Conflicts between science and religion in science fiction.

So I just had a really weird experience. I was on a science fiction writer’s forum, where I was discussing my story of first contact. If some of you don't know I'm working on new science fiction story dealing with first contact. So I posited a question on the relationship between the habitability windows of planets and the rise of intelligence on these planets. For the most part I got some good feedback and I had some interesting dialogue, except for the individual who constantly said that there is no life in the universe.

 To me that is an absolutely inane comment to make. I think a few of you actually know me and have met me and you know that I am easy going, but I do have an issue when people try to lord over some sort of perceived intellectual advantage as i interpreted this to be

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So I asked the individual why they believe there is no life in the universe, bear in mind he didn't say galaxy he said universe, and the universe is about 300 times bigger than our galaxy. His argument was that we haven't found life out in the galaxy/universe therefore life cannot possibly exist out there. I was flabbergasted at this statement.

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is an important scientific tenet, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and I understand this. And I explained it to them that just because we have not found evidence of life does not mean that life is not out there. We suspected that planets existed in the galaxy but we had no way of actually seeing them until we develop better telescopes that could detect the wobble and the transit of planets in front of their stars.

I thought it a good argument on my part; however, it appears all I did was infuriate the other person. So he came at me with the supposition that if there were intelligent life out there they surely would come here to make themselves known to us. I've already posted previously my thoughts on why aliens probably would not come here, and why they certainly wouldn't come here for slaves or for our materials or our resources. And I thought I laid out the argument pretty well that the cost of traveling to Earth over such interstellar distance would not make sense to him.

Now at this point I'm not sure if he's playing devil’s advocate or he actually believes that aliens would come to our planet to steal our resources. So I laid out a pretty compelling scientifically based argument that life may exist in the universe because quite frankly there's so many stars and we are finding so many exo-planets that that hover between the habitability zone and the frost line of solar systems. That's when I got the shock; now bear in mind this is a science fiction forum for science fiction writers to throw out ideas and to get feedback. The individual stated that God only made life here.

What do you say at this point?

While I have the utmost respect for people who have a higher faith it's hard for me to logically think that as big as the universe is as a whole, that life is so unique that it only happened on a small rocky planet on the outer rim of the small modest galaxy. And then it struck me that this person is on a science fiction writing forum, and they don't believe there is life in the universe, what an odd juxtaposition to have about the genre they are writing in. So I asked how he reconciles his beliefs with his writing of alien races, distant worlds, etc. He simply said he just writes fantasy in space.

It was quite an eventful discussion, and to be honest I was absolutely struck by his convictions that life only exists on this planet and how it is so diametrically opposed to my own belief that there is life in the universe besides us. I guess the moral of this is that we all write differently based on our beliefs and that is what makes it such an interesting life.