also, while we're in the general ballpark of the subject, can someone explain something to me? And i mean this seriously, as I've never understood any side of this debate.
I've heard alot of people from both sides of the camps (highly/non-religious) argue that life can/can't exist in the rest of the universe, because it would disprove/prove god.
I've heard highly religious people argue that there CAN'T be other life in the universe because god didn't create other life, and I've heard highly atheist types claim that finding life in the universe would disprove god, and I don't understand how either of these beliefs come off saying either as fact.
If other life were discovered, how does this disprove the existance of god? All this proves is that life probably springs from a natural process. This would mean, most likely, that many precepts of religion are incorrect, such as god creating man in his image, etc. but this doesn't god is disproven. Maybe s/he defined the process that creates life (as well as all processes in the universe). All this would do is make us less special insofar as to how religion relates humans to their deity.
Real quick can you go a bit more in-depth on that with me? How do you come to that conclusion? As we know in logic...
According to the Bible, All S is P, where S is man and P is those life forms created in God's image. The corollary is that Some P is S. How does discovering life on other planets say anything about man being created in God's image?
my reasoning for this conclusion is that if we find more intelligent life in the universe, that doesn't look like us (if it looks like us,or at least vaguely like us, it makes this reasoning moot) then it takes everything that was supposed to be special about us (mainly, our intelligence) and makes it less specific to just us, meaning that how would we know that we were created in god's image, and not just a random assortment of parts and looks?
(For example, we find a 5-tentacled blob monster thing that intelligent, and believes THEY were created in god's image, there's no proving them or us right, and most likely means we weren't created in anyones image, at least to me.)
That's just the way i see it, but YMMV.
Now, maybe I'm just grossly misinterpretting the whole "Created in his image" thing, but as far as I'm aware, god isn't depicted as looking like every creature so that everything is created in his image, so when I hear "Created in his image" that says to me that god's image looks human.