Posted on 02/08/2013 8:37:47 AM PST by PJ-Comix
Most people seem to assume that the universe is chock full of intelligent life. But what if we ARE alone in the Universe? So far all SETI searches have shown no evidence of other civilizations out there. If you have devoted your life to searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, you are probably wasting your time.
The more I study about the formation of the earth, the more convinced I am that the earth is pretty much a freak occurrence whose conditions for life or intelligent life exits nowhere else. So what are the theological implications of this? I would be most interested in reading your input.
That was my point. I agree with you.
Assuming a 1:1 ratio for planets, that’s quite a lot of chances to have some form of life.
***You’re off by about 119,000 orders of magnitude. And that’s being generous with 800 orders of magnitude. The mathematical definition of impossible is 1/10^50. So that’s giving you 16 levels of “impossible”. Having a faith position that life arrives through abiogenesis is deeply embedded with more than 2200 levels of 10^50 impossible.
http://www.tedmontgomery.com/bblovrvw/creation/crea-evol.html
Consider that the smallest theoretical cell is made up of 239 proteins. Further, at least 124 different types of proteins are needed for the cell to become a living thing. But the simplest known self-reproducing organism is the H39 strain of PPLO (mycoplasma) containing 625 proteins with an average of 400 amino acids in each protein.
Yet the probability of the occurrence of the smallest theoretical life is only one chance in 10^119,879 and the years required for it to evolve would be 10^119,841 years or 10119,831 times the assumed age of the earth! The probability of this smallest theoretical cell of 239 proteins evolving without the needed 124 different types of proteins to make up a living cell, i.e., the chance of evolving this “helpless group of non-living molecules” in over 500 billion years is one chance in 10^119,701. Dr. David J. Rodabough, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Missouri, estimated the more realistic chance that life would spontaneously generate (even on 10^23 planets) as only one chance in 10^2,999,940.
Probability is from God too. I’d say the odds of civilization elsewhere in the cosmos are pretty good. Not that we’ll likely ever know of it.
I would be distressed to think that God has less imagination than I do.
In all of the answers so far you are assuming it is a time/distance related issue. Suppose, for once, that the issue is dimensional. Certainly a problem for us but not for God.
In all of the answers so far you are assuming it is a time/distance related issue. Suppose, for once, that the issue is dimensional. Certainly a problem for us but not for God.
Also astounding is that our solar eclipses are just about a PERFECT fit...i.e. the size of the moon appears to be exactly the size of the sun although their distances are much different. A science show I was watching claimed this could be unique in all the universe. Oh, and the fact that we have a SINGLE moon allows us to have life on earth.
The position of the Earth and Moon also seems to have steered us toward highly composite numbers and mathematics. 12, 60, and 360 are all highly composite numbers. Supposedly, NASA used ancient base 60 math for navigation to the Moon.
yeah, I looked after I posted. The number of atoms in the univers is like 10 to the 90th power. Still, it’s not an infinity of atoms.
Science fiction drivel.
but I’m going to believe Einstein and NASA.
No you're going to believe your lack of understanding of it.
Short answer: nobody knows but .. there are SO many more worlds out there! I think there are other intelligent critters ....(else, the universe is a very inefficient job of creation....at least if intelligent little critters are the measure of the enterprise)
longer answer:
Aristotle thought earth was center of universe and so could be the only place for life
Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle and agreed.
But the Church was concerned. The Bishop of Paris mis-read Aquinas. The Bishop thought Aquinas meant that God could not have created critters elsewhere. (Actually, Aquinas only meant to say that He had not done so.) The Church felt that Aquinas’s use of “human reason” was an attempt to limit God’s power. The Church condemned Aquinas in 1277, including a refutation of this ‘Proposition 34’ ... resulting in the Church officially allowing for the possibility of ET’s.
That led to a secondary question (perhaps not secondary to the Church, but anyway....) whether “Christ’s earthly sacrifice was sufficient to cover... had it covered, or redeemed, the ET’s too? Descartes, Liebnitz, Newton, Melanchton all thought Yes. [You can see this discussion playing out today on a much smaller (earth) scale ... in the “limited” versus “unlimited or universal” salvation discourses at various levels within Christianity. Interestingly, Judaism does not have this challenging issue in that it allows for “the righteous of all nations (and presumably all planets) to see God (enjoy salvation)” but in Christian circles, of course, it remains an active topic if only because of the varying Biblical language and relative emphases on God’s love (or God as Love) versus a more particularistic or limited view of the subject...( or even in some denominations, an even more restrictive “predestinated election” doctrine).
AND, returning to the first question ... whether any ET’s existed....many writers believed they did and harmonized or used this idea as a means of extolling God’s power... why should He be limited to creating intelligent beings on just one little rock? The more the merrier, insofar as God’s grandeur is concerned.
Perhaps all this happiness (ET’s exist or probably exist and they are covered by the Creator’s Love and thusly by His salvation or redemption) ... was upset the most by Thomas Paine’s biting criticism or sarcasm of it (in his Age of Reason in 1793). He wrote of the “conceit of Christianity....to believe that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come to die in our world because they say one man and one woman had eaten an apple.” He argued against our “.,..imagining that the Son of Man should go trapsing from one world to the next in order to die on each one.....so that the Church should either quit its belief in the full or universal sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice (here) or else stop believing or allowing for the existence of ET’s on the other worlds. While it seems to me that Paine’s argument could be met on theological grounds alone (and it was in various ways by such as Timothy Dwight in USA and, better perhaps, Thomas Chalmers (the younger) in Scotland UK, the most assertive response was probably that of Thomas Dick (1837) who listed the actual populations of ET’s on the various bodies in our solar system, totaling some 22 trillion intelligent souls (over a third of which residing on the rings of Saturn). We can view Dick’s contribution as a vastly updated version of Herod’s census. Another critique of ET’s came(initially anonymously) from William Whewell in 1853, who felt it repugnant to believe that Christ’s sacrifice would transfer redemption to other orbs ... (a la Paine, as I read Paine).... so ... and here was the new part of Whewell’s contribution.... there must not be any ET’s out there. Again, a position that could be rebutted fairly well theologically, but it had its impact if only because Whewell was the respected Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
The subject exploded in the public mind again a few years on when Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian astronomer, revealed the Martian channels (”canali” in Italian, mis-translated as “canals” into English). He thought they were natural water courses but allowed that they could have been constructed. Other astronomers like Camille Flammarion in France and especially Percival Lowell in USA thought the latter was a distinct possibility, or even probability. As you may be aware, we have robots on Mars right now to find out.
And so... the subject is a fun one.
Enjoy!
fhc
“imagine the horrible depression that would set in when after THOUSANDS of years and countless generations, they reached the closest star system only to find out every planet was uninhabitable and would have to RETURN back to earth.”
Worse:
After thousands of years, they arrive - and are welcomed by their descendants, who (after their ancestors’ grand departure) developed far faster travel and got there first.
Throw in a little chaos theory, and you’d see that those vast numbers can be tamed in a hurry by a few simple organizing physics principles.
Go ahead. Better mathematicians than you have tried and failed.
A Trillion Dollars? They can call it Obamawarp.
“My God is actual, real, pre-existent, non-conditional, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and amazingly, cares about what happens to you and me.”
An old question is “if a tree falls in the woods and no one observes it, then did it really fall ?”
In Quantum Mechanics, the answer is if no one observed it, then it did not fall, but QM is off topic.
What is on topic is if human did not exist, would God exist.
That is god could go about creating heaven and earth and the stars but if no human ever saw it, would these creations exist ?
Your real god that cares about you and me does not exist if there is no you and me to care about. Furthermore, if he cares about you and me but there is no you and me, God’s power is diminished and his spirit is diminished if there is no you and me.
Put it another way. I may be a kind and loving person, but if there are no other people to show that to, then I am diminished by not being able to show kindness and love.
So, God is very dependent on interaction with people to be truly fullfilled.
What is on topic is if human did not exist, would God exist.
That is god could go about creating heaven and earth and the stars but if no human ever saw it, would these creations exist ?
***For the first 5 periods of God’s creation, humans did not exist. We only existed on the last day and we screwed it up very quickly.
The more you feel the need to resort to insults the more we all know you’re wrong.
“My God is actual, real, pre-existent, non-conditional, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and amazingly, cares about what happens to you and me.”
An old question is “if a tree falls in the woods and no one observes it, then did it really fall ?”
In Quantum Mechanics, the answer is if no one observed it, then it did not fall, but QM is off topic.
What is on topic is if human did not exist, would God exist.
That is god could go about creating heaven and earth and the stars but if no human ever saw it, would these creations exist ?
Your real god that cares about you and me does not exist if there is no you and me to care about. Furthermore, if he cares about you and me but there is no you and me, God’s power is diminished and his spirit is diminished if there is no you and me.
Put it another way. I may be a kind and loving person, but if there are no other people to show that to, then I am diminished by not being able to show kindness and love.
So, God is very dependent on interaction with people to be truly fullfilled.
As I understand it, Einstein didn’t say that nothing can go faster than light but that we simply can’t measure any speed greater than light. There is no inertial frame from which to take such a measurement.
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