Friday, October 28, 2022

Theism, Panspermia, And Abiogenesis: Hypocrisy And Compatibility

It does not logically follow from even the appearance of design that divine or extraterrestrial design of human life was the direct cause of it, but it is still blatantly asinine and hypocritical to think that alien consciousnesses engineered life on Earth, or that this is logically possible (and it is), while thinking that it is logically impossible for God to have created either the early stage of the universe or life itself.  Only things that contradict logical axioms and the truths that follow from them, which are themselves dependent on logical axioms, are impossible.  Everything else could be true, could have been true, or could become true.  It is obviously logically possible for a living thing to create a living thing--even mothers who have no explicit philosophical awareness can create separate living things, after all--and a pure consciousness without a body like an uncaused cause would in one sense be living.

To think that God or aliens creating life is impossible but not the other is sheer hypocrisy.  The difference between these two things is in some ways far smaller than the similarities, for both entail something conscious giving rise to a separate consciousness that can then think and act on its own, even if there would be a metaphysical tie between God and the created consciousness so that if the former ceased to exist, so would the latter.  Only blind assumptions or intentional biases would lead someone to believe anything to the contrary of this, but it is certainly not reason they are basing their worldview on.  However, unless abiogenesis happened, God created the first life in the universe, but if God did not directly create a plurality of life forms that led into the diversity we observe today, and neither did abiogenesis, then some other life that had already been created must have done so instead, whether that life is terrestrial or extraterrestrial.

It is just that thinking it must have been direct divine creation of life or must have been panspermia, which is the alien seeding of other planets, is irrational since neither one can be proven to be the case and both are logically possible.  What cannot be true is God creating the first life and aliens creating the first life, since the extraterrestrials would already need to have been brought into existence by something in order to create new life.  Now, when it comes to abiogenesis, there is nothing incompatible about divine creation of mere lifeless matter and abiogenesis as the causal mechanism for the first life to inhabit that matter.  Only if the uncaused cause directly created other life would abiogenesis be impossible, for otherwise God only brought about the matter necessary for abiogenesis to even occur.

There is no contradiction in God as the uncaused cause bringing the initial universe into existence and abiogenesis all being true, with abiogenesis being impossible without an existing universe for life to come from non-living material and with matter not existing until/unless the uncaused cause created it.  In fact, the existence of an uncaused cause is entirely provable from reason alone [1], while the existence of a world of matter beyond one's consciousness is very difficult, but not impossible, to prove for the first time [2].  As for abiogenesis, it is logically possible for it to have happened or for it to not have happened (for the opposite of whichever occurred to have been the case), for this would depend on whether the uncaused cause directly created life at the same time as or after the cosmos or if the physical world afterward became arranged in such a way that immaterial consciousness was created by it.

If abiogenesis did not occur, though, then as has been stated, it was either the uncaused cause that created forms of life beyond itself (if not at the same time as it created the cosmos, sometime after that, evolutionary descendants excluded) or it was the life forms that were/descended from the ones God created them went on to create other living beings.  What is logically possible when it comes to theism, panspermia, and abiogenesis is not what most theists or non-theists think, and beyond the handful of necessary truths about the conceptual nature of life, the fact that there is an uncaused cause, that some sort of matter exists (see [2]), and so on, only possibilities and what logically follows from them are knowable, not which possibility is actually correct.  This is still far more than some have discovered or think humans can know, and even then there is the issue of various ideas being inconsistent (like thinking aliens could have created life on Earth but not God) or compatible in ways that might shock people (like God creating the universe, abiogenesis bringing about life in the cosmos, and then extraterrestrials creating further life without God's direct aid).  Ultimately, these aspects of logical possibilities are in every way secondary to the necessary existence of a universe and uncaused cause in light of certain logical truths explored in the links below, and yet they remain connected with things of vast significance.



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