extraterrestrials vs. god
Creationists and theists are trying to equate the search for life with a rebellion against a belief in God.
It's a newly minted theistic argument. If you believe in aliens, you should also be willing to believe in their interpretation of God by the same logic. We've never seen aliens, we have very little physical proof they exist and our belief in the abundance of alien life across the universe is based on statistics and probability. How is this different from believing in a divine being? We've also never seen one and have no proof of its existence.
However, when theists positing this argument focus on dissecting the hopeful anticipations of many space enthusiasts and scientists, they miss a very important snag in their theory. Yes, alien life is a belief at this point, not fact. But this belief is based on the probability that on some faraway planet, somewhere, abundant organic ingredients will eventually combine into a living thing.
We're not even talking about intelligent life since intelligence is more of an evolutionary fluke than some sort of mandatory requirement for survival. We're just talking about bacteria and very simple animals.
Compare an odd bacteria living on another world to an omniscient, omnipresent and immortal being that not only created our planet, but all of existence. Which one seems more likely? Oddly enough, when I offer the idea that a sufficiently advanced alien race could be mistaken for gods and that they could've created life on a far off planet as an experiment to test their theories, like we've done this year, I'm met with either silence or varying levels of resentment. I crossed the fine line between theology and science, and entered the realm of heresy.
My stance on the ancient astronaut theory, the idea that aliens created humans and our entire civilization, is that it's highly unlikely and very improbable. But you could find enough ancient artifacts of extraterrestrial origins on Earth or the Moon to prove that alien intelligences had a role in our development. Granted, the burden of proof would be enormous.
You'd need to find not only alien spacecraft but tools meant to design living things and proof that they were used to develop something found on Earth today or in the fossil record. However, improbable and very difficult don't add up to impossible. And here's where belief and skepticism differ.
For a believer, the very fact that something isn't impossible is enough to believe it. Skeptics on the other hand want to see the tangible proof before they commit to an idea. The fact that it's not improbable simply means that it's an interesting idea and if there's any evidence to it, they will certainly want to check it out. I place myself in the second camp.
