I watched Disclosure Day on an airplane the other day. It’s not Steven Spielberg’s finest movie. Among other things, I didn’t care for Spielberg having a nun state that she believes in aliens because why else would God have made such a vast universe, with so many planets?
For the sake of argument, let’s accept that God designed the universe. It’s indisputable that He made it inexplicably vast and intricate. Annie Dillard put it this way:
The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, on millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here?
While vastness is one of the defining features of the universe, unfathomable intricacy exists right here on Earth. Charles Darwin referred to “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” For example, there are billions and billions of species of bacteria. Why? I have no idea, but there is no evidence that He intended for them to have any particular purpose (in the sense of teleology). Why, then, would we expect that all the stars and planets in the universe would serve a particular purpose, like evolving aliens that will eventually visit Earth?
Incidentally, the vastness and unfathomable intricacy of the universe also count against the hypothesis we live in a simulation. It seems unlikely that anyone creating a simulation would make it so unnecessarily detailed.
