The subject of UFO “disclosure” keeps heating up.
Our colleague Casey Luskin has already written that alien visitors to Earth, if they are real, would have to be the product of intelligent design, just as we are. You can take that as an (informal) ID prediction. Here’s another.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, celebrity astrophysicist and smug scientific atheist, had a mostly silly op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, speculating about the possible U.S. government disclosure. He writes this about media depictions of ETs:
Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.
Alien, Yet Not Wholly So
So that’s Tyson’s prediction: ETs would look nothing like us, because there is no reason they would. But ID biologist Michael Denton has written the precise opposite, including in his book The Miracle of Man: The Fine-Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. I summarized the point here:
Since humans find ourselves in existence, we must be fit for our environment. This is obviously true, says Denton. But it’s “trivial.” The remarkable observation is just how precisely the environment was specified for us. That is not trivial at all. It is a mark of supreme privilege.
From Denton’s superb presentation, other conclusions follow. For one, if the universe harbors intelligent extraterrestrials, they will not be “aliens” to us. Instead, because of the cosmic design, they will “strongly resemble Homo sapiens.” Their planet, or planets, will resemble our own, for the same reason. If they find a way to visit us, as UFO believers say, they will feel that they have come home.
Not Like “Jellyfish or Termites”
The relevant “environment” is not just our planet but the cosmos. Denton says in The Miracle of Man,
that only biological beings similar to modern humans — possessed of our android design and size on a planet similar to Earth — could ever have exploited the wonderful fitness of nature for fire and metallurgy suggests that if there are, out there in the great dark, any extraterrestrial civilizations possessed of advanced technology, the denizens of those alien worlds will not only resemble ourselves, but their journey — while undoubtedly different in many fascinating details — will also in the main very much resemble our own.
He writes lyrically:
The exquisitely fine-tuned ensembles of environmental fitness described here, each enabling a vital aspect of our physiological design, amount to nothing less than a primal blueprint for our being, written into the fabric of reality since the moment of creation, providing compelling evidence that we do indeed, after all, occupy a central place in the great cosmic drama of being.
Denton makes no claims about the actual existence of ETs. His argument, however, is that the cosmos is fit for intelligent life, if it exists anywhere else out there, that would be remarkably like us in physiology, not like “jellyfish or termites.”
My suspicion is that the disclosure, if it comes, will be a letdown. But maybe not. If we do get a look at an alien, you now know what a prominent thinker, Dr. Denton, has predicted about it. Perhaps we’ll have the opportunity to see who — Denton or Tyson — was right.