Anticipation of a forthcoming U.S. government “disclosure” on alien life is everywhere in the media.

President Trump has ordered a full release of files on UFOs. This week, FBI director Kash Patel said, “You’re going to start seeing those releases literally happening in the very near future. We just met on it.” 

Where do language-based code, computer-like information processing, or machines come from? In our experience, they have only one known cause: intelligence. The existence of ET life wouldn’t prove unguided, purposeless naturalistic evolution—it would provide another example to doubt it.

Some, including Dawkins himself, have speculated that life on Earth could have been seeded here by aliens. But then, where did the aliens come from? Ultimately, life requires a transcendent intelligent designer.

And there’s something much bigger that aliens can’t explain.

Modern astrophysics shows the universe had a beginning—long ago it expanded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense “singularity.” If the universe began, then it requires a First Cause. But no ETs, inside the universe, could fill that role. The only way to explain the universe is to invoke a superpowerful, supernatural First Cause. We call that entity God.

There’s more that aliens cannot explain. The origin of the universe at the Big Bang was no random explosion but a carefully orchestrated expansion event. The laws of nature are finely tuned for life. If they were just slightly different, we could not exist.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose calculated that a habitable universe would require that just one such parameter, the initial entropy at the Big Bang, be fine-tuned to one part in (get ready for a very, very large number) 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. 

We lack the words to describe such an incredible mathematical degree of fine-tuning. This is why another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Charles Townes, said “intelligent design … seems to be quite real,” observing that “if the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here.”

Aliens would owe their existence to a designer outside the physical universe, just as we do.

Alien life, if it exists, wouldn’t overturn anything about God. He made the universe, and could have made other intelligences than ours—be they “extraterrestrials,” spiritual beings, or anything else.

Following a credible government disclosure, figuring out where ETs fit into that spectrum would be our next task. Whatever the answer, the science of alien life would only increase our wonder at God’s creation.

Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist and associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.