Alien Life and Human Purpose by Packer Joseph;

Author:Packer, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Public Battle

Wallace saw the unity cosmology as central to his spiritual and political mission. He wrote in his autobiography that the cosmological turn in Man’s Place in the Universe represents “the ‘third chapter of my book,’ that is to say of my literary work.”[202] He argued that scientists had overstepped their bounds in pushing a materialistic and ethically blind worldview.[203] The public, meanwhile, accepted these pronouncements according to Wallace, because “when a man becomes widely known as a great authority in any department of science, [many people] accept him as a safe guide in any other departments on which he expresses his opinions.”[204] Despite his criticism of the mixture of science with ethical and political pronouncements, Wallace took up a similar strategy of using a scientific cosmology to provide justification for his social beliefs. Given Wallace’s change of view on the nature of evolution to harmonize his scientific beliefs with his political and spiritual beliefs, this should come as little surprise.

The desire to continue persuading the public ensured that Wallace would persist beyond Man’s Place in the Universe and The World of Life. He vigorously defended his scientific position in the press, writing two articles in response to his critics.[205] In 1906, the famous scientist Percival Lowell wrote a follow up book to his argument that telescopes revealed that Mars had a series of intricate canals.[206] Lowell argued that only an advanced civilization of intelligent creatures could have created these canals. Wallace responded a year later with a book-length review that refuted the science behind Lowell’s claims, cementing himself as one of Lowell’s most prominent critics.[207] For Wallace, the existence of canals on Mars implied the existence of intelligent life, which threatened spiritualism and socialism.

Percival Lowell observing the planets from a telescope at the Lowell Observatory he established in Arizona.

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