A man was walking his dog and his dog dropped some heavy timber, as the man was bent down scooping up the dog poop he saw an alien ship land. The aliens, seeing the man scooping up the poop walked up to the dog and said “Take us to your leader ...”
Pretty funny.
Just saw this spin-off of this here:
“Yesterday Harvard Astronomer Howard Smith announced that “we could effectively be alone in the universe.” While we may be alone in the universe, Smith is not alone in his views. The late Michael Crichton, in a lecture entitled “Aliens Cause Global Warming” said:
The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.
Yet no less an esteemed theoretician than Stephen Hawking has as recently as last year declared his view that aliens almost certainly exist. SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - continues, nonplussed by the naysayers. In a straw poll conducted of people working at NASA here in Houston by a friend of mine, a surprising number admitted to belief in the existence of extraterrestrials. It seemed to my friend that faith in God, at least at NASA, was inversely proportional to faith in the existence of ET.
I remember as a young college student running into a member of the Raelian movement. I was at a train station in suburban Toronto, trying to help a fellow student get money for the bus. A kind woman at a nearby restaurant refused my offer to purchase something by credit card, instead giving the person (whom I’d just met myself) a transit token. Being a little biased, I wondered if maybe the woman was a Christian. As we left her restaurant she ran after us with a pamphlet. “I really feel you need to have this” she said. It was a brochure on Raelianism.
Ever after, it’s always surprised me how people will accept belief in extraterrestrial life as “scientifically plausible,” but not belief in a “supreme designer.” The “external evidence” for both, after all, is fairly similar.
Both use, for example, information theory and design detectability in the arguments supporting their beliefs. SETI, combing the skies for a signal that is not merely noise; intelligent design proponents, combing our genetic makeup for signs of non-random information content.
Or the fact that both rely on the plausibility argument to mount a defense for their respective beliefs. Theists point to things like the anthropic principle to support the plausibility of a cosmic designer; Realians and SETI suggest the plausibility of other intelligent life given the shear size of the cosmos.
In the end, both a belief in the existence of aliens and the belief in the existence of God seem to me to rest on similar footing; not simply a “flight of fancy” or pure wishful thinking, but not purely scientifically defensible either. So the question remains: why is belief in aliens respectable to so many, but not belief in a supreme creator?”