LeWoVoc wrote:
The alien explanation is completely ridiculous, and is just as blind and unguided as the God explanation. Even if it were to be aliens, they would have to exist through some form of evolutionary process. You simply cannot start with complexity.
Yes. And this is the same argument I use when people try to argue that evolution can't happen. However, that does not preclude evolution happening naturally in one place and then those people traveling here and seeding a wide assortment of forms of life here. It would certainly explain the gaps.
One of the sub theories which is an alternative to the classic "tree of life" model, is that each basic family of species existed in some common form, and then spread out from there to form all the species we know today (or that have existed along the way). So instead of a single trunk branching into smaller and smaller paths, you have a large number of clusters of related species growing outward, each from their own point.
The problem with that theory is that even though it fits the actual data we have far better, it almost requires that some force created each of those cluster centers independently of each other. There's no explanation as to how several thousand (or tens of thousands) of individual proto-forms appeared, fully formed, and completely distinct from each other, to then fan out evolutionarily to each form thousands more. But that's actually what the data most strongly suggests.
And guess what? That's almost exactly what you'd expect to see if an intelligence deliberately seeded life on a planet. Which is where the intelligent design theory comes from (well, when it's not being pushed by religious folks that is). It's not just based on a need to push creationism, but is also supported by a growing realization that the patterns we're seeing in evolutionary history point to the clustering model and not the tree model.
