Evolutionists Use Design Filter When it Suits Them

How does Space.com know that the coronavirus did not come from outer space?

Look at this confident headline on Space.com:

No, the coronavirus didn’t come from outer space. We promise.

The article examines a claim from panspermia advocate Chandra Wickramasinghe, co-author with Sir Fred Hoyle of Evolution from Space (1984). The Indian astronomer has never given up on his belief that life was directed to Earth by alien intelligences who seeded some DNA in meteorites that sprouted and took root on our planet. WND finds that proposal rather astonishing. Wickramasinghe even points to a meteorite that landed in China that started the pandemic, the article says.

Space.com writer Chelsea Gohd says that directed panspermia is possible in principle, but she is so sure that the coronavirus did not come by that route, she can promise it didn’t. Leaning on Graham Lau for expertise, she says:

Wickramasinghe’s claim ties into the theory of panspermia, a longstanding but not proven theory which poses that life on Earth originated with help from microorganisms and biological material from outer space, Lau said. And while there is not yet concrete evidence that panspermia has occurred here on Earth or is even possible, theoretically, it could happen, he said.

Lau and Gohd base their promise on (1) improbability of surviving long-distance space travel, (2) similarity of coronavirus to other Earthly viruses, and (3) insufficient evidence to support Wickramasinghe’s theory.

“It’s one of those cases where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Lau told Space.com. “Even though it’s an interesting idea, we just don’t have any reason to embrace that idea right now.

“I think it’s important for scientists to point out pseudoscientists or bad science,” Lau added. “If this was real, it’d be great, but we just can’t allow ourselves to jump to the feel-good conclusion without doing our due diligence as scientists.“

To make this inference, they used a type of design filter. It wasn’t designed by space aliens, because of improbability, and the adequacy of natural causes to explain it.

So viruses and life didn’t emerge on other planets by chance, they say. It emerged by chance here. Extraordinary.

If scientists really believed that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, they would have to dismiss Darwinian evolution and the entire cosmology behind it. What kind of evidence could support the notion that nothingness banged and became their brains?

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe proposed their wild idea of panspermia precisely because the evidence for evolution was overwhelmingly, ridiculously, absurdly improbable. You should read that part of Evolution from Space just for the convincing evidence that chance could never produce life. It doesn’t justify their replacement hypothesis, but they surely knew that chance evolution would never cut it.

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