What if? (religious reaction to extraterrestrial life)

my take is that YEC type fundamentalism would have some serious thinking to do.On the other hand the ID faith would not technically have problems with it, but it would be interesting to see them respond.Others know the door frame is not the doorway.heh.This message has been edited by RAZD, 08-30-2004 07:40 PM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Probably with many of them. I am not surprised by anything anymore. My Faith never wavers!

OK...I will speak as one of the "religious" community that you mention. Note, however, that you did not specifically say "creationists". I believe that God created the Universe, but I am not a strict creationist like Ken Hamm.
1) Contact was made with an extraterrestial civilization? Great. I would be as cautious with them as you would be about relating to any outside influence in your life. I would be nice to them, however.
2) A life form was discovered on Mars?== So what? It would be basic. All life STILL originates with God. Yep. The only one that comes to mind that I have heard about was this one: And I could see the strict religious extremists run with this one if a U.F.O. or aliens were discovered. Many Christians believe that all U.F.O. sightings are demonic manifestations. While this sounds intellectually naive, I would ask why it is so easy to accept a U.F.O. and so hard to accept a "spiritual reality"?
3) Science is able to create a crude form of life in the laboratory?== You mean, recreate or replicate. Science cannot even cure the common cold!
4) Medical science discovers a means of extending hman life
indefinitely?== And? If one lives 20 years or 200, one still needs to know what they believe and what they are here for. Good point, Ned. I agree. I think that this can be done on an individual level, as I have done for myself, yet hardly on a societal level. Its like trying to prove love. Love, though it exists, cannot really be proven. No, I think that it is merely absolutist to believe that our God is the center of the Universe..not at all arrogant...somewhat humbling, actually.God is not a product of human imagination. We are His product. So would be the aliens.

Curious that no-one asked the question "what if their religion was the same as ___________" (fill in the blank)?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Which contradicts creationism. Is that what you wanted to say?Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Are you thinking that *because* there is only "one" form (of life) that that is how and why you thought and think life off Earth is possibly probable?I have no confidence in projecting my understanding of life from here to somewhere else. The general scientific literature led me to THINK that when I got beyond the Heart of Darkness in Congo etc ( I went to Africa in '86)that my intution of life on Earth would 'expand'. The spectral color incorporation in soma was all I noticed but this is not even easily significant intraspecifically but rather "looks" only like behahvior differemces. So OUTSIDE my own ideas of this ONE LIFE I was misled by scienitific discussion infered or induced by others as to the additions to any life. May I note that if you really try to understand Agassiz's Essay on Classification,
Questia
one can see that the creationist in him finds life divided essentially so that IF LIFE is found on another alien planent then it might simply expand our understanding of life on Earth and not indicate that we have then (if) another version (aka Silicon, Mercury, Boron etc) of life to study. And more modernly I ASKED ERNST MAYR to just attach a NUMBER UNIQUELY to each sample of Musuem specimens with a suggestion on how this might be done but he, himself took that in this sense of MORE THAN ONE LIFE.Peter had noted the physical environment in a way that makes THIS THINKING to be not amenable to notions of say Sagan on likelyhoods of other planet life. I will describe the difficulites - in thought - later. I did not follow Razd's response.So if you thought

quote:

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I think there is a high probability that we will find life in the solar system.
I think it is near certain that we will someday find life outside our solar system.

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regardless of 'the rules' here, did you have any feeling that you could re-express this by other than saying that while I might not feel this way- you do and did?? I have given time and time again reason to think that life might thermally operate by different rules, rules that if true would likely (in this sense of rules here on Earth)show that Wolfram was mistaken about irreducible complexity (eg once one has one basic set of equilvalent sophistication it is set for any or all in every materialism).This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 09-01-2004 10:24 AM

Brad, I would love to answer you if I had any idea of what the question was.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Modern science is making remarkable progress in may areas. The question is what would be the reaction
I gave Mayr's reaction in terms of the question of progress to my own sense.of the religious community
I cited Agassiz to ostensibly indicate such a community (so that we could have something to talk about).
if any of the following were to happen :
1) Contact was made with an extraterrestial civilization?
I noticed you thought it was possible in terms of actually observing this event sometime in the future
2) A life form was discovered on Mars? You also seemed to indicate life somewhere off Earth.
3) Science is able to create a crude form of life in the laboratory? you noted what you thought by "basic laws" but I have always on this board showed an alternative that I have developed further by using Russian biology.
4) Medical science discovers a means of extending hman life
indefinitely? I thought this in the use of numbers "one" or "two" and I asked you if you only felt this way or if you had something other than a "gut feeling" on the rejection, implict, in my own hypothesis of extending the c/e nexus via thermal properties, as for me but I worded it interms of YOUR experience so you could simply respond for instance, "No, Brad- that is just how I feel about it!"I take it the question was what would be the relgious reaction "if" or without 'if' so by answering, "Yes, that is how I feel", I take it would have answered the question. So I FOR ONE, dont know how or why you cant find a or the question inhere.

Well, thanks for the reply Brad. I must admit though that I'm still as confused as ever.I'm old and slow so you may have to ask plain simple questions of me.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Err..Brad, I would agree with jar. Pretend as if you were addressing a room of children, and break the idea down into oreo size bits...then we can chomp on it.

Odd signal from a galaxy far, far awaySam Jones
Thursday September 2, 2004
The GuardianHad it happened once, it would have been interesting. Twice would have been a bit of a coincidence. But scientists believe a strange radio signal from space spotted three times last year could be a message from another world.
The signal has only been observed for about a minute in total, not long enough to allow astronomers to analyse closely.But it is unlikely to be the result of any radio interference or noise, and does not resemble an astronomical object.Some say the signal could have been produced by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon, or a glitch in the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico that picked it up.Those involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti) think otherwise.The signal is the most exciting find in the six-year history of the Setihome project, which uses programmes running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through the vast amount of data from Arecibo."It's the most interesting signal from Setihome," said radio astronomer Dan Werthaimer from the University of California at Berkeley. "We are not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."The signal, which has been honoured with the decidedly unexotic name SHGbo2+14a, has a frequency of about 1420MHz, says New Scientist, one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, absorbs and emits energy.Some scientists say aliens trying to introduce themselves would be likely to transmit at this frequency.The signal appears to be coming from between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years.Eric Korpela, another University of California researcher, said: "We are looking for something that screams out 'artificial'. This just doesn't do that, but it could be because it is distant."The signal has a rapidly fluctuating frequency, which could occur if it was beamed out from a rapidly spinning planet or object, although a planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to produce the same drift. A drifting signal would be expected to have a different frequency each time it was detected.Yet with every observation of SHGbo2+14a, the signal has started off with a frequency of 1420MHz before starting to drift - although this could be connected to the telescope.Another possibility is that someone could be hacking into the software. But Mr Korpela says he cannot think of any way to fake such a signal.

If an Alien group were contacted and communication and information exchange established, who would get to talk to them? Perhaps a Reality T.V. show?

OK-
Was it a "problem" in WRITING a religIous response?This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 09-02-2004 11:59 AM

OK, Brad. Lets back up a bit. Here is Jars original post that you responded to: Then, you respond to this post like this: Jar and I had trouble understanding you. I don't know about jar, but here is what I find confusing:
1) what do you mean by "The spectral color incorporation in soma was all I noticed but this is not even easily significant intraspecifically but rather "looks" only like behahvior differemces.(?) And who is Agassiz?
2)Who is Ernst Mayr?
3) What is your point?
Sorry, Brad. I'm just a simple mind...Maybe I'm picking on you too much...BTW I just looked at your other posts on this forum and the internet...you are way intellegent and, perhaps, just find it hard to relate to simple minds like myself! respectfully,PhatboyThis message has been edited by Phatboy, 09-02-2004 10:19 PM

1)my whole next post was dedicated to this part. I will try to abbreviate the contenxt since you asked in particular. There is an idea of "insight" in nature study that can be documented against Kant but by the time I was born my Grandfather had noticed that there was a "super-imposed" specutrum when the culture of scientists as well as the science was considered. But WhAT? would it have been said in the 60s to have been superimosed on, if that was more than a mere figurative saying. Well, Sheppard in the book Natural Selection and Genetics" spoke of BIRDS having an "eye-in" for a predator but my Grandfather a decade later had applied this to gregarious humans noting that NOT ALL SCIENTISTS agreed with the trend to disembody this 'eye'. This is nothing other today than opening a websight and postiig a response. But then it applied to ecosystems in the biological sense NOT the information technology sense of our way so say...Well in 1986 I went to Africa and I SAW that butterfies, fish birds and some reptiles had MORE diffraction caused color extensions than what I had seen previously (in NORTH AMERICA) but I did not find more plants and animals as a tangled bush as Darwin said and was popularized in Natural History books about the upper reaches of the Orinoco etc. The job I was doing at the time was to Differentiate *ANY* morphological differences in Fishermen's ELECTRIC FISH and after a couple of months I could not use shape differences in the phenotype to divide what I was clearly collecting from different fishermen&locations in Lac Tumba so I decided to try to use the distibution of the diffraction caused color enhancments soma locations coupled with collection locality geography and "ecology" to try to divide the fish population cosistently . The graduage student from Cornell THEN tested these divisions to see if the electric waveforms were different. I was able to VISUALLY MORPHOLOGICALLY CONTINUE TO FIND MORE DIVERSE FISH BASED ON spectral color differences than the social context the research was done in and that is what I meant by "significant intraspecifically" but this was restricted to the Family Mormyridae and DID NOT APPLY TO ALL THE CREATURES IN THE AFRICAN JUNGLE.Ernst Mayr is an ornithologist who corresponded with my Grandfather, is the brunt of much of Croizat's notions on New Guinea, a convert from Lamarkainsm, someone I spoke with in 87, one of Gould's teachers and a professor at Harvard who recently was celebrated. If you didnt know this and or bother to find ou
Ernst Mayr - Wikipedia
t then I am afraid even Jar would have suspected as much.I already MADE my point>........... I just wanted Jar to try to re-express himself or simply keeping this door a jar to say indeed that is JUST how he felt.PS I am not mad at you nor the ~millionaire my brother Greg is finanically compared to me in my Father's "contrary" eye he said was applied to me. The inbetween generation is mistaken. It's hard to believe but causes me to come on a bit stronger than I was gratified by which is really only satisfy but try to tell this parents this and you get sent to your room.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 09-06-2004 12:37 PM