Famous Physicist, Stephen Hawking's, Blind Faith in Science and Aliens

I know you should never start a written piece with a question, but I have to ask - why do scientists scoff at the premise of God BUT wholeheartedly embrace the idea of alien existence?

It’s a rhetorical question because I get the fact that God can’t be rigorously tested via the scientific method; adequately measured; empirically observed or quantified via data gathering – I get that. But neither can the existence of aliens.

I guess, all of those reasons that scientists postulate as a collective universal outcry to reject God, somehow don’t apply to the existence of extra-terrestrials.

Case in point, on April 25, 2010 famed physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking stated in a story that ran in the Times of London that since there are a 100+ billion galaxies in the universe it’s highly likely that life exists out there beyond the life on earth. He’s quoted as saying, “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

That’s interesting. Because the fact is that there is NO evidence, proof, data or justification for the existence of aliens to be “perfectly rational.”

Could you imagine the Amish-style shunning a scientist would receive if they made a claim that the existence of God was “perfectly rational” based solely on the ridiculously-odds-defying math associated with six-billion lives existing at all on our perfectly-balanced planet, which seems precisely programmed to sustain life?

The closest that Hawking gets to a concept of God, is summed up in an unrelated milquetoast quote, “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”
Hmmm….”may or may not be divinely inspired” versus “aliens…perfectly rational.”

A separate story in the L.A. Times this past weekend on May 7, 2010 includes this insightful excerpt,
“…The Journal of Cosmology compiled responses from a dozen scientists and has published them online. Some criticized Hawking's use of human behavior to predict what aliens would do, but others said that human behavior was a reasonable yardstick. Few, however, questioned the premise of Hawking's statements — that alien life forms probably exist and we are likely someday to encounter them.”

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/07/science/la-sci-hawking-aliens-20100508

So Hawking is chastised by segments of the science community for projecting human behavior on our unproven alien neighbors, but his underlying premise – that they exist – is accepted without so much as a Petri dish of proof. How is that science? Sounds an awful lot like blind faith to me.