Steven Spielberg wants us to believe. Trailers for his latest blockbuster “Disclosure Day,” set for release next Friday, feature humans in direct contact with extraterrestrials (ET) — the stereotypical “grays” from alien-abduction lore. He says the film is “more truth than fiction” and could “upend all established order.” Whether by coincidence or design, the movie is timed just after the federal government started releasing UFO “disclosure” files, upon order by President Donald Trump. Like other hyped-up government document releases, this could ultimately change everything — or it might prove to be a nothingburger, revealing little more than grainy, cryptic, black-and-white videos. I’m not expecting “aliens” to land on the White House lawn any time soon, but let’s consider a far-out thought experiment: If humanoid aliens were shown to exist, what would that mean for questions about evolution, origins, and intelligent design? The stereotypical ET, familiar from media depictions, would have two arms, two legs, two eyes, and an oversized head — a humanoid body similar to our own. Some will be tempted to say that we “evolved” such biological similarities independently — the “Star Trek” version of aliens who inexplicably always look like humans. Evolutionary biologists call this “convergent evolution.” But under an evolutionary view, the existence of other humanoid life is highly improbable. According to mainstream biology, Darwinian evolution is blind and unguided. This means that the likelihood of evolution on another planet independently generating humanoid life like humans is infinitesimally small. Scientists recognize this. Writing about ET life, the late University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup noted that “the majority of evolutionary biologists find the chance of an independent evolution of a recognizably humanoid creature to be essentially nil.” Or, as the physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently wrote in the New York Times, the existence of “humanoid” aliens would “shock” him, “violating everything we know about biodiversity.” The reason for Tyson’s “shock” is that such a high degree of similarity would be extremely unlikely to evolve independently. Even Richard Dawkins once wrote that it is “vanishingly improbable that exactly the same evolutionary pathway should ever be travelled twice.” Instead, as leading UFO disclosure advocate Luis Elizondo recently argued, aliens with a “humanoid form” would suggest a “common link.” The best explanation would be that we all come from a common designer. After all, intelligent agents regularly reuse functional parts in different systems. Engineers reuse wheels on both cars and airplanes, or keyboards on both tablets and cell phones. A high degree of similarity is far better explained by a common intelligent designer, not blind evolution. Undoubtedly, there will be those tempted to say that the aliens actually are our designers, but what does this really explain? Invoking aliens kicks the can down the road and doesn’t explain the aliens’ origin. If humanoid aliens really existed, such a degree of similarity would require that they be based upon something like DNA and proteins. But complex biomolecules like DNA won’t arise once, much less twice, by unguided chemical evolution. Something else is needed. And much more than DNA alone is needed for cells to operate. Life contains a myriad of molecular machines that maintain a highly ordered state of cellular complexity. But how does all that machinery arise? The answer is that they are programmed into our DNA. The nucleotide bases in DNA must be arranged in precisely the right order to produce functional proteins. Molecular biologist Douglas Axe published a paper finding that only 1 in 10^77 amino acid sequences will work to produce a typical functional protein. Blind evolution could never stumble upon such rare and precise sequences of genetic information. Special machines in living cells read and interpret that genetic information, executing its commands, to produce cellular machines. The result is a form of computer-like information processing where you literally have machines building machines. As Bruce Alberts, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, wrote: “The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.” Information-rich codes, computer-like information processing, and factories making machines have only one known cause: an intelligent mind. If alien life does exist — and that’s still a very big “if” — and if it looks or works even remotely like human biology, then it did not arise by blind evolution, and those similarities didn’t occur by chance. Their complexity was intelligently designed, and their similarities trace to a common designer. So, could aliens be the designers? No, because these aliens could not create themselves. Speaking philosophically, if we go back to the beginning, there can only be one ultimate designer: an unevolved, superintelligent, supernatural, transcendent being. Most people call that God. *** Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist, California-licensed attorney, and an associate director at Discovery Institute in Seattle.