Professor Dawkins and Aliens

One or two readers noticed that I asked Professor Richard Dawkins(on Twitter) where he stood on the subject of aliens. This is why I asked.

I am told ( and my source is here ) http://darwinianfundamentalism.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/transcript-of-interview-of-richard.html

that the Professor said the following : ‘Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.’

 

And then:

 

‘And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.’

 

You can watch him say it. The key passage comes about two minutes 50 seconds into this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc (sorry about the sinister music).

 

(Note that Professor Dawkins, in a passage around five minutes into the interview (during a rejection of belief in the existence of any deity) says the existence of the Biblical God would be a ‘very unpleasant prospect’ which seems to me to introduce the question of desire and wish into the question of belief, where I think it is always to be found)