[jnsie]

> I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.

Hijacking someone else's comment to ask without judgement or agenda - How, if at all, would it alter your religious beliefs were life/intelligent life to be found on another planet?

[umvi]

I keep my religious beliefs and scientific beliefs mostly segregated, so they don't affect each other too strongly for the most part. The reason for this is that those 2 things are reinforced by different sources. My religious beliefs are reinforced by spiritual experiences (such as repeatedly being stumped by [challenging life/work problem], praying for help, and then getting distinct thoughts or impressions that miraculously unblock me... or sometimes I'm miraculously unblocked through the actions other people), my scientific beliefs are formed and are refined by reading scientific literature + critical thinking. If the 2 are in conflict (which is pretty rare), it's usually my religious beliefs that adapt to new scientific understanding. For example, if evolution seems to be in conflict with intelligent design, I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed (i.e. "this computer program can't have been intelligently designed, we've proven it was created by an LLM" --> "ok, then the LLM was intelligently designed").

One thing that would probably alter my religious beliefs significantly is if abiogenesis or synthetic life were proven possible (i.e. you can clearly show in a lab how to make life arise from non-life, or how to create artificial life). I don't find the current "primordial soup" or other abiogenesis arguments convincing enough to abandon religion, though I do re-visit the wiki every couple years to see what's new on that front.

[versteegen]

> I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed

I don't understand why I don't hear anyone else take this position. To me it's obvious and it's hard to find any other way to reconcile them. (But I'm not religious.)

Well, actually there's two quite different things that could be asserted along that line and it's not clear which you meant: either that evolution is a mechanism by which the hand of God can meddle in random occurrences to pick outcomes, or that it's completely hands-off.

But I would state the second one differently: that the universe was set up to allow evolution and all the other systems of natures to create the world today. Evolution itself is ultimately a consequence of physics and statistics.