I would say that your entire premise here is incorrect. I view the pursuit of science and religion as largely orthogonal. Science is in search of how, where religion, and similar philosophies, are in search of why. I think people who look to religion to explain the natural processes of how we got here, evolution, and all that are looking in the wrong place. Similarly, I think people who look to science to understand their purpose in life and what they should do with it and how they should treat eachother as looking in the wrong place.
There is some overlap, but I distinctly believe that science can never say anything meaningful about the existence or non-existence of God, and that’s sort of the point. If we liken God to the director of a film, everything in that film is exactly as it is because of the work of the director. We don’t see the editting and changes and the decisions that were made. Sure, we can see outtakes and bloopers, but those are outside the context of the film. As such, any interaction God has with nature inherently appears as part of nature, and is utterly indistinguishable from a perspective internal to the context of nature.
The point is, the purpose of religion isn’t to create a falsifiable theory and then try to verify it. In fact, in my experience, it’s the exact opposite process, an experiential process.
I have no qualms with the idea that there’s other life out there or that God created them too. I don’t believe that we’re necessarily the only life or that we’re necessarily the most important. The thing is, we have no idea how common life is in the universe because we only have a single data point. It could be possible that there’s billions or trillions of civilizations out there, and yet contact with them is all but impossible. Or it could be that there’s millions or billions even within our own galaxy and we just haven’t reached a threshold of technology where we can meaningfully communicate with them.
However, if there’s any other life, it really doesn’t have any bearing on us in the foreseeable future. Even if we discovered intelligent life tomorrow, I don’t see how it inherently violates any of my beliefs about God, barring some unforeseeable information. Then again, any unforeseeable information could cause all kinds of wild and unpredictable results.
And I would argue that this view of how prayer works results from a deep misunderstanding of its purpose. Prayer isn’t about asking God for things you want or asking him to prevent things you don’t want. It’s about conversation and communing with God. In fact, most of my prayer is very seldom of the type where I put my hands together and bow my head. Instead, I think it’s more of a constant type of contact, and often through meditation. Most of all, it definitely is not about getting what you want.
Instead, prayer is about process, growth, and learning. By the definitions of God we seem to be running under here, inherently, his plan is perfect, or at least superior to my wishes, and any expectation of altering his plan to my whims contradicts that. Instead, I prayer that he helps me understand why these things happen that happen and to learn and grow from the experiences so that I can best fulfill my role in that plan.
For an analogy, the type of prayer you seem to be thinking about would be like a kid calling up their parent every time something goes wrong and asking for money to fix it. What will that child ever learn about self-reliance, or life in general, if every time something goes wrong, they give them what they want? Instead, a child should approach their parent looking for advice and concern on how to deal with it and what they can do to keep those bad things from happening or whatever. You know, the whole “teach a man to fish” thing.
In short, I think viewing God as an invisible man in the sky who grants wishes is something that people should have grown out of when they were a young child. The idea that it doesn’t make sense from an adult perspective doesn’t invalidate the existence of God, only that childish view of him.
And this is just silly. You’re dealing with infinities and cycles here. You inherently get nonsense when you compare these kinds of values in our understandings of mathematics. Asking these sorts of questions is like kids arguing and throwing “plus infinity” into it. Which weighs more, infinity pounds or infinity kilograms? Its a nonsense question.
I tend to view the concept of God’s “infiniteness” to our existence as simply jumping up a level of dimensionality. Imagine we have a solid of finite size. How many 2D slices can we take of it? There’s an infinite number of 2D slices, and there’s no meaningful way to describe the 3D shape except through projections. But if anyone has ever seen a 4D hypercube projection, can you really meaningfully understand what a 4th spacial dimension even means?
As such, I try to intuitively accept that however he exists, I can best understand it as him existing in some higher dimensionality, which also explains much of our experiential views of him, like being omnipresent and omniscient.
