Astronomers have identified multiple exoplanets in ranges from their stars that might be able to support the conditions for life light years away.
However, presuming no government cover up of actual human interactions with actual extraterrestrial life, the only “evidence” we have of actual extraterrestrial life existing are anecdotes from people who may well have mistaken manmade technology/biological experiments, natural events or psychological dreams or hallucinations for encounters with little green men. Scientists haven’t even been able to prove replicable extraterrestrial communication in spite of many millions of dollars invested in scientific SETI research and decades of pointing telescopes in every direction in the sky, leaving skeptics dismissing it as pseudoscience.
Based on the atheist’s default position, we should *disbelieve* extraterrestrial life exists in absence of evidence proving it – otherwise you are arguing from ignorance. Without evidence, aliens should be seen as no different from God, the Tooth Fairy, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Nessie and other speculative or human-invented creatures, and people claiming they have seen them without proof should be assumed to be lying or crazy.
However, probabilistically speaking, believing extraterrestrial life exists *even in the absence of evidence* is a very logical hypothesis given the sheer quantity of solar systems and potential exoplanets supporting life. In fact, it is extraordinarily likely there are planets with more evolved and intelligent life than us, given many solar systems are older than ours, and some planets may have fortunately avoided extinction events that reset evolution. It would not be unreasonable to presume that intelligent life somewhere has probably figured out the physics of space travel better than we have, and possibly know how to traverse vast distances that seem beyond the realm of physics and technology. But that is all speculation without evidence.
Unless humans go to every possible life-supporting exoplanet in every galaxy and confirm there isn’t life there, we can’t definitively prove the claim “there is no ET life.” Conversely, unless we receive a coherent signal or visit from ET life, or develop technology to traverse across light years until we find an exoplanet with life we can’t definitively prove the claim “there is ET life.”
In spite of arguing from ignorance, very rational people will look at the odds and err on the side of the believing in ET life because it seems most likely, and consider the ramifications of the possible existence of aliens. Until we encounter intelligent life, we can’t know their form, their intentions, their ethics, their technological capabilities, etc. or definitively, if they exist at all. Making preparations for possible eventual contact or visitation, and advancing our own technology and defense capabilities against an unproven alien threat is a rather rational consideration that would benefit and advance humanity. Thus you can’t dismiss the leap to that belief as meaningless or inconsequential.
Many theists posit arguments for an intelligent designer because alternative ideas seem probabilistically less likely and equally unproven to them (*note: I am not advocating for any specific religion’s supposition of a specific Creator God, most of which are misaligned with known science, rendering the cosmological/teleological arguments incoherent.*) The Big Bang is an event that scientific consensus says most likely resulted in the current configuration of the universe, but there is plenty of room to predict there was divine design, fine tuning and intention behind the scenes, because the alternative seems to be that nature spontaneously self-generated.
In either case (God or aliens), why must the default position be disbelief in the absence of hard evidence? Wouldn’t it be more rational to default to a belief based on whatever theory seems to have the highest probability after weighing all alternative theories in light of current evidence?
>However, presuming no government cover up of actual human interactions with actual extraterrestrial life, the only “evidence” we have of actual extraterrestrial life existing are anecdotes from people who may well have mistaken manmade technology/biological experiments, natural events or psychological dreams or hallucinations for encounters with little green men. Scientists haven’t even been able to prove replicable extraterrestrial communication in spite of many millions of dollars invested in scientific SETI research and decades of pointing telescopes in every direction in the sky, leaving skeptics dismissing it as pseudoscience.
This is false for two reasons,
1-not anything you mention is evidence for extraterrestrial life.
2-There is evidence for life in the universe existing, we are evidence of life existing in the universe and have a planet full with examples of more life.
So te possibility of life existing in this universe has been demonstrated, the possibility of intelligent beings has been demonstrated, their existence outside of this planet is a possibility.
Can you show god is possible to exist as we can show life is possible to exist in this universe?
Because we don’t have any evidence for any kind of supernatural being that is not on equal footing with what you claimed to be “evidence” for aliens.
>the only “evidence” we have of actual extraterrestrial life existing are anecdotes from people who may well have mistaken manmade technology/biological experiments, natural events or psychological dreams or hallucinations for encounters with little green men
Which is exactly why I am extremely skeptical of claims of alien civilizations visiting earth. The evidence for such events is flimsy at best, and requires the aliens be deliberately hiding there existence for unclear reasons.
>It would not be unreasonable to presume that intelligent life somewhere has probably figured out the physics of space travel better than we have, and possibly know how to traverse vast distances that seem beyond the realm of physics and technology.
Alien civilizations, if they exist, are still bound by the laws of physics. It may very well be the case that FTL travel is impossible. Meaning that no civilization no matter how advanced can go faster than light speed. This would limit the expansion rate of any advanced space faring civilization, and also means that it would take an aliens lifetimes to actually reach earth should they discover us and choose to visit.
As for the biggest point of this debate. I am agnostic when it comes to the existence of alien life. I don’t believe and I don’t not believe. I believe that alien life is possible and quite likely exists somewhere in the universe, since there is one case of life evolving naturally on earth. Statically in a universe so large, if it happened once it likely happened again.
With God on the other hand, there is no examples of Gods existing in nature. Life has been proven to exist, God has not, and God has many logical flaws, that I am sure I have brought up in the pasts in previous posts.
But you are correct with one thing. Unless we find another planet with life, we can not be certain that we are not alone.
Another point I wanted to bring up, is you only seemed to consider intelligent alien life in your arguments. Ignoring that throughout most of earths history, the planet had no intelligent life. I think it is more likely that if there are nearby worlds with aliens life, there may not be intelligent life on them.
I think the issue here is that the argument for alien life and the argument for a god are not in the same categories. We know life exists, we know a lot of the conditions necessary for life, how it works, etc etc. Life, biology, chemistry, all that aren’t in question here. Belief here is more akin to thinking that at some point various gold medal achievements in sports will be beaten. Sure we might be at the human limit on some with an achievement that will never be exceeded but who knows.
Gods or a god meanwhile are not nearly in the same category. This isn’t like suggesting because Zeus is real maybe Apollo or Thor is. Every single one of them has no examinable existence as far we can tell. They have nothing at all equivalent to the fact that life exists. Probabilities at least to some degree require known values and actual knowledge to base things on. While inexact life provides some of that. Gods meanwhile provide nothing we can base that on.
I think that if we find out, somehow, that life *only exists on Earth* and nowhere else in the universe, that would be the final nail in the coffin of all “abiogenesis” fantasies.
An atheist, at that point, would be forced to admit that life on Earth is almost 100% certainly the result of God’s direct intervention.
There would be no other possible rational way for life to occur only in 1 planet and not, by an analogue mechanism, in any other planet between trillions of trillions.
There is life on Earth, so it’s possible there could be life elsewhere. That’s a big piece of evidence that I don’t feel theists have an equivalent of in their arguments for God.
Ok first let’s ignore belief and semantics and focus on the base of this argument. Statistics.
The drake equation is fairly simple and upfront. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation.
Every part can be broken down and represented and we are able to make a guess. While this might have errors we do have valid support for an argument by using a rational methodology and approach.
Now finding a supposed error in our arguments about religion does not create your God equation from thin air. Your making a claim but I fail to see your God equation. You cannot claim your beliefs are superior without even the decency of making your argument using probability and statistics. In short you fail for not showing your work.
There is plenty of evidence of the possibility of are terrestrial life. There is life here, in earth.
There is no evidence of god.
Think is is very much an induction/deduction problem. We can infer from all of the evidence that life is probable in locations other than the earth, the criteria for it is really quite broad and things like hydro-thermal vents are pretty mind boggling.
God on the other hand is pure deduction, you have to start with the premise ‘god’ and work back to the particulars, few theists would expect to start with observation and lead to the conclusion, its simply not how it works.
The first flaw in your case is that atheists in general neither believe extraterrestrial life exists nor do they believe it does not exist. The only thing atheism implies is that one does not believe in a God or gods.
I personally suspect there is a good chance that some sort of life exists on other planets around other stars, but obviously I don’t know that. There is a chance this could be proven in my lifetime if extraterrestrial life is actually discovered, although as you point out disproving it could be difficult or impossible.
The Fermi paradox is basically the intelligent alien life equivalent of the divine hiddenness problem: if intelligent aliens exist why don’t we know about them. However if you are talking about ANY sort of life, not just advanced alien civilizations, there’s a big difference between that and the existence of a God. Which is that the God of most religions supposedly WANTS to be believed in and worshipped, and as such would reasonably be expected a God who wants this to make its presence know to everyone and be capable of doing so. That supports a belief that no such God exists. If unintelligent life exists in a galaxy far far away, the reason it hasn’t informed us of its presence would simply be that it can’t and wouldn’t care to do so anyways.
Another difference is that we know life exists in many forms on THIS planet. A belief in the existence of life on other planets is believing in something we know is possible, whereas we don’t know that ANYTHING supernatural exists or have any reason to believe it is even possible.
A final difference would be that I don’t worship aliens which I don’t know exist or look to them for moral guidance.
We also haven’t observed any pebbles or ice outside of our solar system, but our knowledge of how pebbles and ice forms is enough to make us close to 100% that there are. The formation of life is no different in kind. It’s just a much rarer phenomeon. We know that planets can form and that life can form on planets. The rest is just an estimation about how often the various conditions occur.
There’s literally nothing like that for the formation of the universe. We have no idea what processes led to its formation. In fact, the idea of a cause or process leading to the Big Bang may just be incoherent if it is the beginning of time. We also do not know that a universe has formed more than once. If there are any objective probabilities governing the formation of the universe, we have no idea of what they are or how to estimate them. Anything offered in that regard is wild speculation. The arguments given by theists are not frequentist. They simply can’t be because we have no knowledge of the relevant frequencies. The total number of universes could be anywhere between 1 and aleph omega for all we know. It’s easy to p-hack to your conclusion if you literally only have one datum.
Whatever “probabilistic” arguments theists offer are really just Bayesian reconstructions of abdutctive reasoning. Basically, it’s what they think your credences (subjective degrees of belief/confidence) *should* be given their metaphysical intuitions about what facts need to be explained and what counts as a good explanation for them.
The problem is that they can literally offer no real explanations. There is no account of how God is supposed to have caused abiogenesis. Does he manifest tiny hands and pull the right molecules together? Can we empirically detect his tiny hands if we watch long enough, or is he sneaky and makes sure to never do it if we’re watching. I suspect the latter as it will make the view immune to dis-confirmation.
Nor is there any account of how God is supposed to have finely tuned the constants aside from “something something *logos*”. Does this mean that he types the laws of physics into code on a computer and runs the program? If so, where does the computer exist? Hyper-spacetime? Where did the hyper-spacetime come from? A hyper-hyper computer? Is it hyper-Gods all the way down?
Classical theists say God is perfectly simple and eternal and doesn’t act and cannot be positively concieved of at all in and of himself. As such, it is in principle impossible for them to give anything like an explanation for the mechanisms through which God created the universe because God cannot behave in any sort of mechanistic way. Pretty much all causation and everything that enters into any causal relationship that we understand is contingent and creaturely in exactly the way that the arguments say demands an explanation. They can’t offer any explanations of the sort that are used to build things or cure diseases. Instead, classical theists are forced to fall back upon Aristotelian notions of causation that were basically disregarded during the scientific revolution precisely because they have no use outside of metaphysics and theology. Not quite special pleading, but close enough.
I’m puzzled how some theists manage to attach probabilities to their religious claims. Its ludicrous! You can construct the most sophisticated Bayesian formulae ever seen, but at the end of the day they are useless if you don’t have any data points. From what I’ve seen, these theists just choose arbitrary numbers based on their intuition and then expect their equations to magically turn these numbers into something meaningful
No. There is just a very high likelyhood for extraterrestrial life to exist, that what people “believe” in. This high likelyhood is not given for deities.
>Wouldn’t it be more rational to default to a belief based on whatever theory seems to have the highest probability after weighing all alternative theories in light of current evidence?
But isn’t that exactly what’s happening? Ignoring evidence, there is not a single valid argument that would lead us to a god. For example, Intelligent design mostly stems from anthropomorphic arrogance (hurr durr, we and our place in the universe are so special!!!)
And even arguments like the cosmological argument only lead to the conclusion that the universe has been created and then it makes a jump and just assumes that that cause was a being (god) That is fallacious.
You’ve mentioned UFO sightings and supposed “highjackings” in your post and of course those are bullshit or imagination. But when we talk about the existence of aliens, we don’t talk about little green men watching us from their spaceships. Even a single bacterium below titan’s surface would be alien life.
I’ve already talked about anthropomorphic arrogance earlier, but a thing we have to keep in mind is that life isn’t “special” on a molecular level. We are made of the same stuff and go through similar processes that non-living things go through. We are bound by the same laws and affected by the same events.
We don’t have to assume something completely new like supernatural/mystic energies, immaterialistic beings, etc. to discuss the likelyness of Alien life.
Now, if you are talking about advanced alien civilisations, who visit us regularly, I agree with you. Belief in those is no different than belief in god but Alien life begins at unicellular beings.
>However, presuming no government cover up of actual human interactions with actual extraterrestrial life, the only “evidence” we have of actual extraterrestrial life existing are anecdotes from people who may well have mistaken manmade technology/biological experiments, natural events or psychological dreams or hallucinations for encounters with little green men.
>
>Scientists haven’t even been able to prove replicable extraterrestrial communication in spite of many millions of dollars invested in scientific SETI research and decades of pointing telescopes in every direction in the sky, leaving skeptics dismissing it as pseudoscience.
You seem to be confusing scientific endeavour in this field with ‘Aliens stole Elvis’ type stories.
You are correct that the latter should be questioned. Just as it should be questioned if someone slapped ‘this is a religion now’ over the stories.
>Based on the atheist’s default position, we should *disbelieve* extraterrestrial life exists in absence of evidence proving it – otherwise you are arguing from ignorance.
No. We should withhold judgement. We can consider that life elsewhere than earth is likely or even probable to exist, the likelihood is far more complex than merely multiplying the numbers of earth-like planets out there x years they would have had for biogenesis to occur, I’m not sure those scientists you mention working in this field studied and qualified to spend their days beyond the first day at work with their feet up on a desk waiting for a little green man to pop in and say hi.
Do I believe intelligent aliens exist? No. Do I disbelieve it? No.
Look, life exists, we know this. I assume we can even agree on this. You might ‘know’ god/s exist, I don’t.
It is reasonable for one who holds a view that life began via biogenesis on this planet that later evolved into intelligent life to examine possibilities did the same on other planets where conditions were similar. This doesn’t mean they became more advanced, or less advanced. It doesn’t preclude that life was wiped out in some natural disaster, or the intelligent component didn’t wipe itself out with some kind of nuclear war, or that this life is at a much much earlier stage of development than we are.
If other life exists, it had different evolutionary pressures, it may be no more than fish. It may even be no more than bacteria.
But we KNOW life exists.
When we know god/s exist, we can compare probabilities, to me the probability of the biblical god actually existing and giving a flying fuck what I do with the genitals it gave me is effectively zero.
Could I be wrong? Sure.
I have yet to come across any reasons to convince me otherwise though.
There’s a chance that life emerges on a planet when the conditions are right as witnessed by our example.
There are a gazillion of planets orbiting stars in the habitable zone so the odds are looking good.
Could we overestimating those odds? Yes, it could be that our conditions here are so special that they would be expected once or less per universe.
In that case, chances are we are alone.
It’s really just an estimate but I think it’s much more likely that there is a good chance we are not alone.
It seems that you are suggesting that atheists who think it possible/probable that life exists elsewhere but don’t accept that the existence of god is possible/probable are being inconsistent.
So it is wrong to view the evidence, physical evidence for living things in the universe as increasing the probability that other living things are also in the universe while dismissing that philosophical arguments, that aren’t known to be sound and/or valid, increase the probability of an ill defined, not demonstrated to be at all possible being existing?
Call me wrong then, I guess.
I know of at least one planet supporting life. I can imagine what extraterrestial carbon based life would look like, and I have a rough idea of how and where it could emerge. I don’t know of any gods. I don’t really understand a concept of god beyond some childish hyperbole of “a dude who is the strongest and goodest and the bestest and made everything!”. I have no idea how to determine where we could search for a god and what it would take to emerge.
What are the “probabilistic arguments for the existence od god”? And how do you even start counting the chances, if you have zero gods as your starting point?
The good news is that your title/headline is correct – I agree 100%.
>*Many atheists believe in extraterrestrial life without any evidence based on probabilities*
You are exactly right. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial life. We’ve observed life evolving on a planet once so even ignoring all physics, we *are* evidence that the probability of life evolving on a planet circling a star is non-zero. I like reading SciFi novels so I like to imagine that there is intelligent life out there, but I’ll admit that’s wishful thinking – all we know for sure is that it’s physically possible because it’s happened once.
>*but dismiss probabilistic arguments for God as arguments from ignorance.*
That’s also true; most such arguments arbitrarily assign a non-zero probability to an arbitrary hypothesis and are properly dismissed as arguments from ignorance. We have never observed a deity so there is no evidence that the probability of a deity existing anywhere in the universe is non-zero. In fact we have clear evidence that deity myths are fabricated by humans. History is an unending laundry list of deities being invented by humans across the ages and across cultures. Just check out the Mormons or Scientology for a few recent successfully propagated deity myths. So there’s not just a lack of evidence that deities are real – there is massive evidence that deities are fake and therefore no basis on which to assign a non-zero probability.
Again I freely admit to biasing my personal view of the probability of aliens’ actually existing based on the entertaining but fictitious books I read. If only religious adherents would admit the same.
No, some atheists believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, based on the demonstrable fact that life exists on a planet in the universe and could well do so on one of the planets that orbit the billions of stars we know exist elsewhere in the universe. This is clearly not based on ignorance.
Belief in the supernatural on the other hand is based on what? Fear and ignorance.
>Astronomers have identified multiple exoplanets in ranges from their stars that might be able to support the conditions for life light years away.
Correct
>the only “evidence” we have of actual extraterrestrial life existing are anecdotes from people who may well have mistaken manmade technology/biological experiments, natural events or psychological dreams or hallucinations for encounters with little green men.
No, the fact that we exist means life can occur (as far as we know) naturally. The only question is how specific do things have to line up for “complex chemistry” to become life. We don’t really know, but even if it is a trillion to 1 shot their are an insane number of planets in the universe. Either it is the case that life is the single most unlikely thing to ever occur ever, or there is life on other planets. Evidence is anything in favor of one thing. Probability counts as evidence.
>Based on the atheist’s default position, we should *disbelieve* extraterrestrial life exists in absence of evidence proving it –
Yea, you should. There is compelling evidence for the existence of alien life, however. The sheer number of tries the universe gets to make life. That counts. Whether that is convincing or not is up to the individual, but it is evidence.
>Making preparations for possible eventual contact or visitation, and advancing our own technology and defense capabilities against an unproven alien threat is a rather rational consideration that would benefit and advance humanity.
No, it wouldn’t be. The speed of light is the absolute speed limit of our universe. The clostest star is 3(ish) light years away, so if life is rare individual civilizations will literally never interact with each other, ever. Odds are, every alien civilization thinks they are alone even if the universe has life every 10th star. This is tangential to the main point, but I thought I should address it anyway.
>Many theists posit arguments for an intelligent designer because alternative ideas seem probabilistically less likely and equally unproven to them
How, exactly, do you assign probabilities to competing hypotheses? Like what are the odds String Theory is correct? How do you get at a number there.
In addition, those arguments are bad, like really bad.
>but there is plenty of room to predict there was divine design, fine tuning and intention behind the scenes, because the alternative seems to be that nature spontaneously self-generated.
Claims stand or fall by there own merrits, not by “competing” with others. Either the argument for fine tuning is convincing or it isn’t, what other ideas are floating around are irrelevant. It is perfectly OK to not be convinced there is a God or the universe is self-generated. “I don’t know” is the default position.
>Wouldn’t it be more rational to default to a belief based on whatever theory seems to have the highest probability after weighing all alternative theories in light of current evidence?
I repeat, how do you assign odds to competing hypotheses?
There’s a big difference in postulating the existence of extraterrestrial life and postulating the existence of spaceless, timeless, immaterial wizards that routinely break the laws of physics who can can conjure up whole galaxies with ‘a snap of its finger’
And theists who try use probabilistical arguments for gods existence like the fine tuning argument, don’t seem to understand probability theory. You cant infer the probability of something happening if you only have a sample of size 1. Its equivalent to me drawing a ball from a bucket of balls. And then me trying estimate the probability of drawing another ball of the same color without knowing anything about the color of the remaining balls in the bucket
This comes down to a problem of background knowledge. The atheist is going to think that a theistic hypothesis doesn’t align with their background knowledge, and thus they set the prior probability of theism as a theory as very low, but they have the background knowledge of life and a potentially infinite fine-tuned universe, so they set the prior probability of aliens as rather high (I’m thinking poker odds/1/5ish chance or higher). This might not be their conscious thought process, but that’s how people generally do implicit probability work. Even if the probability of design is high given theism, the prior probability of theism is going to be very low since the atheist considers it a weird and improbable belief. That’s why the best arguments for God are generally focused less on pure deduction and more on defending a model of God, and then making predictions based off that model a la Swinburne.
Intelligence design is poor attempt to shoe horn god into the perceived gap of evolution. Except it’s worse by every metric lol. When confronted with ID it’s best to laugh and move on, it’s a pain in the ass to argue someone out of an irrational position when not arrived at via rational methods, let alone some deluded into thinking their irrational reliefs are rational.
We know life exists. We know the conditions for life, and how they come about. We can look around for anything vaguely similar and make an estimate against the absurdly large amount of planets we believe to be in the universe.
We could do the same thing for god, but the ‘doesn’t exist’ pile will be pretty damn big, and that pattern probably won’t give you an answer you like rofl.
Here’s the thing: we know life exists. We know the sun isn’t the center of the galaxy or universe or anything, so we assume it isn’t special. Let’s say you grab a random sandwich from a table and it’s chicken.
Two people then make claims. One says there are probably other chicken sandwiches there. Yeah, probably. You just grabbed a random sandwich. There are several billion other sandwiches there. Maybe you got the only chicken sandwich, buuuut probably not.
Other guy says that there’s probably a unicorn sandwich in there. Well, you’ve never seen a unicorn. You’ve never seen a unicorn sandwich. The guy saying this has also never seen a unicorn ever in their life but insists there is one on the table.
Now either one of them could be right or wrong, or both could be right or both could be wrong, but you know, without any reason to think Earth is special, it makes sense to assume there are other planets with life. And if we knew there were gods on earth, it’d make sense to assume there were other gods on other planets.
i think the default position is innocence of the proposition. the proposition god exist is either true or false and from a position of innocence, one is presented by justifications eitherway and then gets convinced thus holds belief in the proposition being true or false.