I've been following this thread with some interest and not a little amusement. This is one of those great circular debates where your point of view depends entirely on your point of view and very little is likely to shift it. Because at the end of the day there is very little hard evidence to definitively prove anything either way. Back in Newton's day scientists thought they pretty much had it licked with just a few loose ends to tie up. Now we are grappeling with relativity, sub atomic particles, quantum mechanics, the big bang and the likelyhood that there is 90 odd percent of the universe that we weren't even aware of not to mention our living on the 'Goldilocks Planet'. Still plenty of room for God or ETs or anything else.
I watched a program by Richard Dawkins where he explained Darwinian evolution and genetics to a class of teenagers and took them to the Jurassic Coast to show them rock formations and fossils and debunk the whole notion of God and religion. Afterwards the producers interviewed them and asked them what they thought and the general view was - Thank you very much, all very interesting but we still believe in God.
Either Extra Terrestrials or, for that matter, God exist or they don't. If they don't then no amount of belief, faith, wishfull thinking or unsubstantiated encounters or miracles will conjour them up. But if they do exist then no amount of scientific reasoning and logic will make them go away.
Personally, I have no problem with people believing there is more to the scheme of things than just hard facts and evidence yet to be nailed down and pidgeonholed. As has already been said, other dimensions, parallel universes, string theories etc. are all mathematical and philosophical devices cooked up to try and make what we can see and measure in the universe hang together and make sense.
I can't help thinking that aliens, UFOs, faeries, angels and the like are all rather related phenomenon whether they are a product of the way human brains work or whether there is something more external behind them.
It is interesting that there are no scientific or archeological discoveries that have disproved anything in the Bible, even that old chestnut of evolution versus creationism is based on a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what the Bible is actually saying. It is not a scientific account, it is simply saying that the heavens ie. stars etc and the Earth were created and that there were distinct periods of time when only some things existed. There was a time when no humans existed, a time when no animals lived on land etc. Which is exactly what science says. The term 'day' is translated from a Hebrew word that can mean any time period, not just 24 hours. It states Adam would die on the day he ate the fruit and yet it goes on to say a few verses later that he lived over nine hundred years. The original writer and subsequent copyists would not have been so stupid as to make such a glaring mistake if the word day had the literal meaning of 24hrs.
But I digress off the topic of extra terrestrials, but as God and the Bible have already been brought into the topic I thought I might point out a couple of interesting points.
Firstly, when God was going to create Adam he said, "Let US make man in OUR image". The implication being that there were other intelligent beings in the universe before man appeared on the scene.
Secondly it says that the sons of the true God, or the sons of gods, depending on your version came to Earth and married any daughters of Adam they chose. The result of these unions were a race of giants or Nephilim. They were the heros of old, men of renown.
Now you can dismiss this as just myths and legends but it is an almost universal part of civilisations early lor. The gods of ancient Rome, Greece and other Mediteranean people, the Norse Sagas and Celtic legends to name a few. Were they really just an attempt by neolithic and bronze age people to explain away natural phenomenon such as thunder storms? How many thunder storms would intelligent humans need to witness before they realise they are simply passing events. Or is there some reality behind it all?
|