift is drastic to us (and what is a shift of a 100 degrees in terms of the universes various temperatures?). Yet our earth provides a habitat right in between the upper and lower temperatures we can tolerate.
Now if the temperature range was much different and inhospitable to us, do you say that “just different life forms would have evolved here”? Well, given all the things needed for life, and how they all have to fit nicely together, that would likely make life here impossible.
“It is an extremely self centered point of view that we require conditions “X”, so clearly everything was made as it is, solely to support us...”
No, it isn’t “extremely self centered”! That’s what the Bible tells us, and the Bible is GOD-CENTERED! All that’s being said is that God created us, as well as this universe for us to live in, and this planet for us to live on. Nothing more, and nothing “self-centered” about it, in the least. It’s all about HIM.
— It is just as logical to think that life that evolved in this environment would be perfectly fine tuned for this environment because it couldn’t evolve in a place that is hostile to it.
For example, we couldn’t have evolved as we did on a planet with an ammonia atmosphere, so of course we will be found on an earthlike planet.” —
Once again, you’re not being logical as you claim to be. Address some of the specifics in this article:
If secular humanist science hasn’t yet been able dismiss the prospect of a fine-tuned universe, then how do you say that you can?
God in His Word tells us that He is made the universe so that unmistakably we see that it is His work.
— ‘And I never said its a given. I said if life evolved from nothing, that it has happened again and again. Google the word “IF”. —
You HAVE said it’s a given.
1. You’ve put forward two possibilities on this thread, God’s creation and nature.
2. Though you’ve sometimes used “if” in talking about the two possibilities, and said that you considered it unlikely that God created (which would seem to leave open God creating the universe), you have also made statements in which you have proclaimed the naturalistic explanation to be true.
Your post #52 to Heartlander:
“That argument is utterly short sighted. And even more fun, life like us has already happened, run its course, and gone extinct somewhere.... just as life on earth will someday.
“At best we’ve been anything we would recognize as fellow human beings for between 100-200k years.
“Life happened somewhere, went for a few hundred million years, then died off. Gone.”
3. Whether you believe God had anything to do with creation at all or not, you have declared that life as we know it came about through evolution. You’ve made it clear that you favor the naturalistic explanation over God creating the universe.
4. So you did not just say here “if” life evolved from nothing. You have taken the firm position that you believe it most likely did, and that has been clear from your line of argumentation. A fair reading of all your comments here suggests you believe it likely that life arose in our universe without a Creator’s involvement. That’s what you’ve been arguing for.
So you believe that most likely God had nothing to do with the universe’s creation - yes?
And even if He did, He didn’t just create us and the rest of life as we are - right? You believe life evolved?
Don’t sidestep the question of how life came about from lifeless matter, and try to accuse other people of mischaracterizing the debate.
How is it that you say life came from lifeless matter, then?
A waste of space? Not very intelligent?
So God created this universe for us, the beings He created for Himself.
What about us being able to look upon the Heavens, their beauty, and with awe at their size, and for what they contain? Is that worth nothing? Is the Grand Canyon a waste of space?
Hm............upon reflection I now realize my error.
I thought the headline said “Hannity may be alone in the Universe”.
"Came into existence because of our enviornment" is an odd phrase. Two problems: first, something from nothing is an impossibility as it defies the first law of thermodynamics (all energy already exists) and the second law of thermodynamics (things move from order to disorder, never the other way). Second, no evolutionist has ever been able to create "first life." All evolutionists can hope to "create" is microevolution (small changes within the same species), never macroevolution (from one entity to a different entity).
This is right in line with the Genesis account of creation, where it is recorded that each thing that was created was "after its kind."
Based on physics it takes light a billion years to travel a billion light years except for one thing. God said otherwise. Based on biology all men and born from women and none of them come from the dust and no woman come from the rib of a man. Except for one thing.
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