science

Stephen Hawkings: Aliens May Not Come In Peace… Me: Who Sent Them?

Hawkings: From Sunday Times

Last week, famed brainy guy Stephen Hawkings made headlines by talking publicly about the inhospitable attitude of aliens. It was a headline-grabbing promotion for his new documentary on Discovery channel. In it he says without a hint of irony that aliens exist and that they’re probably smarter than us so we should shut down all our attempts to contact them because if they finally do reach us, well, we’re screwed.

Hawkings Alien Belief No Laughing Matter

Hawkings told the British Sunday Times:

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Hawkings Makes Aliens Mainstream

Maybe it’s because I watched Stargate this weekend or that I’ve been glued to the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series but Hawkings got me thinking about this alien thing. Not only did he get mainstream newspapers around the world talking about aliens but he pretty much got them all to agree that they exist. Like no one asked the supposedly smartest man in the world if he was smoking crack because he believed that aliens exist. In fact, he told the British Times:

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

Well, Dorothy I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. Aliens are no longer just fodder for Hollywood blockbusters, Roswell conspiracy theorists or Art Bell fans. (I was actually interviewed by Art Bell for a story I wrote about a guy’s time machine but I digress…). Nope if someone like Hawkings, who let’s face it wrote arguably the most famous book on science ever spread throughout popular culture – A Brief History of Time – could postulate the certainty of aliens then I guess alien existence has gone mainstream. Many scientists, arguably some of the smartest people in the world, have believed that aliens were our creators. This is straight-faced stuff, no puns intended. There’s even an origin of life theory behind hit.

Hawkings Not Alone in Alien Beliefs

Called abiogenesis, this theory of life’s origins attempts to explain a gaping hole that precedes Darwin’s evolution theory: the why of life’s origins. Evolution is logical if you are only interested in the how (and if you leave out a whole bunch of other things but that’s another debate). But when you start asking scientific questions about the why evolution doesn’t have an answer. So biologists and their ilk have tried to answer it by trying to replicate a scenario of creation whereby something comes from nothing (didn’t Einstein say you couldn’t that?) This scientific approach which tries to explain how life was created from inanimate matter is called Abogensis. The theory boils down to that earth’s atmosphere made conditions to create a “primordial soup,” a sort of life stew that evolved into amino acids, single-cell organisms, tad poles and eventually men running around in caves shouting “Ugga’ Bugga.” I, of course, am not a world renowned biologist but this is the gist of life’s why explanation for many biologist.  To this I only had one question: So who ginned up the soup? And an answer was, well, you guessed it, aliens.

Rabid atheists like the zoologist-turned-pop icon, Richard Dawkins, in their zealous attempts to explain away the divine postulate say that the primordial soup mixture was a secret recipe from aliens. (I’m not making this stuff up! See the video.)

So hell-bent (hee, hee) on cutting God from the creation of life equation, many scientists are saying that it was intelligent, sentient beings from millions of miles away who created us. For whatever purpose, maybe to be like those baby batteries in The Matrix, the aliens made a way for us to exist.

Did Alien Create Us for Food?

Now I have read up on this subject a lot and watched the tapes and really they really believe it. So I ask you, if it’s possible that aliens could have created us then why is it so weird to think that a loving God would?

Even Hawkings Stumped By God-problem

I expect biologists and Darwin zealots like Richard Dawkins to scoff at God, but I have a little bit more expectation of physicists. Even Einstein believed in God, that he didn’t believe God had much to do with us is something I can understand. It always amazes me that people think God cares if the Univ. of Michigan wins a basketball game or if Suzy S., will go out with Bobby G. Physics was always my favorite class at the all-girl Catholic high school I went to. Biology was boring. Plus, I hated the smell of the solutions soaking the frogs and pigs we dissected. Biology was boring, because it felt like doing rote memory. But physics, that was a subject in which I saw God at work all the time. Because no matter how much we knew, how many theories we had, there was always the certainty of uncertainty. That variable that had yet to be discovered. In physics God could exist because well, because physicists didn’t seem so arrogant as to think they knew everything that the universe had to offer. They were naturally inquisitive and naturally competitive to prove each other wrong. It’s no wonder Einstein created the atomic bomb in his quest, as he says it, to understand “the mind of God.”

Even so, I struggled to balance my love for quantum mechanics, Newton’s Laws, Einstein’s theories and such with my belief in a personal, intimate God. But really it wasn’t a struggle, it was a quest to reconcile them. Talking snakes and 500-year-old men never made sense, but a graceful, loving God who sacrificed his son so I could be saved did. Just as life creation being a random act of environmental factors just didn’t add up scientifically. If it did why haven’t we created something other than human, like the original aliens who supposedly created us- we have the basic building blocks don’t we?

But Christians I talked to wouldn’t hear of the earth being more than 6,000 years old and scientists I spoke to wouldn’t hear of God speaking to me through events in my life. So here I was a lover of science and God out on an island somewhere. Then I read “The Language of God,” by Francis Collins. Dr. Collins is the head of the Human Genome project and arguably one of America’s finest scientists. Like most biologist he was an atheist but reading C.S. Lewis and a series of personal events led him to pick up the God mantle. His book is scientifically dense but he boils down the issue into one question – Why? Why are we here? Why are we like the way we are? Why do we exist? His answer, as is mine, is God. Dawkins’ is aliens. Mmmm. Which one do you believe?

Oh and I just have one more question for the alien creator sect – um who created them?