"I think it has worked out very favorably for Nasa, as well as the department of defense, through the government consolidating the need to get objects into space as cheap and efficiently as possible..."

From Bloomberg:

Thanks for proving my point.

Funny. I always thought private companies getting government contracts was called *crony* capitalism.

"Evolution has no bearing on any god. It just states that life adapts to changes or dies and that over time these changes can lead to completely different organisms."

Actually, yes, I still find it chilling. There is a long tradition in ethics of arguing how means used to achieve certain ends can be morally grounded. Many argue that using whatever means is "in your power" to achieve a certain end — even if that end is to stop something that is objectively wrong — is immoral. Or,…

I agree that creationism, in the form promulgated by most fundamentalists today, is theologically unsound. Just because we don't have a natural explanation for some natural phenomenon, that does not mean God needs to be "inserted" into that gap to explain it. We may yet discover whatever natural cause remains unknown…

"If one believes religion to be morally wrong, you will do everything in your power to stop their advance."

Wrong — at least as far as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Aquinas are concerned. They did not simply insert God into a "gap" of some missing efficient cause of the natural world (to explain lightning strikes or something). Seriously, I really recommend you actually do some reading.…

The problem I see is this:

I said you hadn't done your reading because anyone who had would never have asked such a question. God, in the classical theist tradition, is simply the ultimate being that is necessary for all contingent things to exist. Alien beings would simply be another set of contingent things, like us. If they seeded our planet…

It's because most new atheists prefer to stew in their own sense of superiority — much like many of the fundamentalists they criticize. In that, they have much in common.

Actually, I was not appealing to any religious text. Hell, the argument from classical theism comes from the likes of Plato and Aristotle, and the last I checked they weren't Christians. I was simply answering your question of what separates "an alien species from God." The answer is obvious to anyone who has actually…

Good comment. Aquinas would probably be quite critical of creationists/IDers. See this post from SF author Mike Flynn:

"What then differentiates such a 'god' from a Prometheus-like alien species that seeded such life?"

I hadn't even been aware of this whole controversy. Had completely missed the FFF articles. But you and Annalee seem to be handling this with a lot of class. Hope things work out.

Same here.

"It might be non-religious but I bet it's coming from a sneaky religious perspective."

Funny thing about articles like this: it's always some pro-choice person — not a religious anti-abortion person — who ends up turning the discussion into one about abortion. Like someone else said, I'm beginning to think it's a "pang of guilt" thing.