Dawkins once said Darwin enabled the intellectual atheist to sleep at night, now his Alien Design theory has stepped into the breach. Even if Darwin doesn’t work on earth, Dawkins can now sleep soundly dreaming of godless evolution elsewhere, and no one can ever prove him wrong. The goal posts, so to speak, have been moved to outer space where the opposition can never reach them.

I have written about it over at my blog:

http://www.willyhoops.com/rich.....aliens.htm

Like Anthony Flew or Fred Hoyle.

“To Stein’s astonishment, Dawkins concedes that life might indeed have a designer but that designer almost assuredly was a more highly evolved being from another planet, not “God.””

I’d like to see the footage of Dawkin’s response in his own words, preferably unedited. It may very well be an unedited response in the film, but there’s no way to know that from a secondhand account written by an unapologetic advocate of ID on whose site one can find prominent promotion of the movie.

I tend to doubt that Cahill’s interpretation of Dawkins’ response is accurate, because Dawkins has discussed this notion of “Extraterrestrial Design” before in “The Ancestor’s Tale”. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept, and was in fact a critique of ID in general and IC in particular:

“It is perfectly legitimate to propose the argument from irreducible complexity as a possible explanation for the lack of something that doesn’t exist…[t]hat is very different from evading the scientist’s responsibility to explain something that does exist, such as wheeled bacteria. Nevertheless, to be fair, it is possible to imagine validly using some version of the argument from design, or the argument from irreducible complexity. Future visitors from outer space…will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bats wings and ears. …They may face some tricky judgments in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens…what will they make of fragile, highly-strung racehorses and greyhounds, of snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can’t be born without Caesarian assistance….[m]olecular machines — nanotechnology — crafted on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems.
Francis Crick, no less, has speculated semi-seriously in ‘Life Itself’ that bacteria may not have originated on this planet but been seeded from elsewhere. In Crick’s fantasy, they were sent in the nose-cone of a rocket by alien beings, who wanted to propogate their form of life… Crick and…Orgel, who originally suggested the idea with him, supposed that the bacteria had originally evolved by natural processes…but they could equally, while in the mood for science fiction, have added a touch of nanotechnological artifice…perhaps a molecular gearwheel like the flagellar motor…
Crick himself — whether with regret or relief it is hard to say — finds little good evidence of his own theory… But the hinterland between science and science fiction constitutes a useful mental gymnasium in which to wrestle with a genuinely important question…how do we, in practice, distinguish [evolution's] products from deliberately designed artefacts? … Could there be genuinely persuasive examples of irreducible complexity in nature…? If so, might this suggest design by a superior intelligence, say from an older and more highly evolved civilisation on another planet?” [549-50, Trade Paperback]

So, clearly, this is not some shocking, new admission on Dawkins’ part, considering that he put it in print almost four years ago. Neither is it so outlandish as Cahill’s review suggests because just as clearly, Dawkins views the whole notion as intellectual play — a thought experiment like Schrodinger’s proverbial Cat, as evidenced by language such as “while in the mood for science fiction”, “fantasy”, and “mental gymnasium”. He is certainly not putting any of it forward as a serious, fully-formulated hypothesis. So, yes, the possibility of design is conceded, but it always has been. Absence of evidence is not, well, you know the rest. As to the assertion that Dawkins considers ID-via-ET more likely than ID-via-Deity, I buy it. What else would you expect from a man who identifies himself as an atheist? Of course he considers intelligent alien life more likely to be responsible for some hypothetical example of ID. That doesn’t mean he considers either scenario all that likely in absolute terms. And, in fact, it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t take the whole alien idea very seriously at all.

It did make for one of the better stories from Star Trek: TNG though, but maybe that’s just nostalgia — I haven’t watched it in years. I think it may even have been a two-parter.

Read the whole article.

AMAZING.

Thanks for the kind response. You are one of the reasons I like this forum. Most people here are very courteous and that is a wonderful thing when compared to most of the internet. And by the way, Jules Verne might be my favorite author; I keep a copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with me at work for late night reading.

Giant squid of Jules Verne fame. From wikipedia:

“Giant squid, once believed to be mythical creatures, are squid of the Architeuthidae family, represented by as many as eight species of the genus Architeuthis. They are deep-ocean dwelling animals that can grow to a tremendous size: recent estimates put the maximum size at 13 metres (43 ft) for females and 10 metres (33 ft) for males from caudal fin to the tip of the two long tentacles (second only to the colossal squid at an estimated 14 metres (46 ft), one of the largest living organisms). The mantle is about 2 metres (7 ft) long (more for females, less for males), and the length of the squid excluding its tentacles is about 5 metres (16 ft). There have been claims reported of specimens of up to 20 metres (66 ft), but no animals of such size have been scientifically documented.”

and

“By volume and weight, the largest known animal ever to have lived is the blue whale, an endangered species whose official record length is 33.58 m (110 ft 2 in), and weight 210 tons (for a pregnant female). The largest land animals today are male Savannah Elephants; one known example weighed roughly 12,272 kg (27,000 lb), although some extinct species, including many dinosaurs, were much larger.”

No Loch Ness monsters and maybe in the deeps of some of the oceans are even bigger aquatic animals. But no dragons or flying dinosaurs and even these giant squid are hard to be classified as monsters though I would not want to meet one just as I would not like to meet a great white.

What does persist over the ages is people’s imaginations but maybe we will meet a real sea monster some day. It is possible since so much of the sea as you say is hidden.