If God were an alien, would you recognize it?
Is there anyone out there?
The initiators and maintainers of the various SETI
(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects think (hope) so. For
more than 100 years scientists, politicians, and soldiers have tried various
ways to “hear” someone out there (fun reading here). So far, it’s been
quiet (at least officially J) but
how would one recognize alien “intelligence” when listening to space?
Coming upon Stonehenge does one assume intelligent
life arranged it or that it wasa naturally formed? Coming upon crop
circles does one assume intelligent life made them or a natural
process? When the doors to the house rattle at night and
measured “thumps” are heard on the stairs does one assume an intelligent (and
possibly malevolent) life or is it “just the wind”? In each of these, and
the many similar instances that can be conceived, most of us have no trouble
recognizing evidence of intelligence. We assume someone created these
novelties. There’s no way Stonehenge, crop circles, or the steps on the
stairway “just happened”. There IS someone out there.
In his recent article, “Science Increasingly Makes theCase for God”, Eric Metaxas argues that based on science’s deeper and deeper
discoveries of the universe, we can recognize the entire universe as an
intelligible phenomenon. Think of it this way: take the possibility of
Stonehenge as a natural phenomenon. In other words, what would naturally
need to happen to produce Stonehenge? If a mathematician calculated out the
probability of all the factors needed to make Stonehenge happened naturally,
he’d come up with the probability of impossibility. However, one doesn’t
need the calculations of a mathematician to know this; we can look at
Stonehenge on our own and recognize that it was made intelligently.
Metaxas makes an analogous argument about the universe. Although we can’t observe the universe all at
once (like Stonehenge or an aerial view of a crop circle), if we did, we would
recognize that it was made intelligently.
And who is the only candidate who is in a position to make a universe?
The question then is a bit bigger than SETI. It’s not “is there anyone out there” (in
space or the universe), but is there anyone even beyond the universe. If you bet that SETI would recognize an alien
sign of intelligence in a similar way that you recognize Stonehenge as
intelligently made, then why not recognize a divine intelligence behind the
mathematically impossible (according to Metaxas’ article) structure of the
universe?