If we could get there—if a door were suddenly opened and we could travel the stars—what would we find?

Maybe you’ve seen some of these recent headlines:

“Aliens likely to be ‘electronic entities’ which have overthrown their creators.“ This British cosmologist believes that any aliens who visit us will be more or less just like us, but more advanced. Which, to him, means they’ll already have been overthrown by the machines they created.

“Astronaut who walked on the moon: ‘why I know aliens haven’t visited Earth.'” This astronaut believes that if aliens exist, they’re all really good people. If they’d visited us, they would’ve introduced themselves and offered to help us solve all our problems.

“Stephen Hawking wants to find aliens before they find us.” Dr. Hawking compares the idea of us contacting aliens to Native Americans welcoming Columbus. “That didn’t turn out so well,” he says.

A NASA study from 2012 estimates that within our galaxy there are 100 billion planets, and that 10 billion of those are similar in size to Earth. The study further estimates that there may be 1,500 planets (150 Earth-sized) within fifty light-years of Earth.

Multiplied by the estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, there may be 2×10²¹ (that’s a 2 followed by 21 zeros, or two thousand billion billion) Earth-sized planets in the universe. Some people argue that with that many planets, it’s just simple statistics that there must be other planets with life on them.

But those people haven’t finished doing the math. Yes, there may be a lot of planets, providing a lot of opportunity for life. But what does it take for life to begin spontaneously? This excellent documentary, using a very generous set of assumptions, estimates the probability of one simple protein self-organizing is one in 10¹⁶⁴ (that’s a 1 with 164 zeros after it; 22:20 mark in the video). Given 10⁵⁸ seconds in the 4.6 billion year history of the planet Earth, the odds against this single protein ever having invented itself are one in 10¹⁰⁶. Of course, we do have 2×10²¹ laboratories cross which to duplicate the experiment, but that sill means the chances of life creating itself once across the entire universe is (considerably less than) one chance in 5×10⁸⁴ (that’s a 5 followed by 84 zeros). That’s for one single, simple protein. The simplest cells require more than 300 unique proteins. And they all have to come together at the same place, at the same time, inside some kind of cell wall, and in the presence of a bunch of other unique complex molecules.

It didn’t happen. Not twice. Not even once.

And yet, here we are. So if life didn’t create itself spontaneously, how did we get here?

A lot of different ideas have been proposed. It’s important to recognize that unless we figure out how to travel backward in time, none of those ideas can ever be proven. No one was there to witness the first life. Even if we could create life out of nothing in a laboratory (a big if), we couldn’t prove that life on Earth originated by the same mechanism. And in fact, we would only be proving that intelligent design is a viable explanation. (We didn’t observe it creating itself. In this hypothetical scenario, we went to great lengths to create the circumstances by which it came to be. We created it. And we’re intelligent, right?).

So believing any theory about the origin of life on Earth requires faith—believing something you can’t see and can’t prove.

Which requires less faith: That we hit the lottery and are that one chance in 5×10⁸⁴? Or that God exists and created us? (Before you choose against God, realize that this argument based on the improbability of self-organizing life is but one of a long list of evidences of design in the universe.)

So if God created life on Earth, and that same God created the entire universe, could there be other life out there? If there were, what might it look like?

I’ll share some of my thoughts in a future post (as well as my upcoming science fiction novel, Two). But for now, what do you think?

The post What’s It Like Out There? appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

You may have seen headlines of late predicting that developments in artificial intelligence (AI) will one day lead to machines taking over. Computers can already calculate faster than we can. Coupled with mechanical systems, they have the potential to be stronger, faster, more efficient, and in some cases, more lethal.

Some worry that our creations will do to us what we too often do to each other.

But for computers to stand up and overthrow their creators they would, at a very minimum, have to be imbued with free will. The ability to choose to do something other than what their creators programmed them to choose.

Is that even possible?

While I think that’s an interesting question (the answer is no, but that’s a topic for another day), I’m much more intrigued by the counter-question: What would we look like if we didn’t have free will?

Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that we’re created beings. Like the computers and robots we’ve created (and deign to believe we can one day imbue with independent creativity), we were created by some other creator who did, in fact, instill in us the freedom to choose.

How would we be different if he hadn’t given us free will? What if we could only choose what he programmed us to choose?

I think it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be over-eating and under-exercising. Or under-sleeping.

And I think it would cut down a lot on murder. And violence in general. How much sense would it make for a creator to program one of his creations to start destroying a bunch of his other creations? If he didn’t like the other creations, wouldn’t he just unplug them? (And whatever happened to all those dinosaurs?)

Politics and government would be completely unnecessary. Allocation of resources? Rule of law? Level playing field? It’s all in the program.

Sound pretty good so far?

Does your spouse love you?

What does that even mean if there’s no free will? She does what she does because the program says she must.

“These three remain: faith, hope, and love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13, NIV) They all have their root in free will. Without it, the actions may still exist, but the meaning is lost.

Without free will, the actions are attributable to the creator, not the creation. It is the creator who loves me, not my wife.

But think about this. Can I even understand what love is if I don’t have free will? If my own actions are directly attributable to the creator’s programming, so, I will naturally assume, are the actions of others. I’ve lost the capacity to understand their actions as an expression of their free choice—because they haven’t any. And thus I’ve lost the capacity to understand the actions of the creator as anything other than natural consequence.

I couldn’t love God if he hadn’t given me free will. On the one hand I wouldn’t know what love was, and on the other I wouldn’t have the capacity to express it.

We often ask how a good God can allow so much bad to happen in the world. I think this is the core of the answer. He wanted us to know what love was. He wanted us to experience love for each other. He wanted us to have the capacity to understand the depth of his love for us. And he wanted us to be able to genuinely and sincerely express love back to him.

It is true that without free will, evil cannot exist. But neither can good.

One final thought I’ll leave with you … How realistic is it to believe we could ever exceed the one who created us?

Okay, maybe two … How would we feel if our creations rebelled against us the way we’ve rebelled against our creator?

The post Love and AI appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

One of the fundamental principles of science is that every effect requires a cause. Without this principle, science would not exist. We study why buildings collapse so we can design buildings that don’t collapse. If they could collapse without a cause, there wouldn’t be any point to the study (or to building buildings).

All causes ultimately fall into one of two categories. Either the cause was necessity, or the cause was agency.

Necessity means ‘it simply must be’. A building collapses because the force of gravity, acting on the mass of the structure, exceeds the mechanical strength of the supporting frame. It must collapse.

Unless the frame is strong enough to support the weight.

Have you ever played Jenga? It’s that game where you stack a bunch of blocks of wood to build a tower, then take turns pulling blocks out from the middle of the stack until someone pulls out a block that makes it fall. (Incidentally, the name of the game is derived from kujenga, the Swahili word for ‘to build’.)

If you build the stack and then no one pulls anything out, it will stand forever. Or at least until your two-year-old toddler simulates an earthquake by crashing his Fisher-Price Bubble Mower into your coffee table.

Now this metaphor at once invokes both types of causes. The real earthquake, you can argue, simply must happen. It results from stress induced along a fault line between two tectonic plates that are moving relative to each other. Once the stress builds up enough to overcome friction, the plates shift and the earthquake occurs.

But what caused the plates to be in relative motion? The plate motion is itself an effect that had some other cause. And that cause may well have been caused by something else. But eventually this progression will be traced to a root cause—which is likely to be the origin of the universe.

But in our Jenga example, the root cause was the agency of your toddler. Agency here is “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.”

Someone intervened. Someone outside the system intervened to cause the effect.

Someone, not something. A person is required, because a decision had to be made. If no decision was required, we’re back to necessity being the cause.

And that person had a will. A desire to bring about a particular change.

And power. The power to overcome the forces of nature that enforce the status quo.

And intellect. The intelligence to know how to manipulate the system to bring about a desired change.

And all that came from your little toddler.

In a roundabout way, the beginning of the universe is a little like the end of that stack of Jenga blocks. Something changed, and the effects were profound.

For many centuries, mankind believed (for the most part) that the universe was eternal. This theory required that we also believe that the universe was static, at least on the grand scale.

But then in the early twentieth century we learned that the universe was not static. It’s expanding. And a necessary consequence of an expanding universe is that it had a beginning.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it. They call it “The Big Bang.” The universe wasn’t. And then, bang! It was.

Now, if you’re an atheist reading this, you have a lot of explaining to do. What caused this effect?

Necessity? If the universe simply must be, why wasn’t it already? What changed to make it necessary now when it wasn’t necessary before? What caused that change?

Necessity presumes a preexisting system. The nature of the system creates the necessity. But the universe didn’t exist. So nothing in the (nonexistent) universe can reasonably cause the universe to come to exist. The cause must be outside the system … outside the universe … outside of nature … super natural.

So was it agency? Did someone outside the universe cause it to begin?

Like your toddler, that someone must be capable of making a decision.

He must have a will—a desire to bring about a particular change.

He must be powerful—more powerful than the entire scope of the universe he created.

And he must be intelligent—more intelligent that we can begin to conceive if he is to be able to create all that we see (and even us) out of nothing.

Which is it, necessity or agency?

Well, we can’t prove either. There’s no way for us to observe the beginning of the universe to see what actually happened, and no realistic way for us to reproduce the event in a laboratory. (We might have the will, but we don’t have the power or the intellect.) So choosing to believe either theory requires an element of faith, of believing something we can’t prove.

The question is, which requires the larger leap of faith? To believe that your stack of Jenga blocks spontaneously exploded all over your living room? Or to believe that your toddler smacked his Bubble Mower into the coffee table?

What caused that big bang you heard in the living room?

And God said, “Let there be light,” and Bang! There was light. (And it was a big bang.) Genesis 1:3 SMCV (Steve’s More Colorful Version)

The post The Big Bang appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Now, before you say, “Well, duh!,” you might be surprised at how many people will look at a good claw hammer with a graphite shaft and say, “That’s intelligent design,” but then look at the hand holding it and say, “That’s random chance.”

The typical claw hammer has three or four parts. There’s the head, usually cast and then machined out of some kind of metal, usually an alloy of more than one type of metal. Then there’s a shaft, made from wood or steel or graphite or some other rigid material. The shaft is usually wrapped in some kind of compliant rubber or plastic to improve the grip and reduce blistering. And in many cases some kind of wedge driven into the end of the shaft that is stuck into the head to prevent the head from coming off.

When you look at all those parts, shaped in particular ways, made from materials with particular characteristics, joined together in a particular way, all to serve a particular function, you just know that hammer was designed.

And you just know there was a designer.

And you just know the designer was intelligent. Maybe not like Einstein the physicist, but certainly more so than Einstein the dog.

The human hand, on the other hand, doesn’t have three or four parts. It has twenty-nine major and minor bones (plus or minus … many people have a few more, and everyone counts these things differently), twenty-nine major joints, at least one-hundred-twenty-three named ligaments, thirty-four muscles which move the fingers and thumb, forty-eight named nerves, and thirty named arteries (and nearly as many smaller named branches).

Does that sound like design, or random chance?

Science is the study of the world around us, whether biology, cosmology, geology, or whatever. Science is also the search for causes. We observe the way things are, and we search for what caused things to be just that way.

In virtually every field of science, we encounter things that look like they had to have been designed. We’ll take a deeper look at some of those things in upcoming posts. Maybe they were designed. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe there’s a credible alternate explanation.

The Intelligent Design movement says, “Let’s at least consider the possibility that design might be the cause.”

You may think that an obvious course.

But you may also be surprised how many modern scientists will vehemently object, willing only to consider “natural” causes.

“God isn’t science!”

Well, yes. God isn’t science.

But if God is, or even might be, is it still science if you ignore reality? If it really was designed, but you insist that you won’t accept that explanation, is that science?

All we’re asking is that you consider the possibility.

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