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?