UFO Religions

Of Sophistry and Antagonism Toward Fine-Tuning

I found this recent post entitled, “Is This the Dumbest Ever ‘Refutation’ of the Fine-Tuning Argument Ever?” worth the read (and a bit funny). It’s about some very poor thinking on the part of British philosopher Anthony Grayling with respect to his disdain of the fine-tuning argument often associated with the intelligent design movement.

I don’t often post things like this here, but examples like this are worth it. Part of the debate over the likelihood of ET life is linked to the debate over the alleged probability that other planets *must* be out there capable of supporting ET life. The other side is the “rare earth” view — that earth is alone (or probably alone) in being home to intelligent life and even complex life forms. That view is consistent with the fine-tuning argument, which posits earth is capable of supporting life because the universe is “fine-tuned” to make that possible. The term naturally implies intelligent design, but there are some fine-tuning proponents that don’t make God part of the equation.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, fine-tuning

Another Scientist Expresses Skepticism Over Cardinal Doctrine of All ET Religions

Astrophysicist John Gribbon’s new book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique was recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer refers to the book as “grimly plausible” and notes that Gribbon has a firm grasp on something obvious to all those who still care to approach the subject of ET life with logic:  there is a world of difference between habitable planets and inhabited planets. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: astronomy, astrophysics, extraterrestrial life, habitable planets, inhabited, unique

The Higgs-Boson Hype

I like to post on things like this every so often to remind readers that science can be marred by, and married to, hype. I was reading through some recent posts by mathematician Peter Woit on his Not Even Wrong blog this morning and came across several items worth offering my own readers here. After all, the multiverse and associated ideas are inextricably part of the ET life and deep space travel issues. I like Woit because he insists that mainstream ideas be probed for internal coherence and not simply embraced for their (pardon the pun) symmetry on the surface of things. Reminds me a lot of my dissertation work on the “obvious” evolution of Israelite monotheism. Anything but.

For those new to Woit, he is a mathematician at Columbia University whose PhD (Princeton) is in theoretical physics. He is most known for his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

The first of Woit’s posts that caught my attention was entitled, “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.” Some excerpts:

Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.

The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.

This past week also saw the premiere of the Multiverse episode of Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series on PBS. It’s more or less an hour-long infomercial for the Multiverse, with the argument against it pretty much restricted to some short grumpy comments by David Gross about how he didn’t like it. Brian’s pro-multiverse argument was that many new advances in physics are all pointing to a multiverse, and he showed support for the idea as resting on a three-legged structure. One of the legs was string theory, and I’ve described elsewhere recently how circular reasoning makes this one very shaky.

The multiverse propaganda machine has now been going full-blast for more than eight years, since at least 2003 or so, and I’m beginning to wonder “what’s next?”. Once your ideas about theoretical physics reach the point of having a theory that says nothing at all, there’s no way to take this any farther. You can debate the “measure problem” endlessly in academic journals, but the cover stories about how you have revolutionized physics can only go on so long before they reach their natural end of shelf-life.

Another post of a couple days ago saw Woit defending himself against ad hominem attacks from mainstream string theorists: “String and M-Theory: Answering the Critics.” Again, some excerpts.

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are trying to make these days, but it also includes vigorous ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me (I’m described as having an “unerring gift for inaccuracy”, and we’re compared to people who campaign against vaccination “in the face of mainstream scientific opinion”).

Duff explains that his motivation for answering the critics is that we have been successful on the public relations front, supposedly responsible for the British EPSRC “office rejecting” without peer review grant proposals on string theory. I know nothing of this, but I think it’s clear to everyone that the perception of string theory among physicists has changed, and not for the better, over the past decade. One dramatic way to see this is to notice that at this point, US physics departments have essentially stopped hiring string theorists for permanent appointments (i.e. at the tenure-track level).

Duff’s article contains an appendix about this, in the form of a “FAQ”, where he explains that he approved the text of the press release headlined “Researchers discover how to conduct first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” which is misleading hype by any standard. Initially someone who was successfully misled in the Imperial media team added the subtitle “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”, which was later removed. Duff claims that Shelly Glashow, Edward Witten and Jim Gates told journalists that they didn’t agree with this because of the “theory of everything” subtitle, implying that otherwise they were fine with the “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” business (except for Gates noting that in any case this is just supergravity, not string theory). It would be interesting to hear from the three of them if they’re really on-board with this “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory”.

Technorati Tags: multiverse, Peter Woit, physics, skepticism, string theory

SETI As Religion

The November 2011 issue of The American Spectator featured an essay of interest to all those who lurk at this blog: “Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Search for God.” I was gratified that the author, Tom Bothell, was familiar enough with the subject matter to note Michael Crichton’s well-placed dismissal of the Drake Equation that ET life enthusiasts breathlessly love to reference. But Bothell also saw the religious bait-and-switch going on with respect to SETI and anything resembling traditional theism. He writes:

The late novelist Michael Crichton gave an entertaining lecture at Caltech in 2003 saying that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a religion. And in a way it is. Carl Sagan, one of its leading promoters, “believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful, as to resemble gods.” … That’s religion. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins shows similar tendencies. He was quoted in the New York Times the other day as saying, “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are Godlike creatures.” But he was careful to add that “these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.” (He would not have wanted to see “Gods” capitalized, however.)

These observations and others in regard to the religious commitment of atheist materialists to their quest for non-divine deities make this brief essay worth the read.

Technorati Tags: atheism, drake equation, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials, God, religion, Sagan, SETI, theism

Panspermia and Religion, Part 1

I’ve mentioned the Journal of Cosmology on this blog before. This online academic journal is known for producing some high-level articles, but has been criticized as well for stirring controversy (most notably the recent claims of “alien bacteria” published in the journal by Dr. Richard Hoover — from which NASA distanced itself).

The journal recently released its September-October 2011 issue. Sure enough, there’s something of interest for readers of this blog.  In particular, the article entitled “Creationism, Neo-Darwinism, and Panspermia” caught my attention. Here is the abstract:

Creationists and neo-Darwinists have spent the past several decades engaged in a sullen trench warfare, occasionally firing at each other with little effect. We argue in this article that an acceptance of panspermia as a “third way” might lead to a long over-due reconciliation between the contending groups.

The short article is worth a read. I think it telling in that it betrays that, at least for some panspermia theorists, this is a religion — and one that is ultimately about trans-humanism. The article ends as follows:

It is not inconceivable that our distant descendants 1000 years from now might evolve further, becoming, from our perspective, super-humans. They might be able to work out the requirements for directed panspermia, perhaps launching our planet’s entire assemblage of genes into space18. This might be science fiction today, but science fiction can sometimes turn into science fact. Many distinguished scientists have expressed similar views, including Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir Fred Hoyle, who wrote: “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature…” (quotation from Hoyle, F., 1982. The Universe: Past and Present Reflections, Ann.Rev.Astron.Astrophys., 20, 15).

Technorati Tags: evolution, God, Panspermia, religion, transhumanism