The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [112]
Alien-abduction beliefs can be considered a type of religious creed, based on faith, not facts. Indeed, a vast body of scientific data indicates that the believers are psychologically benefiting: they’re happier, healthier, and more optimistic about their lives than people who lack such beliefs. We live in an age when science and technology prevail and traditional religions are under fire. Doesn’t it make sense to wrap our angels and gods in space suits and repackage them as aliens?48
ETIs are secular gods—deities for atheists.
The indefatigable ETI searcher Jill Tarter, who brooks no sloppiness or sentimentality in her rigorous research program, in response to my initial suggestion in a Science review essay that ETIs are secular gods,49 expressed her contempt at such a characterization. She correctly noted that “physics, not faith, dictates that any successful SETI detection will be with a long-lived technology (and perhaps the technologists who invented it),” and that “we work on the search because we want to know the answer to a very old question, popularly phrased as ‘are we alone?’” That’s true. Why does Jill Tarter search the skies for a sign?
I search because I’m curious, not to find some deity, secular or otherwise! I do not know the answer to this old question, but I am as excited about using whatever tools are available to try to find the answer as I am excited about the possibility of using other tools to understand the nature of dark matter, or the state of dark energy, or whether giant planets form by aggregation or runaway gravitational instability. All are perfectly valid scientific questions to ask about the universe in which we find ourselves. Nevertheless, Basalla and you sling your accusations of special religious motivations at me and my colleagues and let the cosmologists (and their publishers), who pepper their book titles with the “God” word, off the hook.50
Fair enough. And let me add that I do not in any way equate SETI scientists with alien abductees and flying saucer searchers. SETI is science; UFOlogy is pseudoscience. SETI is elitist; UFOlogy is populist. SETI is dominated by Ph.D. astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians; UFOlogy is predominantly the domain of noncredentialed amateurs. SETI assumes the null hypothesis that aliens do not exist until contact is made; UFOlogy rejects the null hypothesis outright by starting with the assumption that contact has already been made.
What I am after is the deeper motivation for the search, the psychology behind the belief that somewhere out there in the vast cosmos filled with trillions of stars and planets, there exist other intentional and intelligent beings who are vastly superior to us. I contend here that the belief comes first, the search for evidence of the target of belief follows. There is nothing wrong with this; it is how most of science operates. Darwin and Wallace believed that there was a natural force at work creating new species (as opposed to a supernatural creator), and they found it in the form of natural selection. Einstein and Hubble believed that the large-scale structure of the universe could be understood through the operation of natural laws instead of supernatural interventions, and they found it in the principles of relativity and gravity. We search for such ultimate explanations because we are pattern-seeking agent-postulating primates whose brains are wired to find patterns and agents, even if the patterns are purely natural and the agents are just the laws of nature or other corporeal beings. Of