The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [12]
I’ve seen the IETI invitation. This presumes that ETs will be able to read English and navigate a web page on their computers, when only twenty years go—or twenty years from now—none of what we’re using today worked or will work.
That’s why I think we need to just extend the invitation to the source verbally through a global organization such as the United Nations.
What would you say?
I would say something like this: “We, the citizens of Earth, with peaceful intention, invite any and all extraterrestrial intelligences to make contact with us.”
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Whether Chick D’Arpino ever realizes his dream of a UN-sponsored ET invitation event remains to be seen (if you want to read Chick’s own statement on the ET invite, go to: http://www.chickdarpino.blog.com/). There is no harm in trying, and maybe it would even serve to bring humanity together for a brief respite between tribal disputes. There is, after all, no law of nature that says there cannot be an extraterrestrial intelligence out there, even one that knows we are here. I’m skeptical that we would get a response, as I am that what happened to Chick on that early morning those long gone decades ago represents a mind outside of the brain, but as a scientist I must always consider the possibility that I could be wrong. Either way, Chick D’Arpino’s journey is a testament to the power of belief.
2
Dr. Collins’s Conversion
By now you may be thinking to yourself, “Oh come on! How does any of this apply to me? This D’Arpino guy is an uneducated bricklayer. My beliefs are based on reasoned analysis and educated consideration. I’ve never heard voices or tried to see the president. My brain and beliefs are just fine, thank you.”
This is why I shall bookend Mr. D’Arpino’s story with that of Dr. Francis Collins, an M.D. and Ph.D., former head of the Human Genome Project, current director of the National Institutes of Health, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, to name just a few of his accomplishments. Dr. Collins also had a life-changing epiphany, also in the early morning, propelling him to become an outspoken born-again evangelical Christian and write a bestselling book about both his experience and his journey from hard-core atheist to impassioned believer. You may reasonably think yourself immune to the power of belief as witnessed in the narrative arc of a brick mason, but few readers of this book can say that they have the intellectual horsepower or scientific credentials of Francis Collins, one of the greatest minds of our generation. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. In fact, as I argue in this book, the power of belief happens to all of us, albeit at different levels of intensity and in varying parts and times of our lives. The particulars of Dr. Collins’s belief path are radically different from that of Mr. D’Arpino’s, but the process of how beliefs are formed and reinforced is what I wish to examine in the main.
In his bestselling 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,1 Francis Collins recounts his journey from atheist to theist, which at first was a halting intellectual process filled with the internal debates scientists typically have with themselves while working on new ideas (“I hesitated, afraid of the consequences, and afflicted by doubts”). He read books on the existence of God and the divinity of Christ, most notably the works of the celebrated Oxford scholar and novelist C. S. Lewis, whose popular nonfiction works have become a staple of Christian apologetics, and whose children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia—filled with thinly disguised biblical allegories—are in steady production