Saturday 29 August 2009

Hello from Earth

"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"

This towering monument to faith would seem to suggest yes. There is more faith here than in most churches. But faith in what?

One can't help but find things like this and SETI vaguely amusing. Huge efforts and great wads of cash are expended in pursuit of something which has no basis in reality and no evidence to even suggest its existence. This latest outworking of religious zeal is particularly bizarre, and strikes me as very redolent of the Twitter generation.

But one wonders, if indeed there were intelligent life on Gliese581d, what the reaction of those aliens would be to messages like "Stage fright! What do you say in an intergalactic message? Hello? Peace? What's the weather like? Know that we're here, we're waiting. Hear from you soon. Ally". Humans from a century or two ago would have been mystified by a message like that (come to that, so probably would a modern tribesman from Papua New Guinea). What would a non-human intelligence make of it? Wondering if this, a random pick, was a poor example of the kind of messages sent, I clicked on Top Messages to find out what the best ones were. The best, apparently, was "Hello Gliese 581d inhabitant. Can you help us humans travel through space and become smart like you. Please do not eat us we are a friendly race." And the CSIRO funded this?! Hmmm.....

Since one would assume, given the style and vocabulary, that most of the messages have come from children or young adults, it seems supremely ironic that Richard Dawkins and others of the New Atheism, while decrying religious education as "child abuse", turn a blind eye to stuff like this. Does it really seem more rational to them?

UPDATE: A commenter has pointed out that not all atheists ought to be tarred with the same brush on this point, and that there are indeed some who are sceptical about the benefits of programmes like this one. Some of these can be found in this thread on the Debating Christianity and Religion Forum.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Linketh;

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9546

Also, I find it insulting for it all to be labelled as "Dawkins and his ilk." Not everyone on the other side is the same, y'know?

Anyway I was hoping to save the DCR forums for later, but what the hey.

GAB said...

That's a fair cop. That was uncharitable of me. I have edited that bit out.

As to the charge itself, if there are atheist responses to this kind of irrationality, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong on that count too, and would post a link to any such response, if you know of any.

Anonymous said...

Why thank you.

And if you follow the link give, you might find at least one or two who believe "money would be better spent elsewhere", to some extent at least

GAB said...

Ah, indeed. Hadn't read through all the responses before. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

No worries.

Out of curiousity though, have you ever been to the DCR forum before?

GAB said...

I must confess I haven't. I've been having a bit of a look around it since you gave the link, though, and think I will be visiting it a lot more from now on.

Kiran said...

I would think that if Aliens could speak, like lions, we wouldn't be able to understand them...