IF, AS THEY CLAIM, life on Earth got here as a result of an experiment or tech application by "intelligent aliens" such as Crick and Sagan and their colleagues proposed could become a "scientific hypothesis" - just how you're supposed to test that hypothesis with the methods of science don't seem to have bothered them much - then what they are arguing for is, in fact, intelligent design of life on Earth. It doesn't much matter if the intelligence took existing life forms, perhaps altered them and then intentionally seeded Earth with them or if they "created life" to do that from scratch for, by their proposal the answer to life on Earth is, in fact, that we are here by intelligent design.
Such atheist-materialist-scientistic types don't seem to be very good at thinking out their ideological campaign to "prove scientifically" that life is living by the Intelligent Design of The Creator, God is an "unnecessary hypothesis" because literally nothing they can do can be separated from the intelligent design behind a. experiments and what results from them, b. their analysis, c. their ideological motives to start with. To try to claim that they can do any of that, from "creating 'self-replicating' DNA" to "directed panspermia" without it demonstrating the opposite of what they claim, that it could happen without "intelligent design" is philosophically inept because intelligence is a vital component in everything they produce in that line.
What they have "proven" if anything, is that intelligent design CAN produce life. The dumb bunnies.
If the very limited intelligence of life can do that then the proposed far greater intelligence and potency of God certainly could. They've just moved human intelligence a bit farther in that direction instead of away from it as they claim they are doing. Men are often not very good at things like which direction they're headed in. William Blake warned them about that and the intellectual incompetence of the "enlightenment" project,
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, tis all in vain. . . .
They really should require that these tech specialists be exposed more to general culture than their academic programs require them to be. And I don't mean the humanities faculty who long for the repute and glamor (and compensation) and the falsified history of the "enlightenment" and the sciences. I mean a real liberal education. Materialism is decadent and ever was.
As with my point about the CSICOP-CSI "skeptics" (read ideological atheist old farts) liking the UFOlogy they liked as done by themselves* and that which they despised, derided and disdained, so it is with atheist-materialist-scientistic claims of intelligent design (sometimes, now, with space aliens). I think Michael Behe is more intellectually honest than Sagan or Crick or the like were. Though if it's any comfort to them, the inability to distance the human activity of science from intelligent design is also a hurdle for the proposed science proving Intelligent Design because they can't work with what might falsify it. Though maybe that recent holding of the philosophy of science isn't valid. I do think some of their arguments are a lot more persuasive than those of the materialists but that's not on the basis of science.
* Just why Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii's proposed ancient astronauts were more intellectually reputable than those of the popularizers WHO HAD EXACTLY AS MUCH EVIDENCE AS SAGAN DID NOT HAVE EITHER, but the others were ridiculed by the CSICOPers is an interesting question. Sagan even took credit for inspiring the later perhaps slightly less ass-covering writers. I think it had more to do with in-crowd-out-crowd ridicule, fashion and snobbery than anything inherently more disreputable about popular UFOlogy and ancient astronaut junk. I rejected all of it on the basis of there being no real way to figure out if they were right or wrong. I recall thinking some of what Sagan said about that, the stuff based on anthropological crap, was kind of condescending to People of Color.
UPDATE: It would be irresponsible to not add that though I wasn't anything like a frequent reader of it, I did think the few Saucer Smear magazines I saw were amusing.
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