Is the absence of known ET life an argument for God ?

What about if we could prove that :

1. There is no ET life in the Universe (no mulitverse)
2. The Universe is about as big and has about the same characteristics that we think it has today.

Would that make a stronger case ? Would it make a case at all ?

You might be able to make a stronger case for a God, if we found out we are the only 'Life'. It would be really depressing to found out in this huge universe that we are the only 'Life'.

in comparison to the size of the universe we basically haven't even started looking around...

Rare = divine?

I think it is unsurprising that we wouldn't yet have found significant evidence of extraterrestrial life.

When we are talking about extraterrestrial life, what people really mean is intelligent, technologically savvy forms of life that could produce evidence such as radio signals that we could detect.

So the first problem is that there might be all sorts of life forms that aren't producing radio signals. Remember, WE didn't start producing radio signals until less than 150 years ago. So any extraterrestrials scanning earth would not have detected us despite massive human settlements (intelligent life) plus a stunning diversity of earth species.

The second problem is time-shifting, and this is even more difficult. The universe is billions of years old. The one example of an intelligent species we know about, as I mentioned, has emitted radio waves for 150 years. That's a tiny window within the scope of billions of years.

Those radio waves travel at the speed of light, which is very slow compared to the distances between stars and especially between galaxies in our universe. We are receiving information from stars that was emitted years or decades or centuries or thousands or millions or even billions of years ago.

If any particular star system had a 150 year window in which radio waves were emitted, the chances that the information, which will take a long time to get here, would finally arrive at a time coinciding with the present time on earth are tiny.

So it is improbable that we would be able to detect even intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, especially over such a short timespan of looking for it. The absence of such a signal proves nothing about the existence or nonexistence of extraterrestrial life.

Agreed. And even the "basically" could be dropped, imo.

To answer your question: It wouldn't add or subtract from either side of the argument.

no

Theists will use it as an argument for a god. But it doesn't matter. I'd like to hear what their opinion on the matter is before (if) we find life somewhere.

Fact is, we will never be able to prove that there is no life anywhere else. The universe that we know of is about 90 billion light years across. Just think about how big that is. But that's the just observable universe. We can only observe stellar bodies that have an effect on us (like sending light or another type of wave that reaches Earth). There are parts of the Universe we will never be able to find out about because there is no way for us to interact with them at all. This unobservable universe is estimated to be at least 10^(10^30) times the size of our observable universe.

The odds of there being no other life anywhere else is minuscule. The universe is absurdly large. There must be life somewhere, especially considering our bodies are made up of 3 of the 4 most common elements in the universe. (Helium is inert.)

from a teleological perspective, I think one could argue that the existence of all kinds of alien life OR that there was none was both evidence of a "design". I am sure that regardless of whatever turns out to be the truth, it will be claimed to be a design and god will be attributed to it.

Agreed.

I got caught up here for a moment

Statements like this tilt me. Without knowing the probability of abiogenesis occurring in any given place in the universe making statements like "The odds of there being no other life anywhere else is minuscule " is simply silly.

Posit for a moment that we are the only intellingent life in the entire universe. Then as vast as the universe is there probably is no other place in the universe which has the element Ununoctium....even though Ununoctium is made of 3 of the most common sub atomic particles.

I see your point, but it's just not a good analogy. I'm not saying the universe is so big that anything we think of should no doubt exist. The creation of life doesn't seem to be so extraordinary. I'd guess there are billions of planets that are similar enough to Earth to create life. It's hard to imagine none of them creating simple bacteria.

Just use the Drake Equation, giants73756.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Equation

The answer comes out to about: 2.31 civilizations with a 'Life' similar to ours. A pretty small number considering the size of the universe.

My gut feeling is that the universe is teaming with life, but if abiogenesis were something simple...we'd be doing it in the lab. In time maybe we will master abiogenesis and such be in an actual position to make meaningful estimates of the chances of life existing elsewhere in the universe. As it stands now any estimates you or anyone else can come up with are meaningless.

In my opinion if it was ever shown that there is no multiverse/super landscape that would indeed be very strong evidence for a designer.

We are doing it in the lab already - of course it's still very early days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10132762

This isn't abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is the process by which life arises thru natural mechanisms. What Ventor has done is manufactured life using parts of preexisting life....much in the same way Doctor Frakenstein manufactured the monster.

Had famous Miller and Urey experiment yeilded bacteria instead of amino acids, that would be a demonstrations of mastering abiogenesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%...rey_experiment

Thanks for the link. His estimates are that there are 2 communicative civilizations at any time, and that there are 200 more that are not trying to communicate. This is just in the Milky Way Galaxy. Seeing as there are around 500 billion galaxies and the MWG isn't too much larger than the average galaxy, I don't think it's far fetched to say there could be intelligent life on 1 trillion different planets and basic life on 100 trillion different planets.
It's not something simple. We just need to estimate a percentage on how likely a planet can spring up life after 1-5 billion years of existence. We may never know; it could be 99% but it could also be 1%. Even if the chance was 0.00000001% the chance of there being life in one of the 500 billion galaxies is still astronomically high.

Read a little more closely. That's 2.31 civilizations IN OUR GALAXY (The Milky Way Galaxy)

The Drake equation is for galaxies, not the entire observable universe!!!

The most current estimates guess that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars

His assumption have been pulled from his ass so his estimate is meaningless.

I truely hope you guys see that.

No, I don't take it as dogma if that's what you're getting at. But I see no rational reason to reject it in its entirety, do you?

No...I suspect the universe is teaming with life....that is my gut instinct and not some statement of fact. I just think it is silly to conclude as fact that we aren't the only life simply on the basis of the size of the universe. Otherwise very intelligent people do it all the time though.

Sorry, I meant to type galaxy not universe.

He didn't say it was a fact, he said the odds for there not being life was miniscule. Slight difference.

Considering that amendment, wouldn't you say that the larger a space is, the larger the chance that something exists in it is?

If not, why is that a fallacy? (I'm not necessarily saying it isn't a fallacy)

Is finding ET life proof that God does not exist?