Three articles appear below:
1   Probability of a Living Planet
2   Probability of a Living Planet
3   Alien Life and Divine Creation

As of 23 July 2020, there are 4,197 confirmed exoplanets, the majority of which were discovered by the Kepler space telescope. There are an additional 2,418 potential exoplanets from Kepler's first mission yet to be confirmed, as well as 889 from its "Second Light" mission and 1,288 from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_exoplanets

Our Solar System has eight planets. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was considered the ninth but is no longer regarded as a planet. In the 1990s exoplanets — planets of other suns or stars outside of our Solar System — began to be discovered, and currently number about 4200.

Of the 4200 exoplanets so far discovered Wikipedia lists 48 in the "habitable zone". This does not mean they're inhabited, merely that they have some of the necessary preconditions:

Surface planetary habitability is thought to require orbiting at the right distance from the host star for liquid surface water to be present, in addition to various geophysical and geodynamical aspects, atmospheric density, radiation type and intensity, and the host star's plasma environment...

In November 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way, 11 billion of which may be orbiting Sun-like stars. (Wikipedia)



According to the Bible, it was God's special activity that shaped planet Earth for human habitation.

The Bible gives no indication that "God" intervened on any other planet to organize it for intelligent life and civilization. It says that humans are "a little lower than the angels" (Psalms 8:3-5) which may imply that there is no physical life more advanced than humans.

The question I will investigate is: How small must the probability that a planet can self-organize itself for intelligent life and civilization have to be, before we should agree with the Bible that God did it or at least assisted?



In the 19th century many people believed there is human-like life on Mars.

The idea became popular after Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described straight lines on Mars' surface and in 1877 referred to them as "canali". This means "channels" or "grooves" but got translated into English as "canals". 

American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) saw the lines too and concluded they are constructed canals, which implied that an intelligent, technological civilization built them. (But some scientists disagreed and interpreted the "canali" as optical illusions or areas of vegetation.)

Lee (2018) cites the Los Angeles Times of 1907:


The canals featured in science fiction literature from the 1890s onwards. Wikipedia under "Martian Canal" lists many novels in which the "canals" are presented as intelligent constructions by Martians.

The UFO phenomenon after 1948 attributed the origin of flying saucers and aliens to all over the Universe — Mars became only one origin among many. Shelves of bookshops filled with books about UFOs, and the Universe began to seem like it's crowded with alien, technological civilizations. Most famous was Erick von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods. 

Some writers even argued for an outer space origin of the human race. Flindt & Binder (1974) claimed "Earth has been visited more than 5000 times by creatures from other planets" and "The human race may be an interstellar colony..." Crowley & Pollock (1989) argue that the Garden of Eden was on Mars and humans emigrated to Earth to survive a cataclysm that occurred on Mars 40,000 years ago!



With two out of eight known planets, Earth and Mars, believed to be inhabited by technological civilizations, atheists and evolutionists could have concluded that the odds of a planet self-organizing itself for intelligent life from the laws of physics and chemistry without supernatural assistance, is 2/8 or 25%. Whether anyone made such a claim I don't know, but it would have been evidence-based.

In 1965 began the era of high-resolution mapping of other planets when the Mariner 4 space probe sent back pictures of Mars' surface. These decisively showed there are no canals. 

That still left one planet, Earth, with intelligent life and civilization. The odds of planet Earth having originated solely by the working of the laws of physics and chemistry without any God could therefore be construed as 1/8 or 12.5%. If this argument is valid it implied that 1/8 of all planets should have technological civilizations. A good many science fiction novelists wrote as if this is the case — that thousands of planets within reach of Earth support advanced civilizations.

However, if intelligent workmanship, i.e. God's supernatural intervention, is necessary to make planets fit for civilization, then the odds of planets producing civilizations without divine help would not be 1/8, but zero.



In 1961 astronomer Frank Drake proposed the "Drake equation" of seven factors needed to estimate the number of technological alien civilizations. The problem is that although several factors can be estimated such as the number of stars, the others are subjective guesses — resulting in estimates for the number of alien civilizations in the Universe other than on Earth as somewhere between billions and zero.

In 1992 astronomers began discovering "exoplanets" i.e. planets outside our Solar System. Thirty were discovered by 2000 CE. None of them have been confirmed suitable for human life or even for any biological life.

This reduced the probability of planets being able to self-organize to support intelligent life to 1 in 38 — or lower since the odds showed a downward trend.

In January 2012 the number of confirmed alien worlds reached 720 — but none have been confirmed fit for human life or any life. Some are too cold, others too hot, too dry, too big with crushing gravity, or lack a solid surface or stable orbit, or are bathed in lethal radiation with no ozone layer or magnetic field for protection.

This made the probability, as based on observation 1/720 — or lower since the observed odds are still decreasing.

The current count of discovered planets is about 4200 but with no indication yet of life on any of them. This makes the probability 1/4200 or lower.

No exoplanets are yet confirmed as fit for human life. Some exoplanets are called "Earth-like". This does not imply that living things live there, but merely that the planets are approximately the right size and a suitable distance from their Sun. This much is also true of Mars, Venus and the Moon — but all three seem lifeless.

We began with observable odds of 2/8 and are now down to 1/4200.



Wikipedia  under "List of potentially habitable planets" says:


Science News, quoting Professor Conselice, reports:


Nicola Davis (2020) reports in Astrophysical Journal:


Paul Davies noted:


Davies subsequently authored The Eerie Silence (2011), discussing the total absence of radio signals of intelligent origin, or other signs of aliens, and seeking explanations for this absence. 

Davies also wrote The Goldilocks Enigma Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (2008) and shows that: "Calculations suggest that even small changes in some key parameters would wreck familiar structures in the universe and prevent life from arising."

The anomalous situation therefore is that we have a "Universe Just Right for Life" but also an "Eerie Silence" as if there is no technologically advanced life except on Earth.

With the odds of intelligent life as calculated from the number of lifeless discovered planets going down, down, down, how low must the odds get before it's reasonable to conclude: "God intervened supernaturally to prepare Earth for human life?"

NASA's latest planet hunting telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, "should be able to find 20,000 planets of all sizes ranging from Jupiter-sized planets to planets the size of Earth or even the size of Mars." (Weule 2018)

If all 20,000 planets turn out lifeless, the calculated odds of intelligent life arising by natural means would decrease to about 1 in 24,000 or lower.

Wikipedia says:


The article mentions planets initially considered habitable but mistakenly so:




A rough estimate is that the Universe has 100 billion galaxies and an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy. With one planet on average around each star that's a lot of planets — in fact 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (=10²²).

Regarding the Milky Way galaxy Wikipedia says:


These numbers are so big that scientists won't soon confirm the zero probability — unless they discover general principles, distinct from discovering and analyzing planets, by which to rule out intelligent physical life outside our Solar System.



How small must the odds of intelligent, technology-using life originating entirely naturally on a planet become before it's reasonable to conclude that Earth became a "living planet" by supernatural intervention?


REFERENCES

Davis, N. (2020)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/15/scientists-say-most-likely-number-of-contactable-alien-civilisations-is-36

Davies, P. In Search of a Second Genesis, New Scientist, 11 February, 2006, 48-49

Davies, P. 2008 The Goldilocks Enigma, Mariner Books

Davies, P. 2011 The Eerie Silence, Mariner Books

Haynes, K. February 12, 2020
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-many-exoplanets-have-been-discovered-and-how-many-are-waiting-to-be

Lee, K. (2018) https://blog.newspapers.com/mars-canals/

Smith, H.A. Alone in the Universe, American Scientist, July-August 2011, 320-327

Weule, G. (2018)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-04-15/nasa-tess-telescope-and-the-search-for-alien-planets/9627914

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_space_telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/exoplanets/

https://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/communicating-extraterrestrial-civilizations-milky-way-08536.html

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In Investigator #194 I investigated the odds of life and civilization arising on a planet by evolution without supernatural intervention.

In the 19th century Mars (besides Earth) was commonly believed to have technological life, giving odds of 2/9 — or 2/8 if we allow for Pluto later being reclassified and no longer a planet.

By the 1960s science had refuted the Mars hypothesis. This reduced the observed odds of life and intelligence developing without intelligent assistance to 1/8.

With 30 exoplanets discovered by 2000 CE, all apparently without technological life, the observed probability was down to 1/38.

In mid 2020, when exoplanets discovered reached 4200, the odds were 1/4200.

The new "Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite" is anticipated to find another 20,000 planets. If all these turn out devoid of intelligent life the odds would be down to less than 1/24,000.

Note however that by speaking of one out of so-or-so many, my argument implied that Earth with its favorable environment and intelligent technologically advanced life developed without supernatural help.

If we assume the opposite, that Earth's success required at least some divine intervention, then the odds are not 1 out of so-or-so many, but zero out of so-or-so many! The argument becomes zero out of 8, zero out of 30, zero out of 4200 and (perhaps) zero out of 24,000.

Therefore, so far the actual observed odds are zero.

The question in my final paragraph would change to: "How long must the odds stay at zero before it's reasonable to conclude that Earth became a living planet by supernatural intervention?"

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On page 8 of Investigator No. 194 Anonymous explores the possibility of alien life and its implications for the idea that our world is the product of divine creation. The primary reasoning behind his article appears to be that if Earth is the only planet with intelligent life out of the enormous number of worlds in the entire universe then this indicates that our world and the life upon it is the product of supernatural forces rather than the result of the operation of natural laws.

I do not think it is possible to know if Earth is the only life bearing world in the universe. Firstly, our instruments can only detect planets within a limited observational horizon. The most distant galaxy is (as at 15 Oct 2020) GN-z11 located in the constellation of Ursa Major. It is approximately 32 billion light years away (1). If a living planet is orbiting one of the stars in this galaxy we have no way of knowing of its existence due to the immense distance involved (a light year is a unit of astronomical distance — the distance light travels in one Earth year which is about 9 trillion km. In the case of GN-z11 that is 32 billion x 9 trillion km. I invite my readers to do the calculation).

The second problem is the age of the universe, which is approximately 13.77 billion years old (2). This is an immense span of time and it is possible that a planet with intelligent life may once have existed in the remote past but no longer exists due to some natural cataclysm. Below is a list of possible (but not all) causes of global extinction (3):


And then of course there is the future. The heat death of the universe (a state of maximum entropy where no further activity can happen) has been calculated to occur in 10100 years (this number is called googol and is 1 followed by 100 zeros). New star formation will end before this — approximately 1 quadrillion years in the future (4) so it is possible that the evolution of life as we know it will no longer be possible beyond this point in time. Within a 1 quadrillion year time span it is possible that intelligent life on other worlds could evolve, but we will never know.

Astronomers have calculated that there is approximately one planet per star (5), and that there are 1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe (6). In order to rule out the existence of intelligent life on other worlds we would have to visit trillions of planets throughout all time. In addition to planets there are also moons that may support life, increasing the range of environments where it might exist. In our solar system, for example, Enceladus, moon of Saturn has liquid water beneath its surface as do Ganymede and Callisto, moons of Jupiter (7).
 
If there are intelligent aliens, then where are they? In 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi suggested that given the age of our galaxy and the number of stars in it that alien civilizations should be fairly common, and yet none are to be seen. This became known as the Fermi Paradox, and has led some to conclude that humans are the only form of intelligent life in the galaxy and perhaps the universe (8). There are, however, a number of reasons that may explain why we haven't encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life to date, and some of these are given below:


In view of all the aforementioned I do not think it is possible to know that out of all the worlds in the universe throughout all time that Earth is the only celestial body with intelligent life upon it.


Notes

1.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11

2.    https://www.livescience.com/universe-expansion-atacama-hubble-constantmeasurement.html

3.    https://www.sciencealert.com/8-terrifying-ways-the-world-could-actually-end

4.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang-to _Heat_Death

5.    https://astronomy.com/news/2020/02/how-many-planets-are-there-in- the-universe

6.    http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3775

7.    https://www.space.com/15716-alien-life-search-solar-system.html

8.    https://www.space.com/37157-possible-reasons-we-havent-found-aliens.htmI