A latter day religion

Apr 20, 2010, 12.00am IST
PAUL DAVIES.

Humans have a basic need to perceive themselves as part of a grand scheme, of a natural order that has a deeper significance and greater endurance than the petty affairs of daily life.

The incongruous mismatch between the futility of the human condition and the brooding majesty of the cosmos compels people to seek a transcendent meaning to underpin their fragile existence.

For thousands of years this broader context was provided by tribal mythology and storytelling. The transporting qualities of those narratives gave human beings a crucial spiritual anchor. All cultures lay claim to haunting myths of other-worldliness: from the dreaming of the Australian Aborigines or the Chronicles of Narnia, from the nirvana of Buddhism to the Christian Kingdom of Heaven. Over time, the humble campfire stories morphed into the splendour and ritual of organised religion and the great works of drama and literature.

Even in our secular age, where many societies have evolved to a post-religious phase, people still have unfulfilled spiritual yearnings. A project with the scope and profundity of SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) cannot be divorced from this wider cultural context, for it too offers us the vision of a world transformed, and holds the compelling promise that this could happen any day soon. As writer David Brin has pointed out, ‘contact with advanced alien civilisations may carry much the same transcendental or hopeful significance as any more traditional notion of “salvation from above”. I have argued that if we did make contact with an advanced extraterrestrial community, the entities with which we would be dealing would approach godlike status in our eyes. Certainly they would be more godlike than humanlike; indeed, their powers would be greater than those attributed to most gods in human history.’

So is SETI itself in danger of becoming a latter day religion? Science fiction writer Michael Crichton thought so. He said: “Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof,” he explained. “The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.”

Writer Margaret Wertheim has studied how the concept of space and its inhabitants has evolved over several centuries. She traces the modern notion of aliens to Renaissance writers such as the Roman Catholic Cardinal Nichols of Cusa, who considered the status of man in the universe in relation to celestial beings such as angels. “Historically, this may be seen as the first step in a process that would culminate in the modern idea of aliens,” writes Wertheim. “What are ET and his ilk, after all, if not incarnated angels – beings from the stars made manifest in flesh?”

With the arrival of the scientific age, speculations about alien beings passed from theologians to science fiction writers, but the spiritual dimension remained just below the surface. Occasionally it is made explicit, as in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker , David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus , or Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , which is strongly reminiscent of John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress . These are iconic images that resonate deeply with the human psyche, and shadow the scientific quest to discover intelligent life beyond Earth...

For many non-scientists, the fascination of SETI is precisely its quasi-religious quality, and its tantalising promise of celestial wisdom and unbounded riches in the sky – just a radio signal away.

Extract from the writer’s The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone In The Universe ?