06 December, 2010

I'll Put My Faith In God

Ever since I was old enough to remember, we've been told about the possibility of alien life forms on other planets. Hollywood made movies about alien invasions, and long before I was around, Orson Welles scared the daylights out of millions of radio listeners with his adaptation of H.G. Wells' book "War of the Worlds" as listeners thought they were actually hearing live reports of an alien invasion. The thought of aliens has always intrigued us, as we have conjured up images of little green men, or other versions of what we thought an alien might look like. 


Last week, NASA had a special news conference to announce that they believe they have now actually encountered alien life forms, but that we have had it wrong. Apparently, ET may look more like a single celled bacteria, and has been found at the bottom of a lake in California. The scientist have observed that this tiny, microscopic creatures live in thermal vents at the bottom of this lake, and somehow exist and thrive in an environment which is rich in arsenic and phosphorus. They have experimented with this life form and slowly weaned the bacteria off of phosphorus leaving them to live off of arsenic. In doing so, they say the saw a measured change in the makeup of the cellular chemistry in the bacteria. From this, they have now come up with the theory that if these bacteria can morph its DNA to consume arsenic in the absence of phosphorus, that this "weird life"  which is made up of building blocks that has been unknown in our current knowledge and exist on earth, then it could also do so anywhere else in the universe. 


Confused? Me too.  I'm questioning, "How do you make such a huge leap based from this new knowledge? OK, it has previously been unknown to us, but that means "undiscovered" not from an alien planet. Consider that in the past few months around the world there have been brand new discoveries, such as a new species of squid, a new species of frog, several new species of fish, a new flesh eating plant discovered in Cambodia... and these are just a few of the hundreds of discoveries found every month around this planet. Wouldn't it be just as easy to say that these frogs, or fish are aliens as it is to claim that this bacteria is an alien life form? Yet people are eating this news up as a gospel fact... with a giant, blind leap of faith.


Consider that these are the same people who absolutely scoff at the notion of God, and talk about the incredible amount of faith it would take to believe in a god. Yet, these same knuckleheads have no trouble taking this incredible leap of faith to believe that because this bacteria was previously unknown to us, it just HAD to come from another planet. Somehow that makes sense to them. But no one is asking, "How did it get here?" No one is asking how is it possible that we never knew about these frogs, fish, plants, birds and so on... maybe they are actually aliens. Makes just about as much sense to me.


They not only believe this... they expect us to believe it. Sorry, but I'm not willing to jump off that cliff of faith. Faith in God makes a whole lot more sense to me than what they are spouting off. In short, they are saying to us, "This life exists here, so it could also exist on other planets."  This is nothing new. Hundreds of years ago Epicurus wrote in a letter to Herodotus, "There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. We must believe that in all other worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world."  He was saying because life exists here, it therefore must exist elsewhere. The problem with that type of thinking is that now, centuries after Epicurus' hypothesis, we have the technology to see further and more clearly into the universe than ever before, and we still have no evidence of life on any other planet. There simply is no reason to believe there is life out there. Man simply assumes there must be since there are so many planets out there that the mathematical probability leads you to believe that life almost has to exist somewhere else.


OK...  I get the logic of science and I understand the mathematical equations. But they are still asking me to simply believe... by faith... that life must be out there.


I simply choose to put my faith in God. It is far easier for me to believe, "what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life." (1 John 1:1)  

1 comment:

jack69 said...

I had the same thoughts when I read of the discovery. They went wild in their imagination and have a microb to go on! Amazing!