[00:00:00] Speaker A: So any life that we can envision, even if it's somewhat different from life on Earth, life is going to have to exist in that high energy, high order state. There's going to have to be molecular machines. There's going to have to be information.
All those things in our experience only come from an intelligence. So one thing that I think you could take to the bank is that if life does exist elsewhere apart from planet Earth, it was intelligently designed. It did not simply evolve and arise through blind natural mechanisms.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Aliens are trending right now, at least the topic of alien life and the possibility of it. It's in the news, it's in our movie theaters, and even the US Government is getting in on the action. But here's a question that isn't getting explored as much as others. If we did find alien life, will that alien life support the case for intelligent design or an evolutionary origin of Life?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Joining us to discuss this intriguing topic is Dr. Casey Luskin. Casey is a regular voice on ID the Future, but for those of you who may not be as familiar with him, let me give you some details. Casey serves as Associate Director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, where he helps direct the ID 3.0 research program and assists and defend scientists, educators and students who seek to freely study, research and teach about the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution and idea. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg, as well as graduate degrees in science and law, giving him that expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution.
Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools and defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for intelligent design.
Casey, welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Great to be with you, Andrew.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Well, our topic today is aliens and extraterrestrial life. It's pretty big in the news right now. Why is that?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it's big in the news because President Trump issued an order back in February that the federal government had to release its UFO files, whatever they may be.
And that release of those files began, I want to say it was maybe the first or second week of May of 2026. And actually today as we're recording this, I believe that they just released a second tranche of documents. So it's very interesting. This issue has gone from sort of like taboo, something that you talk about in late Night dorm conversations or, you know, when you're having a beer with your next door neighbor, like, hey man, what do you think of aliens? But it's gone from sort of being like that to now something that's become very much a mainstream topic. It's been in. All the mainstream news sites are covering this issue. And what are these things? What these, you know, these objects that are being found in these documents that are being disclosed by the government and released. And there's a lot of people talking about it. So it's definitely something worth us covering. I think here on ID the future. It's a current topic.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And we've also got big budget movies coming out exploring the alien life angle right now. I mean, you saw Project Hail Mary, and I'm sure you've seen a trailer for Steven Spielberg's movie that's coming Disclosure day. What did you make of those stories?
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty much an unreformed sci fi junkie. Andrew.
To make a long story short, when I was a kid, I had really bad asthma. And this was before they invented the inhaler and the. There was only one way that my mom could get me to sit still with this old. This is a precursor to the inhaler called the nebulizer. The only way my mom could get me to sit still for 45 minutes and take my meds was to put on Star Wars. Okay. Or some space sci fi movie, whatever. And so I just got kind of grew up on this stuff. So, yeah, I saw Project Hail Mary. I thought it was a great movie. Very fun, feel good sci fi. Steven Spielberg's movie Disclosure Day looks a lot darker, probably in keeping with some of other Spielberg's take on this subject. A little bit more realistic.
I'll probably go see that movie. I don't know, you know, if it'll be good or not. But it, it looks pretty interesting from the trailer.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Now you've had two op EDS on this topic recently published in the Epic times
[email protected] where you approach this question more from a scientific angle. Why is any of this relevant to intelligent design? Let's start there.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean, it certainly raises questions, Andrew, about if alien life does exist. And I still think that's a very big if. Okay. I'm not coming from this. From the standpoint that I am a believer that, you know, alien life exists or something like that. I'm open to it. We can talk more about that. But I'm not coming at it from that perspective. I Consider myself agnostic on the question of whether there is life on other planets.
That being said, if we did find life on other planets, that could have implications for questions about intelligent design. Does that mean that life simply evolves easily elsewhere in the universe and that's why there's life on other planets? Or does life exist elsewhere because it was intelligently designed? And I think you can really get into a lot of interesting hypothetical scenarios about, you know, what that life could look like and what the implications would be for questions about origins.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think you've identified a great angle to explore this. You know, given aliens, is it going to match up to our expectations of a Darwinian view of life or a view of intelligent design in the universe?
So what do you think at the outset here? Do you think it's going to support a Darwinian evolutionary view or is it going to lean more towards showing intelligent design?
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Well, look, Andrew, if life exists elsewhere, it exists because it was intelligently designed. Okay?
Life is a highly ordered phenomenon. It's built on an information rich code that programs 3D printed nanoscale cellular machines whose efficiency dwarfs anything that humans have made. Okay? So we know from experience that intelligent agents regularly produce language based code machines, these sorts of highly complicated arrangements of matter. But we have no experience of blind natural mechanisms producing such exceedingly complex features. So if we find alien life, and it is even remotely anything similar to life as we know it on Earth, you know, it's probably going to be based upon some kind of information carrying molecule. I think a lot of folks, you know, in the popular world think that if we find alien life, it's going to be based on DNA. Okay, well, if it's based on DNA, then it's got this language based code in it. Any kind of life is going to have to be based upon information.
If I can borrow an argument here from Brian Miller, life is a very, very peculiar arrangement of matter. Why do we say that it's both high energy and high order? Usually when we see natural phenomena producing things, it's either high energy and low order because energy tends to destroy ordered complexity, or it's going to be high order but low energy. We're thinking about something like a crystal, which is actually a very low energy state, but has a large amount of order.
Life is totally different. Life is both high order and high energy state of matter. We have no experience of blind chemical reactions normally producing that kind of arrangement of matter. So how does life through homeostasis, maintain this high energy, high order state? Well, it does. It through using molecular machines, literally machines that can take forms of energy that they find in the outside external world and convert that energy into a useful form of energy that a cell can harness to then produce complex biomolecules. Okay, and so how do cells get these molecular machines so that they can maintain these high order, high energy states? Well, it's because they are programmed with information. There are literally. Cells are literally machine building factories, okay? And they can read and interpret information that is encoded in our DNA, and they use this set of rules called the genetic code to interpret that information in the DNA, and then they send that information to machine building factories. Ribosomes and other molecular machines in our cells that actually execute and interpret the information in the DNA to produce molecular machines. So cells literally have machines building machines to maintain a state of matter that does not exist naturally, namely, high order, high energy state. Okay? So any life that we can envision, even if it's somewhat different from life on Earth, life is going to have to exist in that high energy, high order state. There's going to have to be molecular machines, there's going to have to be information.
All those things in our experience, only come from an intelligence. So one thing that I think you could take to the bank is that if life does exist elsewhere apart from planet Earth, it was intelligently designed. It did not simply evolve and arise through blind, natural mechanisms.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah, a very peculiar arrangement of matter. Indeed. It demands an explanation.
Now, we often hear the argument that the universe is so vast that, statistically speaking, aliens must exist.
I heard this in the disclosure day trailer.
Why would he make a universe so big just for us? That kind of idea.
So what hidden assumptions are embedded in this argument? And is it a good argument for the existence of extraterrestrial life?
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to hit on that point you just made, Andrew. We've all heard this argument that, oh, the universe is so big, therefore life must exist elsewhere. Actually, in February, President, former President Barack Obama made an argument like that. He was on a podcast and he said, statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are there's good, there's life out there. And I remember I first heard that argument when I was in college back in the late 90s, going to see the movie Contact with some dorm buddies. And in that movie, Jody Foster's character famously says, the universe is a pretty big place. So if it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space. Okay, so this is a very safe argument. You don't have to provide any hard evidence of aliens it's just sort of a supposition with a dash of science, you know, mixed in to make it sound like you're making this really sophisticated argument that aliens ought to exist. Okay? So it is true that the universe is vast. However, this argument about aliens, you know, needing to exist because of the size of the universe is loaded with dubious assumptions. And I think that the main assumption it makes is that life, and this is a hidden assumption, it's rarely disclosed or I think even appreciated by folks who are making this argument. It assumes that life evolved naturally on Earth. And if that's true, then it follows that life should evolve really anywhere else in the cosmos if the conditions are right. So basically, that's why Obama said, if the universe is big enough, then quote unquote, statistically life must have evolved elsewhere. So, look, I'll just speak for a moment myself. As a religious person, as a Christian, I would have no problem with the possibility of God making life elsewhere. Okay? As a Christian, the Bible doesn't say whether there is or is not life on other planets. I don't have a theological really, you know, really much at stake for me in whether there's life elsewhere. But that alien argument that life, you know, evolved naturally on Earth, therefore whenever you get the right conditions, it must evolve elsewhere in the universe. Well, when did we establish that life evolved naturally on Earth? When did we actually demonstrate that we have to actually ask that question. It has not been demonstrated. And we just talked about some incredibly, you know, I think, powerful arguments and as to why you don't get the information you need to build molecular machines and create a high energy, high order state of matter that we never find through blind chemical reactions coming into existence. None of those things are going to arise through blind natural mechanisms. Okay? So it has not been established that life evolved on Earth. Therefore you can't assume that if the conditions are right, that life is just going to kind of like spontaneously erupt elsewhere. This is not how it happened on Earth, and this is not how the universe works. We don't live in a universe that seems to be set up to bring life into existence through blind chemical reactions. It seems like the universe we live in requires intelligence to bring life into existence. You need to have an intelligent agent to create that information, to generate those molecular machines and build life so that it can be in that high order, high energy state that's so peculiar. So all that being said, this argument, it's got this first assumption that's just wrong, that life evolves and it rises naturally whenever the Conditions are right, quote unquote. Now, some folks will actually make sort of a theological version of this argument and they'll say, well, look, so fine, you believe in God? Well, if God made this great universe, you know, wouldn't he want there to be life elsewhere? And my answer to that is, well, maybe. I mean, who am I to say what God should or should not do? Like, usually when you start off a question with, you know, should God or could God? The answer is like, well, God can do anything. And I, but I don't really know what he should do. Like, that's, that's up to him. If God wants to make life elsewhere, he can certainly do that. The question I would ask is, is it required that the only reason that we would have this vast universe is so that God could fill it up with life? God could do that if he wanted. But are there other reasons? And immediately, as you know, as a, a religious person, I think of Psalm 19, which says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Okay, so maybe the reason that the universe is so vast is not necessarily because God has to fill it up with life. He can do that if he wants, but maybe the reason the universe is so vast is because God wants to declare his glory and his greatness through this incredibly huge, vast, beautiful universe he's made to its inhabitants. Are we the only inhabitants? I don't know. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't, but. But I don't see a reason why the vastness of the universe has to mean and dictate. Therefore God has to fill it up with life. God could do that, but he might just be doing it to declare his glory, which I think he just done a pretty darn good job of last time. I look up at the night sky and I encourage other folks do the same thing. It's pretty amazing.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And my answer to the, you know, surely this isn't all just for us idea is, is, is, you know, the idea that Earth is an oasis. You know, we heard the Artemis 2 astronauts mention that, you know, that we live on an oasis in a seemingly lifeless universe, you know, hostile even.
And, you know, another one called it a lifeboat, you know, and that we should be very grateful for being on that lifeboat. And, you know, so an oasis by definition is, you know, a rarity in a sea of otherwise hostile environments. And so that's part of an argument, I think, that makes sense. Now, what about humanoid alien life, like how we see in Star Trek that the aliens always have a human like shape? What would that imply For ID and Darwinian evolution.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah. The eternal question that sci fi fans always ask, why is it that all the aliens on Star Trek kind of look like human beings? Right. And actually, even Trump posted this very silly fantastical meme this week on his, you know, social media account showing him walking alongside some tall, gray, humanoid alien on some, you know, fake military base. Of course, this is all, I guess, a joke or something like that. I'm not really sure what he was trying to communicate, but, you know, we've all seen that stereotypical ET with the big eyes and the. But they still have two arms and two legs, two big eyes, maybe an oversized head, and a humanoid body similar to our own. Okay, so what would it mean? I'm not expecting that, you know, we're going to have these things landing on the White House lawn anytime soon, but we can do the thought experiment. What if such humanoid alien life was shown to exist? What would the implications be for intelligent design? So some people are going to be tempted to say that we evolved these biological similarities independently. Again, this is sort of the Star Trek version where for whatever reason, you just get the humanoid body plan seems to be very common in our universe. Evolutionary biologists call this convergent evolution, where you get the same traits evolving independently through, you know, totally basically blind independent processes.
I would argue that even under an evolutionary view, if that's the view you're taking, the existence of other humanoid life is incredibly improbable for multiple reasons. So modern neo Darwinian theory, it's supposed to be blind and unguided. Right? So this means that the likelihood of evolution on another planet independently generating humanoid life like us is infinitely small. And even evolutionary scientists recognize this. Andrew, as I was doing some research on this recently, I discovered a great quote from the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup. Very much an evolutionist, but he actually said some kind things about Philip Johnson back in the day. But he said the following when writing about ET life. He said, quote, the majority of evolutionary biologists find the chance of an independent evolution of a recognized humanoid creature to be essentially nil. Richard Dawkins, of course, one of the spokespersons for evolution in our gen in our lifetime. He said it is vanishingly improbable that the same evolutionary pathway should ever be traveled twice. Of course he thinks this happens through natural selection, but he admits that it's very, very unlikely. Or even Neil Degrasse Tyson, the sort of well known physicist who has the Cosmos series, talking a lot about the implications of, you know, science for these big picture Questions? He had an op ed in the New York Times just in the last couple weeks where he said that the existence of humanoid aliens would shock him. And he said it would be, quote, violating everything we know about biodiversity.
So, yeah, the reason they're saying this is because it would be very, very unlikely for something with such a similar body structure to our own to evolve totally independently. So much less if they also had DNA. Okay. If we found alien life that uses DNA or proteins, oh, my goodness. Once again, the likelihood of that happening by chance or through blind evolutionary mechanisms, I would say is. Is basically nil, as David Raup said. Okay. There has to be a common connection. In fact, I was watching a podcast with one of the guys who's part of this whole disclosure movement, and he was talking about the same point. His name is Luis Elizondo. He said that, yeah, if we found that life was similar to our own, there had to be a common connection. Well, what is that common connection? Well, I would argue we're talking about common design. Okay. Intelligent design would explain these shared similarities much better than evolution.
After all, intelligent agents, we have tons of experience with them reusing parts that work in different designs. Engineers will reuse, you know, wheels on cars or airplanes, or technology. Designers will reuse screens on both laptops and cell phones. And when you see this high degree of similarity, that suggests a common designer. And these kinds of similarities would require, you know, if evolution did it, it would require not just the DNA. And the humanoid body plan arose once, which is incredibly unlikely that it happened twice through strictly unguided processes. So I just see that that is a non starter. If there are humanoid, you know, life elsewhere, humanoid aliens, whatever you want to call them, guaranteed that there was a common designer between the two of us.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Yeah, excellent points.
Now, what about those who claim that aliens were our designers? I mean, Richard Dawkins said in Expelled that he was open to such a view. What would you say to that?
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember in the movie Expelled where Dawkins said that he would be okay with intelligent design, provided that it was aliens. And I find that so suspicious. You know, intelligent design is totally unacceptable to him if it's God, but as soon as it's aliens, oh, he's fine with that. I suspect there are other folks out there that feel the same way. Well, I've got some bad news for folks who want aliens to be our designers, because it really doesn't explain very much. Okay. For one, it simply kicks a can down the road. Okay. Because for. You have to also account for where did the aliens come from? All right, who designed them? At some point, you have to get back to a transcendent intelligent designer. Okay, and let me raise another interesting point. Okay? People want to say that aliens made human beings. All right? Well, if we have, you know, such a close genetic similarity to other species on this planet, like a dog, I would say that's because of common design. Did the aliens make the dog too? Somehow I don't think so. And if the aliens have a similar genetic makeup to a dog, that I think points to a common designer between the aliens and the dog, that isn't the aliens, okay? Something much bigger than than that is responsible for all this life that we're seeing. So invoking aliens as our designers only kicks the can down the road. That doesn't explain where the aliens came from. But there's actually some things, I think, that directly point to the need for a transcendent designer outside the universe. And that's when you start to look at the evidence for cosmic design.
Obviously, we know if you've watched the story of everything, that our universe started in a grand singularity some 13 billion years ago. It started off as an infinitely small, infinitely dense point where everything kind of exploded out from that. That suggests the action of a supernatural first cause outside the universe. No alien which exists inside the universe, of course, was able to get the universe going.
And then, if you want to talk about the fine tuning of the laws of nature, why are the laws of nature balanced sort of on a knife's edge to allow for life to exist again? Aliens are subject to, to physical laws. They exist inside the universe. They need those laws to be fine tuned in order for them to exist. They cannot explain the fine tuning of those laws, which is a prerequisite for their own existence, just like it is for our existence. So I would say that our vast, beautiful universe cannot be the result of aliens, but of a single transcendent designer who crafted the cosmos, its laws, and all its inhabitants, whether they be human, alien, or something else. Okay, so. So we cannot use aliens to explain some of the most important aspects that the theory of intelligent design looks at, namely the origin and fine tuning of the universe. For that, you need a transcendent being that is outside of space and time.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Now with this alien topic trending, you know, we are seeing some fear mongering and some, you know, people thinking, oh, well, you know, it could be the end of organized religion and it's just going to be awful for a lot of folks at the end of the day, would Proof of alien life hurt or help the case for intelligent Design? Let's just sum it up here and more broadly, belief in God and traditional religion. Do you think those things would be greatly harmed?
[00:23:25] Speaker A: I think it's going to only help the case for intelligent design because you're going to see that, you know, if these aliens have any form of life like we are, which is, you know, this high order, high energy state, using genetic information, using molecular machines and etc. Etc. All that just points to more evidence for intelligent design, not that they evolved. So I do think that it's going to only help the case for intelligent design and they're never going to be able to explain, you know, the fine tuning and origin of the universe. And if you want aliens to be our designers, you're going to immediately bump into a regress argument where eventually you have to go back again to an initial transcendent designer. So I just don't see how aliens are going to herd the case for believing in God or Intelligent Design.
What about traditional religion? Well, certainly there would be theological questions to wrestle with. That's not my domain, that's not for me to really talk about.
But I think that the big picture questions of whether God exists and whether, you know, everything just arose through blind natural mechanisms. I think aliens are going to only help the case for Intelligent Design. Again, I'm not saying I know they exist. I really am agnostic on this question. So we're speaking very much in the hypothetical here, but hypothetically, if they were shown to exist, that is what, that is how I would analyze it.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and as we wrap up here, I just want to know what your personal take is on all these UFO disclosure stories and, and the existence of alien life. What, where, where are you coming from, personally?
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the vast majority of so called UFO sightings can be explained through very, very mundane explanations. Weather, phenomena, people having a little bit too much to drink. Frankly, with drones these days, I think the vast majority of so called UFO sightings are probably drones. I've seen things in the last few years where if I had seen it, you know, 30 years ago, I might have thought, whoa, that's a UFO. But today it's like, no, that's a drone. Okay? We know drones can make all kinds of strange patterns in the sky.
So I think that the vast majority are easily explainable through mundane, everyday explanations.
It's also possible that we have, you know, the government has technology that we're not aware of and that might be able to explain a lot of these sightings. There might be some things that the government is not doing and it's harder to explain. I think some of these UFO disclosure files are very interesting. What does it mean? I really don't know. You know, I think it's premature for me to make a hard and fast conclusion. So kind of like everybody else, I'm watching it. I think it's interesting and I think it's worth. Worth continuing to monitor. But, but I'm pretty agnostic on what it all means as far as is there actually extra. Extraterrestrial life out there? I'm not. I'm not a believer yet, but I'm trying to keep an open mind and watch what the news says.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think you've nailed a great angle here. You know, even if we find this, this alien life form, it's going to support an intelligent design view rather than, you know, undirected evolutionary view. So you've cornered that, and that's great. Now, speaking of that, where can our audience read your OP eds? Let's just touch on that again.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I had one at Epoch Times and
[email protected] and hopefully maybe more in the future. We'll see.
But yeah, you can also go to science and culture.com where those op eds were reviewed by David Klinghoffer.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Casey, this was fun. Thanks for stopping by today.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Great. Not a normal conversation for us, Andrew, but, you know, given the news these days, probably one worth having. So thanks for being willing to talk about this.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. It's about time we started talking about aliens. You know, it's got to be worked in there somewhere.
So, audience, don't forget that ID the Future is available on video as well as in audio formats. So you can watch these conversations as well as listen to them. Do so by subscribing to our YouTube channel and YouTube.com d the future. YouTube.com d the future.
Well, I'm Anjme Dermot. Thanks for joining us.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
