A recent paper published in December to the journal Religions posed a simple yet profound question with its headline: “Are Humans Alone in the Cosmos?”
The paper’s author, astrophysicist Hugh Norman Ross, argued that we probably are. The multi-decade search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has thus far come up empty, he noted. And the more astronomers and astrobiologists gaze out into the universe and probe the mechanisms of evolution, it increasingly seems that intelligent life is remarkably rare. Why? Because there are simply too many phenomena in space that can extinguish life in its cradle, and no known way to create living cells from non-living material. Moreover, Ross writes, the sheer distance and myriad dangers involved in interstellar space travel mean that humans are alone in the practical sense. Even if intelligent extraterrestrials existed beyond Earth, we’d never get to meet them.
Though a 2024 survey of 521 astrobiologists and 534 physicists, geologists, and biologists showed that 97.8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that extraterrestrial life exists, Ross’ paper makes a convincing, thorough, and extensively evidenced argument that they may be overly optimistic.
If his paper ended there, it might not have become one of the most viewed papers to be published in its journal over the last three months. But it did not end there. About 90 percent through, it abruptly shifted from science to non-science.
You see, while Ross obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1973 and subsequently studied quasars and galaxies at CalTech as a postdoctoral researcher until 1978, his found that his real calling is using “scientific advances to answer questions and identify new evidence of God’s existence, character, and the Bible’s reliability.” For the past forty years, Ross has done just that at his ministry Reasons to Believe.
“One book stands out among all the others in providing an accurate, testable description of both the natural realm and the spirit realm,” he wrote in his paper. “That book is the Bible.”
“I found the Bible to be the only ancient text I studied that showed itself 100 percent accurate about every scientific issue it addressed. It stood alone in accurately predicting scientific discoveries made by research scientists, often thousands of years in advance of the discoveries.”
To reach a conclusion like that necessitates quite a labored reading of the Bible. One must dogmatically interpret any vague prophecy as an accurate prediction.
Seemingly assured of the Bible’s unimpeachable status as both a religious and scientific tome, Ross spent the final sections of his paper arguing that while humans might be alone in the universe as physical beings, we may not be alone altogether. That’s because there may be entities that exist in alternate dimensions that periodically intrude upon our own. As evidence for this, he cites residual unidentified aerial phenomena (RUAPs) – alien craft that “leave behind no artifacts or debris but damage the vegetation and ground at the landing/crash sites.”
Ross takes the existence of these RUAPs as gospel.
“They have disturbed people, their infants, animals, machinery, and instruments in ways that leave no doubt of their reality,” he wrote.
He casually brushes aside the glaring issue that RUAPs have never left any physical evidence behind.
What does Ross think these phenomena are? Angels.
“Angels, according to the Bible, reside in a spiritual realm and possess several more spiritual capabilities than do humans. They are not bound by either the dimensions or physical laws of the universe. They have the power to come and go from their spiritual realm into the human earthly realm. According to the Bible, they can enter into the human earthly realm in a wide variety of forms.”
There is no conclusive evidence that UAPs are other beings, let alone angels. But Ross’ thesis can be discounted for a more basic reason: religion is not a matter of science, so making scientific arguments to prove its tenets are invalid.
The premise of an all-powerful God, for example, cannot be falsified, for if God is all-powerful, then he has the power to conceal himself from any scientific measurement. God may be omniscient, but God is not scientific.
The angels to which Ross refers are similarly unfalsifiable. If their forays into our physical world leave no physical evidence, then how can we ever be sure they’ve visited? Ross insisted that they’ve “disturbed” objects and people. Okay, but couldn’t these disturbances also have been caused by, say, multi-dimensional tardigrades, invisible dragons, or something entirely mundane, like a wild animal?
Scientifically-trained individuals making seemingly scientific arguments for God or other Biblical phenomena have often attracted attention, because their arguments are intellectually seductive. Ultimately, however, they are also intellectually vacuous.