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The Vatican's chief astronomer has said that belief in aliens is not at variance with Christianity and that any extra terrestrials would form "part of God's Creation".
A certain Mr. Tom Flynn writing on the pages for the Council for Secular Humanism (http://www.secularhumanism.org/) does a weird mental backflip. He "reads between the lines" of this article in order to conclude that, in fact, belief in aliens is in variance with Christianity, and that the Pope and his henchmen are trying to do proactive damage control, so the Church will not be embarrassed when real little green men are discovered on Mars, as she was allegedly embarrassed by the discovery of the New World (what the ancients called the "Perioeci").
Here is the link: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?s
Here is the link: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?s
Digression: Let me explain that obscure reference. The First Century Greeks knew the dimensions of the world from the experiments of Eratosthenes, and calculated that their known oecumene (The word refers to the “House” or inhabitation of mankind, and from it we get our words for economics and ecumenicalism. The ancient Oecumene included Europe, North Africa, and the Near East as far as India) would cover a fourth of that area. They loved the idea of moderation, and therefore supposed the temperate zone was between two uninhabitable extremes: a world of uninhabitable ice as one went north, and a zone of uninhabitable fire as one went south. But, knowing the world was globular, they also speculated that there was a second temperate zone, forever separated from us by the burning and uninhabitable regions of the equator.
They also speculated that there were other continents equally placed in the unexplored hemispheres: a Perioeci which rested (as the name suggests) alongside the oecumene in the northern temperate zone, but in an unimaginable Western Hemisphere; an Antioeci (as the name suggests) opposite the Oecumene but in the eastern hemisphere but in the southern temperate zone, and a land directly opposite our feet, called the Antipodes (as the name suggests), in the southern temperate zone, western hemisphere -- still a nickname for Australia. This was the spot where Dante placed his Mount Purgatory in his DIVINE COMEDY, directly opposite Jerusalem.
I merely note that the learned scholars of the Church (since they preserved the writings of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy and Crates, and studied them in Universities--a Christian institution) might not have been as shocked by the discovery of the New World as Mr. Flynn suggests. That the Bible does not mention the Indians of America is no more shocking to the Europeans than the discovery that the Bible does not mention the Indians of India, even though St. Thomas (according to tradition) traveled there, preached, and baptized. End of digression.
Mr. Flynn goes on to speculates that
".. I think the Vatican’s fascination with astronomy, and its new insistence that its teachings will not be threatened if a genuine ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) turns up, amounts to an exercise in anticipatory damage control. Here’s my best guess: The next time humanity learns (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) that “the universe is much bigger than our prophets said,” Vatican strategists aim to be among the religious leaders who can give the world a thumbs-up and say, “Oh yeah, we were on this all along.”
Um. Riiiiiiiiiight. It is all a conspiracy by the Pope!
“Reading between the lines” is what debaters call “the Straw Man argument.” The Straw Man argument is the simple trick of attributing to your opponent something he did not say, and perhaps did not even imply, and criticizing that.
Since you get to stuff the straw man any way you want, of course, you can criticize whatever you take a fancy in your head to criticize. As long as you are putting words into your opponent’s mouth, you might as well put words as transparently silly or as obscurely sinister as possible.
In this case, the sinister aspect seems to be that the Church would shield herself from criticism by (wait for it!) adopting a position in harmony with what she believes and has always taught. Though the question then becomes: why bother?
Why bother? What Mr. Flynn seems not to notice is that he is talking about an institution that forthrightly states (and holds it as a doctrine that binds the conscience of the believer to believe!) that man, by his unaided reason, can come to deduce the existence of God. In other words, we Catholics take it as an article of faith that Man’s reason is sufficient to confirm an Ontological Argument, or Argument from Design, or some such.
If the Church makes a brazen balls-out statement like that, why would she shy away from having the Pope himself declare that the existence of otherworldly life is no threat to Christian faith, rather than sneak the comment into the world through some back channel?
It is not as if Christians are all that quiet, shy, or reticent about what we believe. We've discovered the secret of eternal life, for Christ’s Sake! We want everyone to know what we believe, and we even send missionaries to the Antipodes (see above) or to India (see above) to get the message out. Every single Christians is under a positive duty to spread the Gospel to all living creatures (including the sharks trailing in the wake of the Pequod, I suppose).
Mr. Flynn needs to read some more detective novels to broaden his education: Father Brown could tell him that
It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, thatdeals with things we don't understand, than a natural story thatcontradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great MrGladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and Iwill be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when firstpresented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room andslapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnosticat all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much morecertain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear;because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.
The only problem with the conspiracy theory that the Pope is secretly prodding the Vatican Observatory to defuse the potential time bomb of the discovery of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence by making public pronouncements now, is… that this is simply not the way the Church has ever acted. It violates the laws of the world I do understand.
Three observations must be made on the psychology of atheism to understand why Mr. Flynn’s speculations seem reasonable to him.
The first is that atheists view the rest of the world with a combination of bafflement and scorn which naturally lends itself, if not to paranoia, at least to a suspension of skepticism about how their fellow men act.
The atheist, from his point of view, lives in a world of lunatics, some violent, some gentle, all of whom believe in Santa Clause or flying unicorns. These lunatics seem like normal people who go to baseball games and vote for school board meetings and watch the telly, but then on the topic of the flying unicorns, they get this glassy stare in their eye, and tell you that the flying unicorns have told them the secret of eternal life (see above), and that Santa Clause will not fill their stockings if they have sex out of wedlock or eat pork on Friday or something.
An atheist defies the entire history and experience of the world when he rejects religion, the one universal of all human cultures. He thinks he is smarter than men like Newton and Copernicus and Thomas Aquinas and Pascal and Descartes, or, at least, the atheist thinks that he has a clearer insight on the issue of religion than these men had, despite their evident brilliance as scientists, philosophers and men of letters.
I am not saying all atheists are conspiracy theorists: but I am saying all atheists must either believe, or entertain the belief, that some fundamental aberration of human thought afflicts all the human race, even the wisest. Only he and his small coterie of “Brights” are immune.
So, if you are an atheist, you are willing and prone to believe human beings, even smart ones, do dumb and irrational acts and believe dumb and irrational beliefs for no reason.
The “Brights” are simply willing to believe unbelievable things about the “Dims”, including the idea that the Pope is attempting to defuse a debate yet to take place centuries from now, not because the Pope thinks Christians should believe Christian doctrine, but simply because the Pope does not want the Church to lose face when the starships from planet Vulcan touch down.
Second, at least some atheists cannot truly believe that there are theists. (I have also met theists who do not deep down really believe that there are atheists). No matter what their heads tells them, in their hearts they think the opposition actually knows its own error, and is ashamed of it, and is taking steps to hide it.
Hence, Mr. Flynn does not speak of whether the existence of extraterrestrial life actually is contrary to Church teaching, nor does he speak of what Christians must believe in order to be true to Christian teaching. He seems merely to assume (and now it is I who am reading between the lines) that the Church is concerned more with saving face than with remaining true to our eternal truths in changing times. He seems to assume we act like people who know we are wrong and take steps to hide it, not like we are people who know more science than he does and that we might have an understandable curiosity about how the various fields of knowledge, that revealed by science and that revealed by revelation, fit together.
Third, the tone of his article is only understandable if the reader assumes that the Catholics are frightened of the findings of science. To a reader not making that assumption, the tone of the article comes across as tone-deaf.
Since he himself mentions that the Vatican Observatory was founded in 1582 (Pope Gregory XIII asked Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius to help reform the calendar), Mr. Flynn cannot support the idea that "The Vatican's fascination with astronomy" is new or recent. Indeed, since the Vatican Observatory is the oldest in the world, if would be more fair to say that the Church invented modern astronomy, and that the secularists are johnny-come-latelies riding the coat-tails of their Christian predecessors, men like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
One final wry observation: Mr. Flynn takes the time to quote with approval one Jill Tarter. She says this:
“If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it.”
This type of casual arrogance is typical of the Brights.
Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.
Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.
The Morlocks, for those of you who do not catch the reference, in the romance of H.G. Wells, are the cannibal troglodytes of A.D. 802701. The vile beasties have the honor of being evolved from the descendants of modern man, the peak of progress. The are the posthumans; the supermen. Nietzsche and Marx and every other believer that human evolution necessarily means progress rather than regress or retardation, is well advised to read Darwin and to contemplate the hungry Morlock.
By no coincidence, I wrote an article for the Catholic Herald of the United Kingdom, prompted by my own thoughts and speculations about Father Jose Gabriel Funes comment (speculations no more grounded than reality than Mr. Flynn's, I suspect; but then again, I am a science fiction writer, so I am allowed).
Here is the link:
Here is the link:
Here is a quote:
Men can indeed lose their faith through a loss of imagination. Many are lost to the faith, merely because the modern and scientific view of the world leaves no room in their imagination for God. The heavens are filled with stars and nebulae, quasars and radio stars, gas giants and black holes, and roaring x-ray sources. Where are the saints and angels? Where are the pearly gates, the streets of gold, and the tree of life?It is not a logical argument, but instead an inability to look behind the tapestry of facts and speculations making up the naturalistic and scientific image of the universe, its appalling size and emptiness, the appalling cruelty and waste of the random Darwinian process of evolution, and to see the Hand of God weaving that tapestry.[…]Yet some writers see this question of extraterrestrial intelligence as a severe challenge to Christianity, even fatal. Bertram Russell, for example, in "The Theologian's Nightmare" (from Fact and Fiction, 1961) has a pious man in a dream reach the afterworld only to discover, in despair, that the learned but alien librarians there can find no record of the Milky Way galaxy, much less the Solar System or the Earth - in the cosmic scheme of things, the Milky Way is simply too small to come to the notice of Heaven. The inconspicuous motes, called planets, circling one tiny sun out of billions are not of any note, nor are the parasitic mites occupying the surface of one of the smaller ones.Russell proposes that the universe is so wide that man's pretension that his life, his actions, or indeed his whole world occupies any significance must be dashed. We are less than one grain of sand on the shores of the blind and numberless stars. Herbert Spencer and H G Wells voice the same thought: modern science proves the cosmos is too big for man to be in the eye of God. Man is too small compared to the universe.Other writers are not so worried. Russell's conceit is dismissed with a smile by G K Chesterton, who remarks: "It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree." (Orthodoxy, 1908)[...]In any case, imagining that God selected a lowly stable for His cradle is no harder and no different than imagining God selected a lowly world for His cradle; the difference is only in the magnitude of what one's imagination can grasp.Indeed, the larger and older the cosmos seems to get as modern science tells us more of its weird secrets, the larger and grander must, to the Christian imagination, seem the maker of all this glory.The width of the cosmos, the age and majesty of worlds larger than Earth, and stars larger than Sol, the mind-numbing numberlessness of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters of clusters, the titanic immensities of time, the birth and death of young suns and old ones, all these things, unfortunately, can be used by the agnostic imagination to paint our local and tribal gods with the colors of parochial absurdity; but by the same token, all these things can be used by the healthy Christian imagination as a type or shadow to contemplate the majesty, the infinity, and the immensity of a Supreme Being greater and more gracious than any imagination can reach.
Astronomy is useful to show a Christian what it might mean to meet with glory astronomically grander than anything on Earth.
August 14 2008, 15:37:47 UTC 3 years ago
August 14 2008, 15:42:25 UTC 3 years ago
August 16 2008, 03:51:21 UTC 3 years ago
With cool space weaponry?
What kind of exotic armaments would albino Jesuit assassins in space have?
(Yeah, I'm thinkin' Warhammer40K again).
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August 14 2008, 17:43:43 UTC 3 years ago
Space and whatnot
"Indeed, the larger and older the cosmos seems to get as modern science tells us more of its weird secrets, the larger and grander must, to the Christian imagination, seem the maker of all this glory."The words "omnipotent" and "omniscient" take on geometrically more significance the more I learn about astronomy. Incidentally, the more I learn about atheists, the more I realize how small is their understanding of the Christian concept of God. This is well-addressed by Terry Eagleton specifically in response to Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.ht
Oh yeah, and: "Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not... Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." Significance has little to do with dimensions.
August 14 2008, 19:43:50 UTC 3 years ago
lovely essay
The Catholic Herald essay is lovely! I couldn't get the link to work, by the way--I googled the title and found the essay on Richard Dawkins' website! The Brights on that website, judging by the comments, did not read a word of it.August 14 2008, 22:06:00 UTC 3 years ago
Re: lovely essay
Indeed. There was one comment I found interesting. It seemed to suggest that God was limited by the speed of light. The article clearly commented on the omnipresence of God, which is firmly planted within Christian theology. If God fills every part of Creation, then God does not need to travel the speed of light, or faster or slower.August 14 2008, 20:29:39 UTC 3 years ago
Wait, wasn't the belief in worlds beyond "Ultima Thule," in the form of a continent encircling or on the other side of "Ocean," one dating back to Classical times? (They probably got the idea from very sporadic contacts with the Americas).
August 15 2008, 00:24:15 UTC 3 years ago
one secular message?
The aliens would necessarily send us a religious message if they were religious?What if they would regard it as a dangerous thing to do? After all, they don't know if we've been initiated into the Alien Mysteries -- as secret as the Eleusian Mysteries.
August 15 2008, 03:32:20 UTC 3 years ago
Re: one secular message?
I think it may be related to many atheists seeing their lack of religion as their defining character trait-- most of the religious folks I know have religious things around them, but do the "preach constantly, use words as a last resort" theory.Would we even RECOGNIZE alien religious symbols?
(note: if an alien message came with a fish and a crucifix, I'd be freaked. And thank EWTN....)
August 15 2008, 16:01:08 UTC 3 years ago
Re: one secular message?
And another thing:"If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it."
Um, did organized religion exist on Earth when we sent out our secular message in 1974?
August 15 2008, 02:36:50 UTC 3 years ago
August 15 2008, 08:52:35 UTC 3 years ago
Re. Straw Man Arguments
Regarding your comments on what atheists believe. Pot and kettle are the words that spring to mind.August 15 2008, 15:11:18 UTC 3 years ago
Re: Re. Straw Man Arguments
So . . . our host talks about what a particular variety of atheist believes, giving abundant examples, quoting extensively, and adding information from his own personal experience when he was an atheist . . . and you call this a strawman? Ludicrous.3 years ago
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August 15 2008, 15:20:04 UTC 3 years ago
Re: Re. Straw Man Arguments
I am an atheist, or was. I know exactly what I believe.Beside, I both quoted and linked to the article by Mr. Flynn. Do you think his 'reading between the lines' reflects an assumption that the Christians are sincerely examining an implication of their own belief system, or do you think he thinks the Christians are merely trying to deflect criticism out of a sense of guilt or weakness? You may read his words and make your own assessment.
3 years ago
August 15 2008, 15:41:03 UTC 3 years ago
We call 'em angels, he calls 'em aliens.
I suppose he thinks the Vatican really knows The Truth and has definitive proof (in the shape of a crashed UFO or a hand-written original manuscript of the Bible or the bones of Jesus Christ or something) that Eric von Daniken was right and that God was an astronaut, and is now engaged in a cover-up so when Our New Insect Overlords finally arrive, it can maintain a position of power and influence.
I am constantly amazed to find out how fantastically outré the religion to which I belong is in reality, thanks to all these kind people toiling to reveal the truth of our nefarious goings-on. I never realised I led such an exciting double life!
August 15 2008, 15:49:04 UTC 3 years ago
Whoa!
Hey, that Tom Flynn dude is no relation to yr. obt. svt.!And what is it about the "Brights" or the "Enlightened" that impairs their ability to think clearly, with logic and evidence, and to go instead for the gnosticism of Hidden Meanings. I mean, that would be like finding the collapse of the US legal system in the existence of UFOs.
Oh. Wait. http://www.firstthings.com/blog/200
For example, the Other Flynn writes: And yes, the church has come a long way since 1600 when it burned Giordano Bruno, in part for speculating about other worlds. This is contrary both to empirical fact - Giorgio di Santillana writes that there were eight articles in the indictment, and none of them had to do with astronomy - and to common sense - in 1277, the Bishop of Paris condemned the proposition that there could not be other worlds. Oh well, one of the propositions also condemned in 1277 was #154 "That the only wise men in the world are philosophers," so the "we-are-oh-so-Bright/Enlightened" idea is of long-standing.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web, a self-proclaimed Catholic with a predilection for Biblical fundamentalism hit the roof over the astronomers' announcement. He took it as a command that we =ought= to believe in ETs, that it had been proclaimed as "fact." (He believes there can be no ETs, because the Bible doesn't mention any and we are obviously the sole product of creation.) He was immediately taken to task by others, who thought this meant the Church had, a l'affaire Galileo, previously forbidden its members to believe in the obvious scientific truth of ETs. (They believe that ETs must exist because... Well, just because!) Heh. The life of an empiricist is a lonely one.
Aside: the Brother Guy Consolmagno mentioned in the article is a friend of mine and a frequent attendee at Boskone. Here is part of a Boskone panel he was on this past Feb.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4eGVQ9
He is interviewed here: http://www.astrobio.net/news/articl
+ + +
I wonder if the Other Flynn appreciated the pun in the poster seen on the wall in the background of the cartoon accompanying his column:
http://secularhumanism.org/fi/vol_2
It reads: "The Universe is Catholic." Given the meaning of "catholic," that is a tautology.
August 15 2008, 15:58:09 UTC 3 years ago
Re: Whoa!
"The discovery of the Americas was hugely embarrassing to Western Christianity. Here was this vast and utterly unexpected landmass, and Scripture said nothing about it! Rationalists made great sport of that failure; in time, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith undertook to remedy it, weaving America and its native peoples into the Christian salvation narrative. Smith’s handmade faith, now a fast-growing world religion, grew primarily by drawing converts from Catholic and Protestant ranks.My guess is that the Vatican has learned its painful lesson. Just as Scripture said nothing about those continents half a world from Europe, it is silent about other worlds and the beings who might call them home. The discovery that those entities also exist, unbeknownst to Scripture, could be devastating for the faith."
I am saddened that a man by the name of Flynn seems to be ignorant of the famed St. Brendan. I would like to refer him to the webpage of the Tralee and Fenit Harbour Commissioners:
"http://www.fenitharbour.com/saintbrend
Saint Brendan was born near Fenit in 484. He travelled extensively and founded several monasteries. Many places are named after him: places in Ireland, England, Scotland, the Faeroes and Brittany. There is compelling evidence to suggest that he visited Greenland; Iceland; Newfoundland and other places in North America; the Bahamas and other Caribbean Islands; the Azores and the Canary Islands.
In the middle-ages, a book was written about his voyages; Navagatio Sancti Brendani - describing his voyages. This became, what would be today, a bestseller and was translated into many languages. It described scenes of what can only be interpreted as volcanoes and icebergs. It was instrumental in influencing Christopher Columbus to set out for America.
The traditional craft used in this period was made with leather over a wooden frame. Tim Severn, the modern-day explorer, studied up on St. Brendan and crossed the Atlantic in a replica boat. This boat is on display at Craggaunowen, a historical interpretative centre, near the village of Quinn in Co. Clare.
Saint Brendan is buried, in the monastery which he founded, at Clonfert, a small village in south east of County Galway near Shannonbridge.
Saint Brendan is the Patron Saint of the Navy of the United States of America.
To mark the achievements of this much undervalued historical figure, a 5 metre high bronze monument was erected at the top of the Great Samphire Rock in Fenit Harbour."
Of course, why on earth should the Vatican in Rome pay any attention to those crazy Irish out there on the edge of the Known World telling them since the 6th century that there were strange lands out there in the Western Ocean? No wonder it came as a complete surprise and shock to them that it was true.
Certainly, there is nothing to the folk belief in Galway that Columbus stopped off there on a final reprovisioning stop before heading off, especially as they maintain that he wanted to talk to the local pilots about what they knew about strange lands in the Western Ocean.
No, it was a complete and utter surprise and nobody nowhere had any notion at all that this might be so.
Isn't it lucky for us that history only really started in the 18th century? Before that, nothing of any note happened anywhere at all, but thanks to the Enlightenment, we now know so much!
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August 15 2008, 20:21:39 UTC 3 years ago
As an aside, I must question what killed that desire. I suspect it was my journey through the secular public school system, as it kills most things. Jesus said that we are to be as children. Well, it is childlike to wonder at the things around you, and wish to explore them. As I continue in my studies of all things reasonable, be they philosophical or scientific, I find myself in a world of wonder, that the nihilistic atheist I was in my early 20s would scoff at.
"Indeed, the larger and older the cosmos seems to get as modern science tells us more of its weird secrets, the larger and grander must, to the Christian imagination, seem the maker of all this glory.
The width of the cosmos, the age and majesty of worlds larger than Earth, and stars larger than Sol, the mind-numbing numberlessness of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters of clusters, the titanic immensities of time, the birth and death of young suns and old ones, all these things, unfortunately, can be used by the agnostic imagination to paint our local and tribal gods with the colors of parochial absurdity; but by the same token, all these things can be used by the healthy Christian imagination as a type or shadow to contemplate the majesty, the infinity, and the immensity of a Supreme Being greater and more gracious than any imagination can reach."
Beautiful.
August 16 2008, 01:42:25 UTC 3 years ago
Though if we found another fallen race, it would be our duty to bring the Good News. Because all creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God.
August 15 2008, 22:25:53 UTC 3 years ago
August 16 2008, 04:18:58 UTC 3 years ago
August 16 2008, 16:12:54 UTC 3 years ago
I'm so amused by it, I'm beginning to think kindly of the man
After all, it is rather flattering to be considered belonging to an ancient, world-spanning organisation that knows the real truths behind all the mysteries and can guide its plots over centuries.
Since the Vatican knows that aliens really exist and are coming to visit Earth sometime in the future, we can all smile mysteriously and nod meaningfully since we've got the inside track on what's going on. Oh, yeah: when Our Insect Overlords arrive, us Papists are going to come out on top because we've been preparing for this all along, you betcha!
Which I suppose means that Catholicism should be the only religion that makes sense for Science Fiction authors and fans to adopt.
Oh, wait... ;-)
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August 18 2008, 00:04:43 UTC 3 years ago
First of all, what's a "superior culture"? If it indicates technological superiority, we might emulate them by aquiring their technology. However, there's no real impetus to chuck our own culture(s) and adopt theirs. (Unless they impose their culture on us as a prerequisite to getting their technology, in which case they're culturally-imperialistic %&*$ aliens.)
Second, a secular message doesn't mean the culture that sent it is secular. Introductory greetings might not discuss politics, theology and mating habits. (Unless the aliens are cads, a la the most recent FUTURAMA movie.) What if the "superior culture" takes the existance of God for granted and thus doesn't mention it in their first messages? (Or better/worse, what if the alien culture functions as a theocracy bent on evangelizing other cultures? Wouldn't THAT be a kick in the head?)
August 20 2008, 19:09:32 UTC 3 years ago
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis dealt with this issue in a fairly comprehensive manner in an essay contained in 'The World's Last Night and Other Essays.' Highly recommended if you're interest in the "what if there really are aliens?" question.August 21 2008, 14:27:57 UTC 3 years ago
Bulverism strikes again
Tom Flynn's argument sounds to me less like the Straw-man fallacy, and more like classic Bulverism. Instead of arguing against your opponent's arguments on the merits, speculate on their motives, assume your speculations are true, and dismiss anything the opponent says on that basis.