Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life

KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."

Comments

Re:I mod this down.

[RiotingPacifist]

The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that "if it didn't work, we wouldn't be standing her talking about it" and would much rather test it.

What worries me is how little you have to know if your a creationist. How do they explain plastic, which is formed from oil, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to form, when the world is only ~4000 years old?