Casey Luskin talked with Andrew McDiarmid on ID the Future about why extraterrestrial beings, if they exist, would have to be bearers of an intelligent design as much as we are.
“Life Is Totally Different”
This point is crucial, and I want to underline it. Keep it in mind when someone tries to tell you that evidence of alien visitors to Earth, like the kind dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Disclosure Day, would scramble religious tradition, as Spielberg himself hints. It doesn’t matter how the biology of aliens might differ from ours. If they are alive, they must be designed.
Dr. Luskin cites our colleague Dr. Brian Miler on the physics underlying that statement:
Life is a very, very peculiar arrangement of matter. Why do we say that? It’s both high energy and high order. Usually when we see natural phenomena producing things, it’s either high energy and low order, because energy tends to destroy ordered complexity, or it’s going to be high order but low energy.
We’re talking about something like a crystal which is actually a very low energy state but has a large amount of order. Life is totally different.
Life is both a high order and a high energy state of matter. We have no experience of blind chemical reactions producing that kind of arrangement of matter.
So how does life through homeostasis maintain this high energy, high order state? It does it through using molecular machines. Literally machines. They can take forms of energy that they find in the outside external world and convert that energy into a useful form of energy that a cell can harness to then produce complex biomolecules.
And how do cells get these molecular machines so that they can maintain these high order, high energy states? Well, it’s because they are programmed with information.
Cells are literally machine-building factories. And they can read and interpret information that is encoded in our DNA.
They use this set of rules called the genetic code to interpret that information in the DNA. And then they send that information to machine-building factories, ribosomes, and other molecular machines in our cells that execute and interpret the information in the DNA to produce molecular machines.
So cells literally have machines, building machines to maintain a state of matter that does not exist naturally, namely a high order, high energy state. Any life that we can envision, even if it’s somewhat different from life on Earth, is going to have to exist in that high energy, high order state. There’s going to have to be molecular machines. There’s going to have to be information.
All those things in our experience come only from an intelligence.
Anywhere in the Universe
Anyone imagining alien biology, anywhere across the universe, even if it takes unexpected forms, would have to include this expectation: high energy and high order, necessitating not blind material processes alone but the application of purpose-driven intelligence. That is, intelligent design. Download the podcast, listen to it, or watch it here.