By now millions of people the world over have read the exiting news of the discovery of planet Gliese 581 g. It's exciting because it is the first time that an extra-solar planet has been found that orbits its host star within its so-called 'Goldilocks zone'. As its name implies, any planet that orbits its sun within this zone is neither too hot or too cold to theoretically support life as we know it. Not surprisingly then our planet orbits safely within the parameters of just such a zone.
Almost immediately following this momentous discovery, equally fantastic statements were being made the most irresponsible of which was that "the chances for life on this planet are 100%". Aside from serving as an example of an empirically reckless statement, this unproven conjecture was something else as well: a window into the soul of many modern scientists.
Many scientists today could be described as 'militantly atheist'. That is to say they are no longer content to take the traditional philosophical position that either science is a separate human endeavor distinctly different from religious questions and experience and/or they are unable to accept Pascal's wager which basically stated that the question of the existence of God will always be, from a rationalists point of view, a 50/50 proposition. (It should be noted here that Pascal, like a true self-aware gambler, decided to believe in God since the potential social and individual 'payoff' he figured would be greater in the aggregate both in this life and the next.)
However these New Atheists are just fooling themselves. They have almost as much need for a connection to the supernatural, to the unknown, to the mystery of life as any other person--and in many cases more so. The religiosity of some of our greatest scientists such as Kepler, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein is well known. What is not so well known today is that these New Atheists too are religious--albeit in an emotionally repressed and philosophically confused way.
Aside from the fact that the New Atheists, prominently led by the brilliant evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, place man's Reason at the center of the known universe they also have intriguingly refurbished this old Jacobin way of thinking with a synthesis of astronomy and biology: astrobiology.
The new discipline of astrobiology is fascinating for many reasons not least of which it is, for the present, an intellectual discipline without an empirical object: there are no known life-forms outside this planet (although their potential building blocks are everywhere). However according to scientific conjecture based on the known laws of physics which, among other things, deals with the inner most structure of 'stuff' and its modes of combination, recombination, and/or non-combination with other 'stuff' there should be other life-forms in the cosmos.
Scientific exponents of this belief have a myriad of well-thought out reasons for
believing such a conjecture. But for now they must believe it, it is not sufficient that they demonstrate such a statement: because they cannot. They must first believe it to be a reasonable assumption and then seek out methods and means to either prove or disprove it. Ok fair enough.
The intriguing part comes when we ask ourselves why so many of them so fervently
believe in life out there? I think the answer is quite simple and has nothing to do whatever with either the reasonableness or probability of their
scientific assumption.
The
unstated belief that is, in part, the animating spirit behind this empirical quest is that once life is found on another planet religion will no longer be either necessary or meaningful for human life. The ludicrousness of such a hope is so fantastic that it is almost funny, if it weren't so serious that is.
Such an understanding of the complex phenomenon of religion is naive and simplistic at best, woefully ignorant at its worst. Many religions have no requirement as to the number of 'living worlds' extant in the universe, and indeed one of them, Zen Buddhism, has long supposed their existence as well as the existence of other worlds forever closed to the human perceptive faculties. Furthermore, the existence of life on other planets does not necessarily negate the uniqueness of life on this one. It all depends on how you interpret it. An activity which some scientists are fond of forgetting. In short the fundamental, if vague, animating spirit in all this that one day scientific 'fact' will be able to efface human 'meaning' is erroneous. There never was and never will be a magic bridge from what 'is' to what 'ought' to be. Human life will always be meaningful as long as there will be humans to interpret it.
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue78/78antony.htm
http://www.thinkatheist.com/
http://astrobiology.com/
