The usual pattern is that religious people, especially Christians, think that humans are very special. Only humans have souls, consciousness and consciences. Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, argue one of two ways. Either intelligent life is a natural, almost inevitable development of evolution and is likely to appear elsewhere in the universe; or they say the development of intelligent life from evolution was an off-chance and if humans wipe themselves out there is little of no chance it will recur. On the atheist-agnostic side, therefore, one’s view of the human condition would not be profoundly affected by the discovery that we are not alone and that out there intelligent life is working away producing Beethoven’s Ninths; Hamlet and Blue Poles, even if in slightly different forms. From the Christian view, however, intelligent life out there is a bit of a problem.
Fundamental to the Christian view is that God incarnate came down to earth as Jesus; told us what we should do; gave us the free will to do it or not (we’ll leave Calvin out of this for now); sacrificed himself and then ascended into Heaven. Now if SETI (the search for extra terrestrial intelligence) finds next week that half a dozen stars are sending intelligent signals to us, or finds an “”unmanned” or “”manned” spaceship coming our way or whatever, the Christian view of the world has to change a bit. Did Jesus visit all these planets as God incarnate spreading the Word and getting Himself crucified, albeit sometimes with six arms? This problem for religion is being placed before the public by the Australian physicist and professor of natural philosophy Paul Davies. Davies, fresh from winning Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is touring the country selling his latest two books, About Time and Are We Alone? The former is a desriptive book about relativity.
The problem extraterrestrial life presents religion was posed _ in a rather more sober way than I have _ in Are We Alone? Are We Alone? comes at a pertinent time. The power of Project Phoenix set up by NASA in 1992 to search for extra terrestrial life has grown exponentially with new electronic-sweeping devices that can check great chunks of the universe for intelligent signals in a way undreamed of a few years ago. Of course, the project can never definitively say we are alone, but it can produce solid evidence that we are not. Davies’s self-imposed task has been to pose the question to the world’s religions: “”What are you blokes going to say or do if someone is out there?” He thinks it a long shot.
However, the recent increase in Project Phoenix’s computing and electronic power to sort out the earth-sourced and the extra-terrestrial background noise from extra-terrestrial intelligent signals is astonishing. Davies thinks that if extraterrestrial life with consciousness is found, it poses a fundamental question for the role of the Christian god. “”Does he just save Homo sapiens, or does he save the little green men, too?” he asks. “”If so, does he go all around the universe to do it. If so, it makes Christianity appear rather ludicrous, I think.” Davies’s view is that it is likely that consciousness will be found elsewhere in the universe. “”It may well be that that is at odds with the Catholic Church; it is their problem, not mine,” he said. “”None of the world’s religions have confronted the issues, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book, because I felt they needed a bit of a prod.”
He pointed out that George Coyne who runs the Vatican Observatory has said that having god incarnate on all inhabited planets would be a heresy as far as Catholics are concerned because implies incarnation on earth was necessary, was preordained, was an automatic consequence of the Great Plan. But it is essential for Catholicism that god becoming incarnate on earth was a free act. Davies says of extraterrestrial life: “”I don’t think there is any articulated position in any of the branches of the Christian Church or any of the other world religions. Most were founded before anyone had an inkling of extraterrestrial life. But it is now considered likely. The discovery of extraterrestrial life would not only throw world’s religions into turmoil but our world view into turmoil in an even greater way than Copernicus and Darwin did. “”For the first week it would be the great sensation and then people would get on with their lives and take several generations for true import to sink into society as happened with the legacy of Copernicus and Darwin.” Davies poses a view that does not sit well with either the Darwinists or the main religions. As a physicist he is aware of the major laws of physics and some of the newer theories on chaos and complexity.
He sees a lot of self-organising, complex systems in physics, chemistry and astronomy. He also finds it remarkable that the human mind has a great capacity for the theoretical, especially the understanding of pure mathematics which underpins much of the laws of physics. That capacity has no especial value in a Darwinian sense. It does not enable us to survive any better. For example, humans like dogs only need to get out of the way of the falling apple to survive; they do not need to know the Newtonian laws of gravity that govern its falling. Far from helping us survive, this capacity for mathematics, indeed, has threatened our survival. Davies’s conclusion is twofold, if I have him right. The first is that the human mind with its mathematical ability fits well in a complex but ordered universe.
The second is that human intelligence and consciousness is neither the product of a supernatural miracle nor some unique or rare biological freak. He thinks that intelligent, self-conscious life is a quite likely and natural consequence of the sorts of physical laws and phenomena that are quite common in in the universe. “”Consciousness is a fundamental of universe, not a quirk of evolution,” he said. “”Extraterrestrial life will show that; that is why I attach so much importance to it.” Biologists would go ape over this. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, in Wonderful Life and elsewhere, has argued that intelligent self-consciousness is a quirk and that if humans wiped themselves out and the movie were replayed it would not recur. He supports his argument from the work of palaeontologists with the Burgess Shale.
The shale revealed dozens of fossils from about 600 million years ago. Surprisingly they showed not just lots of different species but whole different phyla, just in one small place. These fossils revealed completely different body structures the like of which had never been seen before. Gould argued that the mass extinction of phyla and species around 600 million years ago and again several times since must have had a certain randomness attached to what survived, and that a feature like consciousness was no more or less likely to arise than, say, seven-fingered hands, three eyes or symmetrical body shapes. The biologists suggest that the starting of life out of chemicals in the primordial slime was a one-in-many-million freak.
When the long shot of consciousness arising is added to that, the biologists say the search for extraterrestrial life is a waste of time. They say the physicists and cosmologists driving it do not understand biology. Even if the conditions were freaked elsewhere, the life is likely since to have been wiped out. However, Davies says, “”We don’t know how we go from non-life to life on earth.” Physicists looking at complexity and chaos theory see self-organising chemicals that drive towards great complexity with great efficiency, thereby shortening the odds that life arose and increasing the chance that the same process happened elsewhere in universe. “”We live in universe replete with self-organising processes in physics, chemistry and astronomy, so it would be astonishing if we don’t see it in biology too,” Davies said. “”But it is a very unfashionable view.
“”So I think there is a very deep cultural and scientific schism here which is worth drawing out because it is at the essence of this whole SETI program.” Davies sees an odd alliance here. “”A lot of (religious) people would be happier with the notion life is unique to earth because then it can be seen as a miracle,” he said. “”Whereas if it is seen as an automatic consequence of the laws of physics it is threatening to their religion. On the other hand (the atheist biologists) would say the opposite and the suggestion that the emergence of life and consciousness was pre-ordained in the laws of physics was as bad as having God’s guiding hand. “”So it is curious that the extreme atheist and extreme theist might well join hands in an alliance here against the notion of extraterrestrial life.
“”I would rather take the point of view that humanity is the end product of natural processes. This has the effect of reintegrating ourselves into nature as part and parcel of nature and these wonderful laws which underpin the universe that have the power within them to organise matter and energy spontaneously into these elaborate structures of living organisms and the test of that would be if it was happening all over the universe. I think that is a comfortable way of looking at ourselves that we are not the centre of the universe that we are not the be all and end all we are not an act of special creation. But we are not a freak either.
We are part and parcel of this natural working out of things which I think is a very nice middle position for people who do not want a supernaturalist view but nor do they want to feel it is all a pointless hopeless accident that the universe is bleak and unfriendly. “”But people like to pigeonhole me and say that you must either go to church and believe in miracles or you are an atheist, and I think I am having a little bit of trouble getting this point of view across.” Perhaps Davies is having that difficulty because of an earlier work called the Mind of God. It started with a clear exposition of developments in modern physics and then jumped to conclusion that behind this was the work of God. It was a similar view to that propounded by Einstein _ God is a mathematician. It would be a shame if the pigeon-holing of Davies prevented people from reading Are We Alone?
The question of what is the human place in the universe is certainly not purely a religious matter. It is a very old question, and one might have thought everything had been said about it. Not so. Forget the religion. Even if rock-solid proof of extraterrestrial life is found, it will not make the slightest difference for many religious people. Religion is faith; not science. However, the finding of extraterrestrial life will help resolve the schism developing between biology and physics. Just a biology is moving away from thinking evolution inevitably steers life upwards towards the more complex, sophisticated and the conscious; physics is coming out with theories which suggest matter, energy and systems appear to do precisely that in a self-organising way _ so why not life, too. The new biology is saying life’s creation was an accident and evolution a series of random accidents which could just as easily have turned out another way. In the same way that one could imagine a trifling change in history could have made the whole world go a different way.
The new physics, on the other hand, edges ever closer to more unified laws of matter and energy and more unified theories of the way systems evolve and how complex systems hold together, suddenly fall apart and then self-organise again. And just as this difference emerges, computer technology is making the search for extraterrestrial life much quicker and more thorough. So the physicists and biologists might get some help from elsewhere to resolve their differences. To add my own bit of mischief, I think it more likely that fairly conclusive theoretical research on earth stating extraterrestrial life is or is not there is likely to precede the factual discovery of life elsewhere. I say that because it has been the pattern of scientific research for so long. Radiation, atoms, relativity, black holes, quarks, etc etc, you name it and they were “”found” theoretically first and then found in nature.