The Aliens Are The Answer? Think Again

Euclid’s panoramic view of the Horsehead Nebula. European Space Agency via AP

Commentary

Americans, it seems, have aliens on our brains.

President Donald Trump, who has ordered the government to release files on UFOs, recently said the disclosure process has “found many very interesting documents,” and “the first releases will begin very, very soon.”

That may or may not happen before Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster “Disclosure Day” hits theaters in June. The trailer, at least, is very intense, centering on a whistleblower who has stolen data related to alien life visiting Earth and vows “full disclosure to the whole world.” Spielberg calls his film “more truth than fiction,” and the film itself promises to “upend all established order.”

Meanwhile, U.S. House Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who helped lead Congress’s 2024 hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena, has recently been on a media blitz saying that the public would be “up at night” if “the things that I’ve seen” were released.

Even the more demure former President Barack Obama has waded into the conversation. In February, he stated that, “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”

How many times have we heard that before? I first heard it in college, in the 1997 movie “Contact,” in which Jodie Foster’s character says, “the universe is a pretty big place,” so “if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

It’s a very safe argument. No hard evidence of aliens is required. It’s just a supposition, with a dash of science, that they “ought” to exist.

Yes, the universe is vast, but the logic about aliens is loaded with dubious assumptions.

First, it assumes that life evolved naturally on Earth. If so, it follows that life should evolve anywhere under the right conditions. If the universe is big enough, then “statistically,” life “must” have evolved elsewhere.

As a Christian, I would have no problem with ETs. The Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not life on other planets.

However, as a scientist, I have major reservations about the alien argument. Its first premise—that life evolved naturally—isn’t supported by compelling evidence.

That argument is presented in another new movie—not a sci-fi film but a documentary—“The Story of Everything,” produced by Sypher Films, which features scientists from the Discovery Institute (where I am also a senior fellow) and other academic institutions.

Life is a highly ordered phenomenon built on an information-rich genetic code that programs 3D-printed nanoscale cellular machines whose efficiency dwarfs any human technology. We know that intelligent agents regularly produce language-based codes and machines, but we have no experience of blind natural mechanisms creating such exceedingly complex features.

The standard rejoinder says natural selection builds complexity slowly, over time. But natural selection requires a self-replicating system, and self-replication requires molecular machines and other biomolecules that store and process information, metabolize nutrients, and protect life from environmental harm.

There is no gradual buildup to such irreducible complexity. Either all of the necessary parts are present, and you have a living cell—or they aren’t, and you have a blob of dead chemicals. Such problems are why the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan wrote, “How life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology.”

If alien life does exist elsewhere—and that’s still a very big “if”—then just like life on Earth, it must have been intelligently designed.

Some might recognize life’s design, but claim aliens were our designers. Even the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick proposed “directed panspermia”—the idea that life on Earth was seeded by aliens. But that just kicks the can down the road—where did the aliens come from?—and fails to explain other key data.

The best evidence shows that the universe exploded into existence in a “Big Bang” from an infinitely small, infinitely dense “singularity” some 13 billion years ago. That’s no job for an alien. It suggests the action of a supernatural First Cause outside the universe.

The astronomer Allan Sandage—whose research was crucial to supporting the Big Bang—saw it that way. He remarked that, “God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence.”

Moreover, the laws and constants of nature are balanced on a knife’s edge: If they were only slightly different, life could not exist. As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Townes noted, “intelligent design ... seems to be quite real” because “if the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here.”

Again, aliens—subject to physical laws just like we are—cannot explain why the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned for life.

Our vast, beautiful universe wasn’t the work of aliens but of a single transcendent creator who crafted the cosmos, its laws, and all its inhabitants—whether they be human, alien, or something else.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.