The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos by James N. Gardner;Ray Kurzweil;Ray Kurzweil

Author:James N. Gardner;Ray Kurzweil;Ray Kurzweil [Kurzweil, James N. Gardner;Ray Kurzweil;Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-05-12T22:38:00+00:00

The Oddest of Bedfellows: Religion, ET, and Science, Oh My!

One of the strangest aspects of the human mind is its mysterious capacity to harbor simultaneously two or more contradictory worldviews. Otherwise rational people, who in their everyday lives would not dream of doubting the quotidian evidence of their senses, willingly and routinely suspend disbelief when it comes to unabashedly affirming the existence of an unseen realm, peopled by supernatural spirits to whom one can communicate pleas for merciful indulgence and intervention-pleas that are believed to be heard and at least occasionally answered.

These same individuals believe, in disconcerting numbers, that the Earth is being regularly visited by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, even though hardly any reputable scientists subscribe to this assertion. And the ET belief system coexists, at least in the minds of many of the faithful, with the tenets of traditional Christianity and-even more curiously-with a general acknowledgment of the practical utility, if not the philosophical unassailability, of the scientific enterprise.

Indeed, educational experts have been surprised by the general pattern of tolerance on the part of fundamentalist Christian communities for what would seem to be, from their strongly held religious viewpoints, the infection of young, impressionable minds with noxious strains of"scientism." As Walter Russell Mead put it in a perceptive essay in Foreign Affairs:

Shocked by recent polls showing that a substantial majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, intellectuals and journalists in the United States and abroad have braced themselves for an all-out assault on Darwinian science. But no such onslaught has been forthcoming. U. S. public opinion has long rejected Darwinism, yet even in states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which have large actively Christian populations, state universities go on teaching astronomy, genetics, geology, and paleontology with no concern for religious cosmology, and the United States continues to support the world's most successful scientific community. Most evangelicals find nothing odd about this seeming contradiction. Nor do they wish to change it.... The pragmatism of U. S. culture combines with the somewhat anti-intellectual cast of evangelical religion to create a very broad public tolerance for what, to some, might seem an intolerable level of cognitive dissonance. In the seventeenth century, Puritan Harvard opposed Copernican cosmology, but today evangelical America is largely content to let discrepancies between biblical chronology and the fossil record stand unresolved.10

Public Belief in ETI and UFOs

Scientific historian Steven J. Dick reports in The Biological Universe" that credible polls indicate that 58 percent of highly educated Americans believe in the existence of intelligent life on other planets, and a majority believes that UFOs have visited Earth.12

If these polls are accurate, they cast doubt on the dire predictions by Jill Tarter and others about the probable adverse effect on terrestrial religions of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. Somehow the majority of Americans-who are among the most zestfully religious folks on Earth-have managed to reconcile their good old-fashioned faith with the zany notion that alien spacecraft are zipping through our skies. Would the mere receipt of a radio

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