Indeed both views have the problem you just spoke of, but the supernatural view has still another deficit, which we might call a failure to explain. When we posit aliens, we posit something which we presume has a causal history in terms of more fundamental parts, but when we posit a supernatural god or the like, we posit something vastly complex yet with no parts. It is as if the entire text of "Finnegans Wake" were the 3rd letter of the alphabet, or as if particle physics tried to explain the universe in terms of quarks, leptons, and dinner tables.
There is yet another point, which is that the alien "gods" are not what one might call "religiously adequate." Nobody wants to worship mere fellow creatures, no matter that they might have created us.
I agree that positing a ontologically basic creator has one more deficit than positing an ontologically non-basic creator. I just don't think that's a particularly important place to draw the line. Far more important to me is the difference between positing an goal-directed creator vs. a non-goal-directed one, for example. To my mind, positing alien astronauts who came to Earth in order to create human beings is nearly as problematic as positing a god who did so, and focusing my attention on the extra deficit introduced by the latter is not a helpful use o...
The final straw was noticing a comment referring to "the most recent survey I know of" and realizing it was from May 2009. I think it is well past time for another survey, so here is one now.
Click here to take the survey
I've tried to keep the structure of the last survey intact so it will be easy to compare results and see changes over time, but there were a few problems with the last survey that required changes, and a few questions from the last survey that just didn't apply as much anymore (how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)
Please try to give serious answers that are easy to process by computer (see the introduction). And please let me know as soon as possible if there are any security problems (people other than me who can access the data) or any absolutely awful questions.
I will probably run the survey for about a month unless new people stop responding well before that. Like the last survey, I'll try to calculate some results myself and release the raw data (minus the people who want to keep theirs private) for anyone else who wants to examine it.
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.