darth_ender said:
^Indeed. Though I wonder what on earth you are talking about here:
Bingowings said:
The Mormon churches are pretty much reliant on belief on other planets for their canonical narrative.
I am unsure of what you are referring to here. We do believe that God has created life elsewhere, but it is hardly significant to our doctrine or canonical narrative. If we were to change that one little item, it would not alter our manner of worship or any other aspect of our religious practice.
God isn't needed to create intelligent life any more than you need a carpenter to make a soft place to sit in a field (indeed some of the synthetic chairs on local buses are much filthier than a moss covered log or a grassy knoll).
You oversimplify a bit. Even non-believing scientists acknowledge that even under the rare perfect circumstances that our earth finds itself in, life, especially sentient life, are hardly inevitable. Only the vastness of our universe allows for those rare opportunities to arise in a spontaneous theory, and even then one cannot help but wonder how the laws that led to such creation came to exist.
But it's all pretty crazy and asinine anyway.
Not just the vastness of the universe which allows for organic materials to spontaneously emerge not only on Earth but in space but also the depth of time which allows those materials the chance to alter and shift in an effort to remain stable in an ever changing environment.
Yes it's inevitable.
The organic materials can be scraped off a jar in almost any lab.
You can't scrape Geoffrey Chaucer yet, that takes longer but on enough planets who knows?
Chairness is an emergent property of the shape and strength of a physical object or collection of objects and the act of them being sat upon.
Some chairs are designed as such (and used as weapons in bar fights) others are hillocks and not designed by anyone but sometimes work better.
As for not being sure what I'm referring to ask a Mormon. A physical being on another planet would match most people's definition of an extraterrestrial intelligence.