When Isaac Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants, he unwittingly hammered the first nail into the lid of the coffin of the supernatural. I say unwittingly, because Newton was a profoundly, indeed, fanatically, religious man; but his concept of a solar system ordered by a handful of simple physical laws with concise mathematical expression was something totally new. Prior to Newton, the planets were kept in the precise paths described by Copernicus and Kepler by the hand of God. It was the divine supervision of the creator that guided the astral bodies and specified their motions. Newton showed it to be not a conscious and deliberate direction, but an inevitable result of the same natural law that controlled all matter, from the motions of distant binary stars to falling apples in an orchard. The immediate hand of the divine was not the force that moved the planets, it was the initial author of those physical laws. To the seventeenth century mind, this did not remove God from the picture, it simply assigned him the role of the shipwright and removed him from the position of captain. God created the Laws of Motion and from that point on everything else followed, it did not require him to be presiding over the day-to-day enforcement of those laws. It can be argued that the Enlightenment followed from Newton’s work, that the Age of Reason now no longer needed an ever-present, all-knowing God involved in every single detail of the management of the cosmos. He was now relegated to the initial principle that set it all in motion. Like the mechanical timepiece, also a product of that age, the universe ran itself without assistance, once the original clock was built, set, and wound up by the Creator, it no longer needed him. This demotion of God was the first step of the process of the demolition of theism.

The next assault on the religious viewpoint came centuries later with Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Darwin was also a religious man, albeit less doctrinaire than Newton, but his ideas were philosophically no more a threat to the religious cosmology of his contemporaries than Newton’s had been. His contribution was to show that the uncannily effective adaptation of life to changing conditions was also the result of a natural, rather than determined process. Natural selection has no equivalent of the Laws of Motion, it does not require forces or fields or mathematical expression. It is simple probability and common sense. It simply HAS to happen, and its eventual result is to give us organisms magnificently adapted to their environment and even capable of modifying themselves to adapt to a changing environment. It neatly explains away the baffling ability of life to be so perfectly suited and precisely fitted to its surroundings without having to posit the existence of an intelligent guiding force. Again, this is really no different than what Newton had done with planetary motion and gravity, but this time, resistance to the concept of a self-managing universe was much better organized and unwilling to concede the field as it had during Newton’s day.

Most religious traditions rapidly accepted Darwinian principles, correctly perceiving that there is no fundamentally anti-religious concept behind Darwinism any more than there is one behind classical mechanics or Maxwell’s equations or atomic theory. In the West, the major sticking point was that evolution’s timetable challenged a literal interpretation of scripture, one that was now directly open to attack by experiments in the laboratory and observations in the field. Evolution was rejected not because it questioned the role of the Great Designer of all living things, but because it contradicted the historical claims of the Old Testament. Influential sects of Protestant Christianity had identified and linked their doctrines to the infallibility and literal interpretation of Scripture. Before long, fundamentalist Christianity found itself at war with not only biology, but geology and astronomy as well. It seems ironic that Newton had fit in perfectly with a theology based on a geocentric universe, but Darwin was irreconcilable with a fundamentalist creation myth. In my view, both are in direct contradiction to the Old Testament, but neither makes any claims whatsoever as to the existence of God. Irregardless, fundamentalism chose the field where it would make its stand. It was not a wise choice.

What Newton and Darwin did to physics and biology, Marx and Freud did to collective and individual Man. Even if you don’t accept their particular explanations (their work was neither as successful or as influential as the others), it still suggested that the world was just as easily explained by science as by the divine. Marx and Freud have their critics, but the Church cannot challenge them any more.

These issues have an inordinate impact on the English-speaking world, particularly in North America, where fundamentalist Protestantism is powerful and influential in political and cultural debates, but I believe that to be primarily a sideshow, a secondary yet highly visible, but not particularly important historical or worldwide philosophical controversy. But I do suspect that this ideological division has unforeseen consequences in the sciences, over and above whether evolution is taught in the schools.

When I was a high school student in the the rural deep South, there was considerable discussion and debate between those classmates of mine who shared my materialist, reductionist and agnostic views and the more common paradigm in our community, fundamentalist Protestantism. One particular comment we often endured was “…but science will never find the secret of Life”. This is one sentiment you don’t hear much any more, indeed, it was pretty much discredited by the 50s when the structure of DNA was revealed by Watson and Crick, although that was not fully appreciated at the time. Today, when biochemical technology based on that science is not only accepted as courtroom evidence and medical practice, but plays an enormous role in our science and industry, it is pretty much accepted that Life with a capital “L” is a chemical phenomenon and can be completely understood in those terms. The fundamentalists have retreated, setting up a fallback position about the issue of Consciousness and the Soul, although that is also under attack from cybernetics and artificial intelligence. I don’t wish to get bogged down here in a debate on which of these viewpoints is correct (whatever that means, after all, maybe they’re both right) but to explore the idea that this debate continues to influence not only religious thought, but scientific fashion as well.

I believe the great interest now evident in science about life on other worlds, intelligent or otherwise, is religiously motivated. From the subconscious point of view of scientists active and interested in this area, the discovery of extraterrestrial life will be yet another successful attack against the religious viewpoint. It is the final justification of the Principle of Mediocrity, the idea that there is nothing special or unique about Man or his position in the universe. This is a guiding principle of science, and anathema to religion. I further submit that at least part of this scientific interest is religious, or more properly, anti-religious. The discovery of life in space, particularly intelligent life, will be the final proof that life is a physical, natural phenomenon, entirely understandable in terms of and due solely to chemical and physical forces. I suspect that this is true, but I am rather concerned by the philosophical nature of this drive. Science is going beyond the collection and interpretation of facts. It appears that it has a foregone conclusion and it is collecting observations to support it. As a scientist, I find this troubling. Too often, I have learned that when you deliberately set out to prove something, you very often do exactly that.

Personally, my own opinions are that life is a purely natural process, without supernatural origins, and that living things are common in the universe. I further believe that if there is a supernatural agency involved with the universe, it is in the distant past and no longer plays a role in the evolution or future of the cosmos. If it ever existed, it was only to define the rules of the game, not to play it or to reward the winners. Intelligent life is only different in degree, not in kind, from organic life itself. But I also recognize that these are my opinions, and that others, some of them much cleverer than I, don’t feel the same way. I also know that even though I may believe I’m right, it may very well turn out that none of these questions will ever be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. I also recognize that sometimes science leads us to places where we may not want to go.

The search for life, and by extension, intelligence, in space is now accelerating as fast as technology will allow it. I think sometime soon there will be a breakthrough, but it may not turn out to be what any of us expect.

Adam & Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and fell from grace when they listened to the serpent. Later on their son Cain married a woman from the Land of Nod. I’ve always wondered if the people living in Nod, and elsewhere, had fallen too, or were they still unspoiled.

After all, who’s to say the aliens won’t have something to teach us about God?

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The gist of the story is that God has several intelligent races in his basket, but only Earth of these three worlds has “fallen” and had to be redeemed by an incarnation of God as a human. Earth is still “the silent planet,” cut off from the spirituality that is the norm elsewhere. The first book is about Mars, which possesses more than one intelligent native species. They live in peace and harmony with God and each other, never having “fallen” into sin in the first place. In “Perelandra,” Ransom is recruited by the “powers that be” to go to Venus where the first man and woman have been placed in that planet’s Eden (at that time it was still okay to present Venus as an ocean world). Ransom’s job is to prevent the devil from wrecking Venus, too.

It’s a lot of fun, with some theological speculation thrown in.

After all, who’s to say the aliens won’t have something to teach us about God?

I got nothing. Time will tell.

My belief system is so rock solid that I don’t need explanations or provisions for the unexpected.

Arf

I do believe there would be theologians if there were only the Bible. Look at all the different sects who claim to follow nothing but the literal Bible. Clearly there are different interpretations.

Just as many of the dietary restrictions made sense in the Old Testament world but are no longer applicable, the chauvanistic view of the world and Universe are also outdated. Therefore the dilemma faced by Christians.

I’m sure Christianity can adapt to it. After all many Christians eat oysters and pork without qualms. And many of those same people condemn homosexuality, apparently worshipping from a Biblical buffet. I just think it will be interesting to see how it’s done. It seems they can either ignore the Bible, as they do re what not to eat, they can engage in some real semantic gymnastics as they do with the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, and some have access to God for new directions, Mormons and Roman Catholics. Maybe others could simply define the other-beings as not eligible for salvation.

My guess is that all of those will be employed by various sects. What the discoveries will do is put more stress on the word of God as relating less and less well to the Universe as it becomes better known.

Life is lived forward, but understood backward. And at a minimum it’s interesting, isn’t it?

Arf

I have to begin at the source (you) and discover what you think first.

I have an opinion…but it isn’t as important as what you think…to begin.

..or is this a trick post, and it just sped by me like a speed of light?…or a neutrino?