Meant to ping you ...
Worse, Freepers who I respect deeply and hold dear have been offended. This is not good and I didn't want to sow any discord.
Panspermia is irrelevant to me - no matter whether it is Crick or Dawkins championing the speculation. It amounts to no more than avoiding the Name of God in academic discussions or worse, denying God the Creator altogether.
We mortals tend to be blinded by persistent sensory inputs to the point that we can easily believe that reality must be somehow limited by our ability to perceive it.
And Dawkins like so many other atheists and metaphysical naturalists is probably the most blind of all - or the most deluded. It is as if he cannot accept any reality in which he is not the captain of his own ship and the master of his own destiny.
As a scientist, he should know better.
For one thing, science cannot say that a field or dimension or type of dimension does not exist if it has no direct or indirect measurable affect.
Limited to his persistent sense of 4 dimensions (3 spatial, 1 temporal) and energy/momentum and blinded to only accept that which he can measure directly or indirectly, a man might believe that no thing could move through space/time faster than the speed of light. After all, such an impediment would severely limit the opportunity for contact over large expanses of space/time should such life actually exist.
But what if the distance between two points could be collapsed as if by folding space/time, i.e. making the two points adjacent? More to the point, 4D limitations would not apply to a 5 dimensional being.
If you were 5 dimensional, for instance, you could remove the contents of a box without opening it.
All of that may sound a bit like science fiction, but in quantum field theory, more specifically quantum entanglement which has been tested up to 10 kilometers, the speed limit of the universe (speed of light) has already been breached, where the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to one another regardless of the extent to which they may be spatially separated. e.g. one on earth the other on the moon, in another galaxy, etc.
So I am not troubled one way or the other, whether God has created other life forms elsewhere and whether they are 4D, 5D2T or whatever. Indeed, I've often wondered about the following passage, i.e. "kings and priests of what?"