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By Margaret Harris
Press releases are supposed to be attention-grabbing, but occasionally, I come across one that really goes the extra mile. That was the case this morning when – my eyes still a bit bleary, my coffee still un-drunk – I spotted a real doozy in my in-box.
“Are the world’s religions ready for ET?” the headline asked.
Some might regard this question as unimportant. Even if you care about the official views of religious groups (and many people – including some religious people – do not), their opinions about life on other planets are surely less relevant to daily life than their guidelines on, say, human morality. After all, if extraterrestrial life does exist, it is an awfully long way away: the nearest star system to ours, Alpha Centauri, is more than four light-years off, and astronomers do not regard it as a good candidate for habitable planets. So, if extraterrestrial life is ever discovered, the Earth’s religions will have plenty of time to get used to it before it causes them any practical problems down at the local synagogue, mosque, temple or church (“Baptismal Ceremony ET: For alien life forms unable to answer for themselves”).
This press release, though, had another trick up its sleeve. Under the sub-headline “Belief in extraterrestrials varies by religion”, it included a snippet of data from opinion polling carried out in the US. This is what really grabbed my attention. Apparently, the people most likely to believe in extraterrestrial life are…atheists. More than half (55%) of the atheists in the poll professed a belief in extraterrestrials, compared with 44% of Muslims, 37% of Jews, 36% of Hindus and just 32% of Christians.
Without information about how many people were polled, or how they were selected, it’s hard to know how seriously to take these results. The press release also didn’t say how the question was phrased, which is likewise pretty important. After all, believing that we are unlikely to be alone in a vast universe is very different from believing that little green men gave you a ride in their spaceship last Tuesday. But even so, it seems odd that atheists – a group defined by their lack of belief in a being (or beings) for which there is no good scientific evidence – are so willing to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials. Because, of course, there’s no good evidence for them, either.
The Roman Catholic Church is certainly ready. Pope Francis was asked about aliens recently http://www.christianpost.com/news/pope-francis-talks-about-aliens-says-he-would-welcome-martians-to-receive-baptism-119630/ and I think that the official Catechism of the Catholic Church may address the question of alien life forms and salvation.
A faithul of any belief like an entreprise, by nature – Darwinian survival, has to be narrow in its views, reach and overall perspective compared to those of an atheist.
Ante la inmensidad del universo, los millones de galaxias, cada una con millones de estrellas y millones de planetas suponiendo que cada estrella pueda tener más uno; se hace imposible pensar que los seres humanos son los únicos en el universo que en este rango de visión, vemos.
La vida es factible que exista con otros rangos de visión, en este u otro universo; en este u otra línea de tiempo; para los eventuales aliens que llegaran a contactarnos, si es que han podido superar la velocidad de la luz que es nuestra medida de desplazamiento, para ellos, los seres humanos serían los Aliens, y tratarían de educarnos según sus creencias. La religión que profesáramos, terminaría cambiando a la que ellos consideran verdadera.
Prueba: la conquista de américa que hizo desaparecer las creencias de las civilizaciones aztecas,maya, etc.
I have a paper accepted for publication on the relation of science to philosophy and I know about what religions say about cosmology. Referring to the quote below from the present Physicsworld article:
“More than half (55%) of the atheists in the poll professed a belief in extraterrestrials, compared with 44% of Muslims, 37% of Jews, 36% of Hindus and just 32% of Christians.”
clearly most muslims amongst the sample in this survey do not know about what the Quran says about extraterrestrial life.
Qur’an Chapter 40 Verse 57
The creation of the heavens and the earth is definitely a greater thing
than creation of mankind, however, most of mankind knows not.
Quran Chapter 65 verse 12
God it is who has created seven heavens, and similar number of earths, The commandments come down among them slowly,
that you may know that God is Able to do all things, And that God surrounds all things in knowledge
( The word seven is used in following verses in the Quran to denote a very large number more like infinite.)
That there is no evidence for the existence of god is self evident to an Atheist but to say that there is no evidence for extraterrestrial life is simply wrong, in fact if you have seriously studied this subject you will find a lot of evidence. Its all there, you just have to look and read past the first few paragraphs and apply some comprehension.
In fact if you seriously studied the subject you will find a lot of evidence for the existence of God which makes the faith of the atheist self-evident.
The outcome of the poll is not really surprising to me. In the history of physics we can observe a shift of the importance of human beings away from the center of the universe (which initially was the earth) to a modest position on some planet in some solar system in some galaxy somewhere in the universe. From an atheist point of view it is not unreasonable to suppose that the probability that the earth is the only inhabited planet in the universe is smaller than the probability that there is somewhere in the universe life that is more or less comparable to human life on earth.
“It seems odd” – but I think there is an explanation. Informed atheists realise that the emergence of life from chemicals is extremely unlikely, and that the emergence of intelligent life appears to raise the barrier of improbability so high that even their credulity is stretched. Consequently, much of their research has been devoted to trying to show that life is inevitable, and that the universe is teeming with life. However, despite the best efforts of SETI and the numerous laboratory attempts to simulate abiogenesis, positive results remain elusive. Nevertheless, atheists have to operate on the basis that life’s origin must be the result of natural processes. To protect this view, they have led the way in redefining science so that only natural biological processes are able to account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth. Despite the lack of positive evidence, atheists lead the poll about extraterrestrials because they are pursuing their dream. No doubt more could be said about the other groups in the poll, but sufficient to note here that the spontaneous emergence of life is not a necessary element in their worldviews.
Couldn’t have put it better myself
I’m surprised so many Christians believe in extraterrestrials. Should probably read ‘professed Christians’.
I find a strong tendency for we mortals to believe what we feel happy believing and manipulate the evidence to fit. There is certainly no evidence of ET life but to be fair, given the vast distances positive proof either way would depend on faster than light travel, as any sci-fi fan knows.
Hi, my name is Mike and I am currently working on a book called, ‘How to Debate Atheists.’ I have completed the first three chapters and would appreciate any feedback.
http://mikemanea.com/unapologetics/how-to-debate-atheists/
Apropos the letter from David Tyler.
The visible universe contains some hundred million galaxies with between ten million and one hundred million stars per galaxy. E
Recent observations suggest that planet formation is a fairly common phenomenon, albeit the formation of terrestrial planets could be rather less frequent. The number of planets that could support life can be expected to be constrained by the needs for: – heavy elements, such as Iron, – a stable, long-lived star, yellow or red dwarf preferred, and – a tranquil environment free from nearby novas or supernova. On this basis we may expect that one percent or less of the stars in a galaxy will possess planets suitable for terrestrial types of life; this still gives in excess of a thousand billion suitable planets in the universe.
It has been objected that the transition from complex but non-living compounds, such as amino acids, to prokaryotic cells, and thence to complex organisms and sentience, would involve a sequence of extremely improbable events; however, given the billions of years since the formation of the earth, the reaction rates of complex chemicals, and the number of reactions occurring per second, then the highly improbable becomes less unexpected. The Fermi paradox and the continuing failure of the SETI programs suggest that intelligent life may be very rare; a very rough estimate suggests that if the probability of intelligent life arising on a suitable planet is one in ten to the power thirty (a suitably improbable event), then intelligent life is a near certainty in the universe as a whole, although most galaxies will contain no more than one intelligent species.
When attempting to debate the question of whether we are alone as intelligent life in the universe, I don’t believe popularly cited estimates of probability are really very useful. There may well be 1000 billion suitable planets in the universe, and billions of years for intelligent life to have independently and spontaneously arisen there, but if the basic likelihood of life beginning is sufficiently low (and contrary to Peter’s figure, several models have produced probability figures of less than 10e-100), then all those billions and billions still don’t generate a lot of noughts!
Extremely low probabilities are often difficult for the public to intuitively grasp, since they fall outside of everyday experience, particularly if the enormity of figures written in scientific notation are not adequately grasped. A suitable analogy might be the lottery: we know that people win the jackpot – it’s unlikely but not unheard of. However, the chances of winning the lottery jackpot twice are truly vanishingly small. Of course, the vast majority of participants never win at all.
The problem with applying this logic to the SETI question is that all outcomes are not equally observable. The overwhelmingly most likely result is that no life at all ever appears in the universe, but in that case, there would be no-one there to observe it. Indeed the most basic interpretation of the anthropic principle is that the conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always one. With the outcome of ‘no life’ excluded by observation, the next most likely number of intelligent civilisations is one.
This problem is somewhat easier to visualise in a multiverse (in which parallel universes exist, either figuratively or literally): almost all universes would be devoid of life, a tiny fraction would have a single civilisation, and the numbers with multiple civilisations would be vanishingly small. I’m afraid I will leave the question of “if other life exists in a parallel universe, are we alone?” to the philosophers!