LIFE OUT THERE:

Why the question matters & some ideas on how to motivate much stronger interest in the American people in support of expanded highly ambitious space research focused on making discoveries in astro/exobiology & SETI.

By: Charles L. Harper, Jr.John Templeton Foundation

http://www.google.com/search?q=yuri+gagarin

What I will argue, in key point summary• Success in astro/exobiology research is of course

fundamentally uncertain, but is likely to be advanced in probability substantially by big hyper-ambitious projects (giant space array interferometric telescopes, bio-search missions to Mars & Europa, etc.)

• Broad & intense public interest & support would be helpful. (Present day really “big” space science is mostly an unpleasant political monstrosity !)

• The search for “life out there” can be seen to be compelling and fascinating from a variety of “spiritual” perspectives including that of the Catholic, “evangelical” and “Pentacostalist” Christians who together as a bloc represent a huge majority demographic part of the US population.

• The “Whiggish dialectic narrative,” however, while attractive to many intellectuals, is alienating to much of the American public and is unhelpful and unnecessary.

Super-Advanced Space Mega-InterferometerOur Earth as seen (potentially!) at 10 Ly distance

• Broad & intense public interest & support would be very helpful.

(Present day really “big” space science {e.g., Space Station} being mostly an unpleasant political monstrosity !)

• The search for “life out there” can be seen to be compelling and fascinating from a variety of “spiritual” perspectives including that of the Catholic, “evangelical” and “Pentacostalist” Christians who together as a bloc represent a huge majority demographic part of the US population.

War of the Worlds

&

Mega-wars in our world

??

What direction for advanced super-intelligent ‘genius’

out there?

von Neumann or

Bach ??

What I will argue, in key point summary

• The “Whiggish dialectic narrative,” however, while attractive to many intellectuals, is alienating to much of the American public and is unhelpful and unnecessary.

“Whig Interpretation of History”

History moves from

(your atavistic) darkness towards

(our progressive) light…

“Whig Interpretation of History”

The category was coined by the Roman Catholic British historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931 in his small but influential book The Whig Interpretation of History. It takes its name from the British Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament, who opposed the Tories, advocates of the power of the King and the aristocracy.

The term has been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (the history of science, for example) to criticize any goal-directed, hero-based, and transhistorical narrative.

Scientists tend habitually to self-identify with Whiggish narratives

Scientists (or especially their often non-scientist representative popularizers) tend to present their vision to the public in the mode of the Whiggish dialectical narrative of the advance of science as enlightened progress against a backdrop of resistant religious “darkness,” ignorance, and opposition to new knowledge. But this is in large part (--- historians of science have demonstrated convincingly---) in part a mythic and unscholarly view. And it can be culturally unproductive for science.

A few examples• #1. The case of Giordano Bruno (d. 1600)

• #2. The myth of Columbus vs the flat Earthers (see: Jeffrey Burton Russell. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and the Historians.)

• #3. SETI presentations by SETI President Jill Tarter.

• #4. The contemporary “multiverse” discussion in cosmology.

Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier

(d. 1279. Important critic, in 1277, of the logic of Aristotle as an ancient authority, --- on the necessity of their being only one world {the Earth}. Tempier argues that this traditional Aristotelian belief in the necessity of one world inappropriately constrains the power of God and should be ‘anathematized’ as a constraint on thought within the University of Paris .)

Physicist & historian of Physics, Pierre Duhem (1861 – 1916)

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa

/ Causanus(1401 – 1464)

Early mathematician developing concepts of infinity. Early advocate of many worlds and of an infinite universe with life everywhere. Highly influential upon Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno & Galileo

The problem of “folk notions,” --specifically the “God of the Gaps.”

• God as stopgap ‘plug’ for scientific ignorance.

• The most famous example is exemplified in Laplace’s famous put-down of Newton that he {Laplace, mathematically} had, “no need of that hypothesis” (of a Deus ex machina fix to planetary orbits instabilities).

Anti-Evolution “ID” theory is based on a “God of the Gaps” folk logic

• Logic: (contemporary) Evolutionary theory cannot fully explain X.

• X therefore must exist as a product of the action of an “intelligent designer.”

• (Feeds off of the “nothing but” philosophical positions of the scientism advocates.)

Astrobiology / origin-of-life research seems sometimes haunted by the “God of the gaps.”

I have observed that several astonishingly brilliant chemists who work in the area of the origin of life seem incapable of considering basic concepts coming from insights in physics having to do with the “anthropic principle” and fine-tuning issues. They seem to me to hold a philosophical pre-commitment to the idea that life must have arisen via a gigantic accident only. They seem averse to the idea that the laws, properties and constituent elements of nature may be intrinsically favorable to the natural arising of life via random but probable process (and thus reasonably in many places in the universe). To me, this situation seems to have to do with “photographic negative fundamentalism” in Anglo-American culture.

No “God of the Gaps.”

Sophisticated philosophical theology does not follow the “God of the Gaps” model.

Win-lose is mostly folk thought• Classic philosophical theology within the Christian

tradition is the precise opposite of the God of the gaps. Win-win is better!

• The appropriate vision is well expressed in a statement in a popular book, Your God is Too Small, by J. B. Phillips:

“We can never have too big a conception of God, and the more scientific knowledge (in whatever field) advances, the greater becomes our idea of His vast and complicated wisdom.”

• Success in astro/exobiology research is of course fundamentally uncertain, but is likely to be advanced in probability substantially by big hyper-ambitious projects (giant space array interferometric telescopes, bio-search missions to Mars & Europa, etc.)

• Broad & intense public interest & support would be helpful. (Present day really “big” space science is mostly an unpleasant political monstrosity !)

• The search for “life out there” can be seen to be compelling and fascinating from a variety of “spiritual” perspectives including that of the Catholic, “evangelical” and “Pentacostalist” Christians who together as a bloc represent a huge majority demographic part of the US population.

• The “Whiggish dialectic narrative,” however, while attractive to many intellectuals, is alienating to much of the American public and is unhelpful and unnecessary.

Can ordinary people get really excited about space exploration over the next 50 years having to do with the “life out there question” ?

• The quest for “life out there” very easily can be presented attractively and compellingly to most Americans in a way that draws on their deepest cultural resources.

• But to do so, scientists would need to welcome a new and different “narrative” and avoid boosting the incessant “culture of conflict” which tends keeps up a hot drumbeat of advocacy for the notion that science advances as the necessary enemy of faith (and of the deepest source of inspiration and values that many people have).

Thank you

for your attention!

Christian de Duve

Simon ConwayMorris

Martin Nowak

“God of the Gaps”

What does a modern person “see”? - a “literalist” picture of Michelangelo’s creation of Adam