The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [97]
Well, I counter, millions of Mormons believe that their sacred text was dictated in an ancient language onto gold plates by the angel Moroni and buried and subsequently dug up near Palmyra, New York, by Joseph Smith, who then translated them into English by burying his face in a hat containing magic stones. Millions of Scientologists believe that eons ago a galactic warlord named Xenu brought alien beings from another solar system to Earth, placed them in select volcanoes around the world, and then vaporized them with hydrogen bombs, scattering to the winds their thetans (souls), which attach themselves to people today, leading to drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, depression, and other psychological and social ailments that only Scientology can cure. Clearly the veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it.
The burden of proof is on believers to prove God’s existence—not on nonbelievers to disprove it—and to date theists have failed to prove God’s existence, at least by the high evidentiary standards of science and reason. So we return again to the nature of belief and the origin of belief in God. I have built a strong case that belief in a supernatural agent with intention is hardwired in our brains, and that the agent as God was created by humans and not vice versa.
Shermer’s Last Law and the Scientific Search for God
For most theists, God’s existence is not a matter of blind faith, circumstantial geography, or cultural construction. They know that God is real, and they have as much confidence in that knowledge—and often much more—as they have in many other claims to knowledge. Atheists also affirm the belief that God’s existence is knowable. By making the argument that there is insufficient evidence for God’s existence, they are including God in the epistemological arena of the empirical sciences. If sufficient evidence did emerge that God is real, atheists should—at least in principle—assent to his existence. Would they? What evidence would be sufficient that both theists and atheists would agree to settle the issue once and for all? I contend that there is none. (This is another reason why I prefer to call myself an agnostic or a skeptic.) Here’s why.
Most theists believe that God created the universe and everything in it, including stars, planets, and life. My question is this: how could we distinguish an omnipotent and omniscient God or Intelligent Designer (ID) from an extremely powerful and really smart extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)? That is, if we go in search of such a being—as both theists and atheists claim to be doing—we encounter a problem that I call (pace Arthur C. Clarke17) Shermer’s last law: any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.18
My gambit (ET = ID = God) arises from an integration of evolutionary theory, intelligent design creationism, and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, and can be derived from the following observations and deductions.
Observation I. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to technological evolution. The reason is that biological evolution is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, whereas technological evolution is Lamarckian and can be implemented within a single generation.
Observation II. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty, so the probability of making contact with an ETI is remote. By example, the speed of our most distant spacecraft, Voyager I, relative to the sun is 17.246 kilometers per second, or 38,578 miles per hour. If Voyager I was heading toward the closest star system to us (which it isn’t)—the Alpha Centauri system at 4.3 light-years away—it would take an almost unfathomable 74,912 years to get there.
Deduction I. The probability of making contact with