The existence of other life has no bearing on the existence of god. There is no relation between those two issues at all. The idea that there is a materialist explanation for life and the increased probabilities based on the number of life supporting planets says nothing about the existence of god.
George,
I think you've missed the point I was making. I was addressing a view that is held by certain scientists who find it too difficult to accept that the first form of life could have spontaneously arisen in a soupy sea because the probability of all the right molecules coming together in the right circumstances, right conditions and right time in order to form a basic building block of self-replicating life, would have been unrealistically small.
Such people tend to believe that an Intelligent Designer or Creator God is a more reasonable explanation.
I won't deny that such a view has some merit, but the flaw in that argument, based upon an unrealistically small degree of probability that life could have originally occurred by chance, is that it doesn't take into consideration the likelihood of the existence of trillions of planets in our universe which have similar environmental conditions to those that have existed on the earth.
As I pointed out, recent observations and calculations imply that our galaxy possibly has about 20 billion planets, and the universe as a whole has around 2 trillion galaxies.
If we make a reasonable guess that maybe only 10% of those other galaxies are suitable for the existence of any planets, and only 1% of all planets in all galaxies have, or had, the elements, compounds and temperatures suitable for life to develop, then the total number of planets with a potential for life to spontaneously arise, could be 40 quintillion divided by 1,000, which equals 40 million trillion.
Now, however remote one might think the chances of life spontaneously arising in a soupy sea might be, those chances should be multiplied by some huge figure, such as 40 million trillion because there probably exists (very, very approximately of course) 40 million trillion planets in our universe with the essential ingredients for life to spontaneously arise.
It might be the case that only one of those 40 million trillion planets have developed life because the probability is so small, and we're the lucky ones (or unlucky ones, depending on your perspective or religion).
Can you understand the logic of my argument?
In case you don't, I'll use a simple analogy of playing roulette in a casino. However remote your chances of winning, if the chip you place on a number were simultaneously placed on a second roulette table for the same one-bet price (equivalent to a second planet with environmental conditions similar to the earth), you would increase your chances of winning, wouldn't you agree?
If you were offered the option of your chip being placed on that same number on a thousand different roulette tables around the world, for the same one-bet price, you would feel very confident of at least one of those balls settling on the number you had selected, wouldn't you?
My point is, however remote one might think the chances are of life forming on one planet, in this instance the Earth, such chances increase in proportion to the number of Earth-like planets that exist in the universe. Therefore, the reasoning that some people use, even some scientists apparently, that the chances of life spontaneously arising are too small for credibility, is now a flawed logic in the light of recent investigations that have discovered the actual existence of planets encircling other stars in our galaxy, and estimates of the massive number of planets that probably exist in the entire universe with its trillions of galaxies. Got it?