Posted by
Rob on Thursday, January 10, 2008 5:04:09 PM
I was asked to give a talk at the local chapter of Reasons to Believe, which meets quarterly at the Whitesburg Baptist Church on the first Thursday of the month at 7pm, with the next meeting scheduled Feb 7. Here is the title and abstract, please come if you can, I'll see if it can be vlogged.
Extra-terrestrials and the Bible
For centuries, the RCC has had the only key to heaven's gate, and the thought of life elsewhere was most disturbing to their theology (though not, apparently, to the Russian Orthodox). Accordingly, heretics and atheists have hypothesized about extraterrestrials as if it were the best refutation of God since the serpent's: Giordano Bruno, HG Wells, Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan... you get the drift. Now that NASA actually has data on that life (Orgueil meteorite, Viking Lander on Mars, Deep Impact on Comet Tempel-1, Voyager pictures of Europa, Cassini observations of Enceladus, Titan), there is a great deal of maneuvering and, well, politics. It didn't fit the mold of Sagan's "Contact", but it did break the mold of Darwin's "Origins". Many scientists seem adamantly opposed to ET life, invoking all sorts of strange accidents to explain away the data (and suppress contrary views). Weirdly enough, the same arguments that Intelligent Design theorists use for a Creator over Chance, are the ones needed to determine if, say, amino acids at Titan are evidence of life or just an accident. Even as Darwinists reel from the discovery that they aren't the center of the universe, comes the announcement today in Nature that Lamarck (who, unlike Darwin, proposed purposeful evolution) was right after all. How do I reconcile all these results? To misquote a Presidential candidate: "It takes a galaxy to raise a child," for rather than being the meaningless result of a million years of evolving, it appears that you and I are the product of 13.7 billion years of nurturing.