For about 20 years, NASA operated an astrobiology division. NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was established in 1998 and suspended in 2019, “to develop the field of astrobiology“. It focused on attempting to answer the fundamental questions of: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? How do we search for life in the Universe?
As I followed the research results of this institute, I’d often notice a sense of awe in the tone of the researchers, as they worked at the cutting edge of asking the big questions of origins. While they were still operating as an institute, I invited one of their staff to visit the community college where I was teaching astronomy at the time.
After the lecture was over, the general population audience as well as my astronomy students and I were invited to ask questions. I asked the questions that I’ve asked dozens of times before of experts in the field of the origin of life. The questions have to do with the origin of five carbon sugars (ribose) and the origins of the homochirality of both proteins (left-handedness) and DNA (right-handedness). I asked for some known physical mechanism that could have brought about either of these entities.
The NASA astrobiologist replied that the “best hypothesis we have at this time is panspermia. That both homochirality and five carbon sugars originated in another solar system and migrated to our solar system over time.”
My reply was: “But that doesn’t deal with the origin science. How did these entities originate in the first place, wherever they originated.”
Her response was: “We simply don’t know yet.”
Of course this doesn’t prove that there is a God. It is just evidence that something, someone has tinkered with the Universe in a non-naturalistic way.
My hypothesis is that it was a super-naturalistic way.