Reply #68: Reasoning the existence of aliens isn't science either, it's a probability [View All]

[Xithras]

Much of science is driven by nothing more than probabilities...you should know that already.

Nobody has ever observed, documented, or reproduced an alien, but relatively few people question the probability that there is other life out there, somewhere. Is it science? No. But the science of probabilities tells us that we likely aren't alone.

Even Natural Selection, to get technical, is a probability based science. As of yet nobody has observed the process of natural-selection induced speciation in the wild. We know that natural selection exists as a functional process and have observed it on a small scale, so we fall back to the "science" of probabilities. We know that evolutionary theory plainly indicates that Species A forked into Species B, and we know that Natural Selection is the only process we've observed to be capable of changing the appearance or form of an animal. Even though we've never actually seen Natural Selection fork Species B away from its parent, the science of probabilities tells us that it is the most reasonable answer.

But when it comes right down to it, it isn't science either way. Until the process of natural speciation is directly observed by scientists, it's all really a battle of probabilities.