Kieran Healy

Cosmic Inevitability

Just read “E.T. and God,” an article by Paul Davies in the current Atlantic Monthly about what would happen to religion if extraterrestrial life of any sort were discovered. The author tends to slide about between that question and the narrower issue of what would happen to the theologies of the major world religions, especially Christianity. As Davies himself notes, the discovery of E.T. would do all kinds of things for groups like the Raelians. (Funny how their clone story dropped off the map, by the way. Whatever happened to the allegedy respectable science journalist who was going to verify their claims, I wonder?)

Davies shows a marked weakness for the argument from design, and in particular its “anthropic principle” subgenus:

If life is found to be widespread in the universe, the new argument goes, then it must emerge rather easily from nonliving chemical mixtures, and thus the laws of nature must be cunningly contrived to unleash this remarkable and very special state of matter, which in turn is a conduit to an even more remarkable and special state: mind.

He also paraphrases a biologist:

Simon Conway Morris, of Cambridge University, makes his own case for a “ladder of progress,” invoking the phenomenon of convergent evolution—the tendency of similar-looking [sic] organisms to evolve independently in similar ecological niches … Conway Morris maintains that the “humanlike niche” is likely to be filled on other planets that have advanced life. He even goes so far as to argue that extraterrestrials would have a humanoid form. It is not a great leap from this conclusion to the belief that extraterrestrials would sin, have consciences, struggle with ethical questions, and fear death.

Hey, why stop there? I bet they also have homologues to non-fat vanilla lattes, frat parties and New Labour. I remember seeing a standup comic do a routine where he said he was an alien from a distant galaxy, where life was wholly different from Earth. “We have no concept of love, and no death,” he said, “and a different-shaped gearstick on the Honda Civic.”

As for the anthropic principle—the idea that the fundamental physical constants of the universe are so tightly calibrated that life could not have happened if any of them were a tiny bit different, and hence that the Universe was waiting for, e.g., Orange County to emerge—well, it’s always seemed like a lot of badly-reasoned old cobblers to me. It’s a bit like wondering how eggs know what shape eggcups are, or feeling pleased that God has organized things in such a way that the sun rises in the morning, just when people are ready to go to work.

It’s one of the great bull session topics out there, isn’t it? It’s not just religion but much of biological science that would get a huge challenge, because so much of both bodies of thought and practice depend in their present form on there being only one set of examples to draw from.

The problem is, while one can say with certainty that the discovery of other sentient life would provide a gigantic challenge to ways of thought and action, religious and otherwise, the nature of that challenge depends entirely upon the nature of the life encountered and, as non-Western peoples know perfectly well, on the relative power relations between the other sentients and ourselves, on the nature and proximity of the contact.

You can’t say much beyond that except to explore the branches of the tree of possibility the idea presents.

What if we find living creatures whose sentience is not even certain to us, e.g., they are non-technological but who appear to communicate and act in coordinated ways that look sentient to our eyes, but where we cannot seem to figure out how to communicate with them? Then we just add a new data point to an old debate.

What if we find living creatures whose sentience is apparent in that they are highly and visibly technological but with whom we cannot communicate? That doesn’t just add a new data point to the debate about sentience, consciousness and communication, it changes its nature entirely.

What if we find living creatures with whom we can communicate but whose biological nature is so radically different than our own that we have almost nothing to talk about? Again, that transforms existing debates entirely.

What if the aliens we find are humanoid, and fairly close to our own body plans? Huge impact on us, and possibly more empowering for religious ideas unless xenobiologists can explain why universal conditions tend to produce humanoid body plans.

Etcetera. In many cases, we’d just then be scurrying for even more data points, and existing debates would vault up in scale but not change all that much. But it all depends not just on finding something, but on what we find. (and also on whether it finds us, and whether it finds us tasty…)

Nice post. Here is the exact point at which I decided that the article you review is a steaming pile of crap: “If life is found to be widespread in the universe, the new argument goes, then it must emerge rather easily from nonliving chemical mixtures, and thus the laws of nature must be cunningly contrived…”