mormonsandscience

I was at a ward sod party last week.  (For the uninformed, a sod party is where members of the ward help lay sod at a member’s home.)  While moving wheel barrows of sod to the back yard, dropping them on the ground, and setting them in place, the home owner asked for my opinion on a radio talk show that focuses on paranormal events (the Coast to Coast show by George Noory).  I replied that largely it is a good show, but that some of it was hoakey (I use “hoakey” when referring to empirical truth claims that lack scientific rigor); like a recent show that had a UFO expert answering calls from guests who claimed to have been abducted by ET.

There is a saying which goes: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  In other words, just because we don’t have good empirical evidence for something, it does not follow that that thing does not exist.  Even honest atheistic scholars concede this point when it comes to deity.

I reject ET, but not because we lack evidence like flying saucers and short, skinny men with big eyes and large craniums.  I reject ET because the accounts are not consistent with what the gospel teaches. 

Is there extra terrestrial life out there?  Yes.  God created and populated other worlds.  Could people from those other worlds develop technology that would allow them to travel to our earth?  Yes.  They would have to be more technologically advanced than us, but intergalactic travel technology in other worlds is a real possibility.  In 40,000 years Voyager 1 (launched in 1977) will come within 1.6 light years of a sun in the Ophiuchus constellation, but without life on board, of course.  If people on an earth near that star are paying attention they might see Voyager and call it a UFO.   

If there are extra terrestrials out there that could have intergalactic travel technology, then why not accept ET?  The answer is that intelligent life forms are created in the image of God.  ET may have two arms and two legs, but his eyes and head are way too big.  Even modern apes look more human than ET.  Reports of ET’s physical characteristics are too far off the beaten path of what an entity created in the image of God would look like

So have extraterrestrials resembling ET visited earth? No.  But if we start hearing reports of human-looking extraterrestrials in space ships, then the reports might gain credibility.  But as long as the ET folks keep with the hallucinogens, alcohol, and self-imposed delusions caused by wishful thinking, ET will have a disproportionately large cranium and large eyes, and their accounts will lack credibility with me.