by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: December 10, 2009   Last Updated: December 11, 2009

My answer to the topic question of this debate is an unequivocal “No.” Allow me to explain myself.

First of all, the credit for the belief that “everything that is not patently obvious can only be explained by extraterrestrials” can be traced back to a former Swiss hotel clerk named Erich Von Daniken, whose 1968 "Chariots of the Gods? " and 1970 "Gods from Outer Space," among others, are accorded a degree of respect within the “ET for Lunch Bunch” that is reserved for original copies of canonical scripture among the more psychologically well-balanced.

Another source of such pseudo-science, pseudo-theology, and pseudo-anything except common sense can be found in the 12 volumes of Zecharia Sitchin’s "The Earth Chronicles."

According to Sitchin, the “gods” of ancient Sumeria, Egypt, and practically every other ancient Middle Eastern culture were actually real, literal, extraterrestrials that had been the first to establish a civilization on Earth. Unlike Von Daniken’s benevolent visitors, who went around doing nice things such as building pyramids and posing to have their images chiseled in stone, Sitchin’s gods fought among themselves and even carried their war to Earth. It was this war that supposedly wiped out the earlier civilization, triggered the first instance of global warming (accounting for the story of Noah’s flood), and the first failure of genetic engineering (the “Nephilim” who impregnated earth women to produce the “giants” mentioned in Genesis 6: 4).

Surprisingly (for most people, at least) is that there is actually a relatively popular religious movement in the United States that holds beliefs remarkably similar to those given above.

According to the doctrines that every member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (“LDS” or the “Mormons”) must accept as nothing less than the divinely-revealed word of God, the Earth was created (about 6,000 years ago) near a planet (or star) called Kolob but was thrown into its current location at the time of the “Fall of Adam.” God himself rules both Kolob and Earth as a result of having been “raised” (“promoted”) from mortal man to God as a reward for being unusually pious. If a Mormon male (women don’t have equal opportunity status) lives according to the church’s rules, then he can one day become the god of his own planet and everyone on that planet will worship him. There is more to the Mormon theology than this, of course, but that part is even less believable that the above.

Returning to the topic at hand I find it amusing that, of the twenty essays (as of this writing) taking the “No” position in the topic of this debate, four hold that such a scenario would have been impossible by citing the standard intellectual cop-out of “God created the human race just like it says in the Bible” with one adopting the centrist argument that even if the extraterrestrials did create humanity, that would still be OK because God would have created the extraterrestrials too.

The scary part of all this is that, with the innumerable troubles in this old world of ours, our goal seems to be proving that PT Barnum was right.

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