Do Aliens Exist?

Speedwell said:

It's not a theory, merely a speculation. without hard evidence there can be no theory.

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Theory is based on assumption, and not hard evidence. Hard evidence is when you have physical proof, like a murder victims blood on your knife.
Speculation is fantasy, it's devoid of any evidence and it belongs in the realm of fantasy.

Kylie said:

Just that the conditions for life - planet, liquid water, etc - seem to be fairly common.

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There are something like 1000 conditions necessary for biological life to exist. I have no problem with some pond slime existing somewhere in the universe, as it's existence is utterly useless and insignificant in anyone's language.
There's a great documentary on this very subject, it answers all the questions. I know most people don't want to know the truth, as one famous actor said "you can't handle the truth" I'm sure your not one of those people. I don't expect you to watch it, I'm only suggesting it incase your interested in astronomy.

Dan1988 said:

Theory is based on assumption...

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Not the way the term is used by scientists. In science, a theory is a well-evidenced and thoroughly tested explanation for a phenomenon.

Hard evidence is when you have physical proof, like a murder victims blood on your knife.

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Right--the kind of evidence necessary to turn speculation into a theory.

Since their emergence in the First World, the Hopi and their ancestors remained in a close relationship with Kachinas, who White Bear defined as “initiated, highly ranked, esteemed beings.”

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Kachinas can manifest visibly or invisibly, but White Bear made it clear that these beings come from locations vastly distant from Earth.

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In ancient times it was known among certain people that intelligent beings had come from space and helped cultivate mankind out of its primitive state …

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Earth Cataclysms And The Hopi Kachinas, Saviours From Space

jamesbond007 said:

It is a religion of no theism and no moralism.

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It's not a religion, by definition - check any dictionary.

If there is no God, then there aren't any moral obligations or behavior due to said God/gods.

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Correct, we are not beholden to, nor do we abrogate moral decisions to, the fictitious moral whims of capricious imaginary gods. We have a personal moral responsibility towards our fellow humans and our societies. The statistics suggest that this is a better, more peaceful way; the more secular a society, the lower the levels of murder and violent crime, and conversely, the more religious, the higher those levels (the US being a particularly good example).

Is it any wonder that they aren't bothered with no evidence of what they believe such as aliens and abiogenesis?

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Science isn't a question of belief, but of probabilities and levels of confidence based on empirical evidence.

We can put their cosmology of the multiverses in that category. It's basically a pseudoscientific explanation of evolution that the religiously subscribe to.

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Multiverses are predictions of well-tested, well-established scientific theories.

You're omitting a big part of it. I thought it was in reference to the continued search for aliens in our solar system by NASA and SETI.

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I explained what I meant.

Christians have evidence for God and creation with the discovery of the Bible and Genesis. It explains how the big bang or beginning of the universe happened.

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If those old texts are evidence for God and creation, then every other ancient origin myth is evidence for their respective gods or mythical creator beasts, and creations - and the Harry Potter books are evidence for wizards and magic.

We have Kalam's Cosmological Argument. We have a planet covered with 3/4 water due to the global flood. We have some of the greatest scientists in the history of the world which is backed up by the scientific method. We have an explanation for why different peoples speak different languages. We have an explanation for the energy that was created to power the entire universe. That's only part of it.

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All those 'arguments' & 'explanations' have been debunked many times, including in these forums; you're better off just claiming the transcendence of faith, or something similarly vague and unfalsifiable.

If you we a true agnostic, then you would be bothered by no aliens and no abiogenesis. You would be bothered by Miller-Urey experiment not being real and conclusive. You would be bothered by no discovery of intelligent aliens like ourselves.

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Not really; there are many things that we think likely to exist, given what we already know. That we haven't yet found them, or may never find them, doesn't mean they don't exist. Someone who acknowledges this is an agnostic.

Incidentally, the Miller-Urey experiment was real, and fully supported the hypothesis that putative conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors. Their primitive Earth atmosphere wasn't quite right, but it was a proof-of-concept 70-odd years ago. we've come a long way since then.

You would be bothered by social Darwinism, eugenics, the rise of Nazism, Hitler, and the Holocaust...

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I certainly am bothered by them.

You would be bothered by how a big bang could from an ordered and intelligent universe when there was no spacetime and no beginning. You would be bothered by the conservation of energy where energy is not created in our universe, but only transferred. Any thinking person would be bothered by the lack of rational answers to questions such as how did the big bang start with no spacetime and energy?

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If you learn a bit more about cosmology and physics, you'll realise that those are not the issues you think they are. We may not know how our observable universe arose, but there are a number of potential options that require no invocation of inexplicable supernatural entities - including the 4-dimensional Einsteinian 'block universe'.

JFYI, conservation of energy applies to static spacetime, whereas Einstein's General Relativity describes a dynamic spacetime (the expanding universe). Conservation of energy is an approximation that applies only at small scales of time & space (i.e. local) where the dynamic nature of spacetime isn't noticeable.

Then you are distorting what Satan said to trick Adam and Eve into the first and gravest sin.

"Satan told Eve, “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” Genesis 3:5

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In the stories, Satan is a deceiver, so the meaning is ambiguous. But they're just stories. Knowing right from wrong doesn't make you a God.

Today, the atheists know that not believing in God is a sin.

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Give it a bit more thought - they don't believe in God; do you think that not believing in, for example, Thoth or Zeus, is sinful?

Well, the Gallup poll from 2019 shows that about 40% believe in creationism while 33% think it's evolution with God's guidance. Only 22% thought it was without God. The majority believe in some form of evolution including God involved in origins and then guiding evolution. The 22% are the ones who don't care and don't have morals which follow their thinking. I think the majority want more evidence from evolution such as finding aliens and low level life elsewhere as evidence for abiogenesis. Otherwise, the difference between the moralists vs the non-moralists.

40% of Americans Believe in Creationism

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You may be surprised to hear that most of the world's Christians are not American...

Strathos said:

Actually, if one were to categorically reject any and all conspiracy theories regardless of, that could qualify as believing that there is a conspiracy to suggest that conspiracies exist. Because certainly there are such things as conspiracies, even though most of them are eventually exposed.

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1. If you reject all conspiracy theories, you will, by definition, reject the conspiracy theory that there is a conspiracy to suggest that conspiracies exist

2. Conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies do not refer to the same thing; the former typically contradicts the latter.

Anyway, I don't see how finding microbes on Mars would do anything to discredit Christianity. Just because something wasn't explicitly mentioned in the Bible doesn't mean it's not necessarily true. Same with the people who claim that the earth has to be flat for the Bible to be true.

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I agree.

coffee4u said:

While anything is possible it doesn't make any sense to me that God would create all manner of life here than randomly go to some other planet and make some other life there.

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Of course, intelligent life on another planet could say the same thing about life on Earth, with equal justification (i.e. none).

AV1611VET said:

Well we don't really know for sure either way, do we?

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The context is important - the complete lack of signs or spoor, the poor food resources, and the area required to support a breeding population undetected over thousands of years, etc., make it extremely unlikely.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

The context is important - the complete lack of signs or spoor, the poor food resources, and the area required to support a breeding population undetected over thousands of years, etc., make it extremely unlikely.

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Doesn't academia use the same arguments to say the Jews never wandered in the wilderness for forty years?

AV1611VET said:

Doesn't academia use the same arguments to say the Jews never wandered in the wilderness for forty years?

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Not in the numbers claimed.

JohnEmmett said:

Earth Cataclysms And The Hopi Kachinas, Saviours From Space

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Ah yes, Graham Handcock, a von-Daniken for our times...

Speedwell said:

Not in the numbers claimed.

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If they can't find evidence for two million Jews in the wilderness a few thousand miles away, how are they expected to find n-billion aliens on a planet light years away?

AV1611VET said:

Doesn't academia use the same arguments to say the Jews never wandered in the wilderness for forty years?

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I don't know the details, but the absence of any of the many different lines of evidence that would be expected is significant.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

I don't know the details, but the absence of any of the many different lines of evidence that would be expected is significant.

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Seeking evidence is the wrong way to seek the truth.

But seeking evidence (and failing) is a way to avoid accepting the truth.

JohnEmmett said:

Seeking evidence is the wrong way to seek the truth.

But seeking evidence (and failing) is a way to avoid accepting the truth.

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That depends how you define truth. I favour the correspondence definition, which requires evidence to establish.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

That depends how you define truth.

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The Truth Is Out There…
Earth Cataclysms And The Hopi Kachinas, Saviours From Space

It seems like too many oversimplified conclusions in here where people wanna conflate stories where Joe Smith saw E.T. in the shed in his backyard with stories where objects have multiple lines of evidence such as caught on radar, verified by multiple independent witnesses in different locations, confirmed by trained military personnel, etc...and call them all equally laughable stories that only the gullible eat up.

Speedwell said:

Not the way the term is used by scientists. In science, a theory is a well-evidenced and thoroughly tested explanation for a phenomenon. Right--the kind of evidence necessary to turn speculation into a theory.

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Thanks for the explanation, but it just doesn't make any logical sense to suggest that a theory has been thoroughly tested.
The "big bang theory", the "theory of evolution" and many other scientific theories have zero evidence to support them, so they are nothing more than fantasy.
I'm not one of those who swallows something just because it's popular, I need hard evidence and there is no hard evidence in mainstream science for most of their claims.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

1. If you reject all conspiracy theories, you will, by definition, reject the conspiracy theory that there is a conspiracy to suggest that conspiracies exist

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Not if you're a hypocrite about it.

Dan1988 said:

Thanks for the explanation, but it just doesn't make any logical sense to suggest that a theory has been thoroughly tested.
The "big bang theory", the "theory of evolution" and many other scientific theories have zero evidence to support them, so they are nothing more than fantasy.
I'm not one of those who swallows something just because it's popular, I need hard evidence and there is no hard evidence in mainstream science for most of their claims.

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There is plenty of evidence, even though you deny it.