It's a mark of the PR success of the aerospace industry and ideology as science that some of the things I've said in the past few days have been controversial. Even the most incontrovertible fact that every single thing said about "other life" "extraterrestrials" "aliens" from their actual existence to the attribution of atheism to them is the product of human hopes and or fears based on absolutely no evidence, would seem to be hotly resented by many. It would seem that, for them, even saying that for all we know Earth is the only planet in the universe that has life on it, is a damnable heresy.
Among the greatest sources of the inability of people, whose public devotion to evidence could be accurately called febrile, to even imagine that hardest of truth about "extraterrestrials" I will name Carl Sagan. For an early, if not founding member of CSICOP, the religious atheist group* dedicated to debunking a long list of officially prohibited thoughts, Sagan is remarkable for having built a career and even an entire science on making stuff up on the basis of no evidence, whatsoever. "Exobiology" is something I used to call a pseudo-science but, as one of its true believers has pointed out to me, it is widely considered a science by other scientists and, perhaps even more definitive, it gets grants to study stuff. That the one thing that it cannot study because not the first bit of a hint that an actual specimen will ever be available to it, an organism of "other life" is the actual subject matter of exobiology, might indicate that what "science" is needs to be more rigorously considered.
That it was Sagan, Mr. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" who invented "exobiology" and then went on to be the brightest star in the constellation of actual scientists in the group dedicated to enforcing that standard to ideas atheists don't like, is, to put it mildly, ironic. To put it less mildly, it's another glaring symptom of the fraud that organized skepticism is. And that pseudo-skepticism was organized as a promotion and a support of atheism by Paul Kurtz, almost certainly with funding from the atheist ideologue and trust fund Stalinist, Corliss Lamont. If you doubt that the entire thing is to promote atheism, go look at what its successor and satellite organizations dedicate most of their time to.
That it was Sagan, Mr. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" who invented "exobiology" and then went on to be the brightest star in the constellation of actual scientists in the group dedicated to enforcing that standard to ideas atheists don't like, is, to put it mildly, ironic. To put it less mildly, it's another glaring symptom of the fraud that organized skepticism is. And that pseudo-skepticism was organized as a promotion and a support of atheism by Paul Kurtz, almost certainly with funding from the atheist ideologue and trust fund Stalinist, Corliss Lamont. If you doubt that the entire thing is to promote atheism, go look at what its successor and satellite organizations dedicate most of their time to.
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How important is this is provided to me by what might be rather casual evidence of synchronicity because as I have been typing this, the radio is on. The program On The Media is dealing with the shooting down of Flight MH17. The excellent host, Brooke Gladstone has just brought up the speculation that blames aliens for the mass murder being discussed in the media. From what I understand it isn't only Putin's prostituted press that is doing that but it has been mentioned on American cabloid "news" as well. While she and James Fallows can understandably make light of that absurd idea, that they find it useful to mention it shows that there are people both pushing and buying that bilge. That she also mentions The Bermuda Triangle in the same question rightly places speculations about "other life" in the category of the entirely imagined. I just thought I'd throw that in there to thicken the broth.
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Since not even one other example of alien life is available to study, scientifically or casually, anything said about "other life" today is as imaginary as whatever is said about unicorns or leprechauns or even an interplanetary celestial teapot. And, unlike those imaginary objects dealt with by mathematics, "other life" must be imagined as being alive. And as living beings other lives, of necessity, have to be far more complex and detailed than numbers, sets of numbers and even the imaginary objects of geometry which must conform to our experience of dimensional reality as well as their imaginary perfection. We have to imagine them metabolizing and, to make them more interesting so as to hold the imagination more successfully than pure mathematics for most people, reproducing. Which multiplies the possibilities so vastly as to make the probability of successfully imagining correctly - without recourse to revelation - entirely unlikely. Yet Carl Sagan talked other scientists, many of them as rigid materialists and pseudo-skeptic-atheists as he was, into accepting those improbable tall tales about them as science. Call me skeptical but I don't think he could have done that while being an even excellent teacher at one of the excellent land grant universities of the mid-West or other region of the country. It's a product of prestige and mutually reinforced social positioning.
All that would change with the availability of even resolvable artifacts of dead "other life" about which something definite could be said, though the massive and equally unfounded speculation, filling in the enormous gaps of what the lives of those organisms might have been will rival today's "exobiology" in its unfounded creative invention and certain assertion. You can only really study the lives of organisms when you can see them alive in the environment that allows them to live and function with whatever other conditions or organisms they live with. Which is something you can understand an astrophysicist with a specialty in planets might not get about the study of living organisms and their environments, you have to gape at the ability of biologists to suffer from the same oversight. Without the ability to observe living organisms in their native environment even the massively popular idea that they evolved as life on Earth has is an entirely unfounded assumption.** Yet that doesn't keep the "extraordinary evidence" cult from making up entire biospheres full of imaginary organisms to be believed in, rather fully. I remember Sagan presenting all kinds of organisms he and a colleague made up to live on Jupiter, complete with 60s sci-fi cover art pictures of them. And it was science.
That the pushback you can get from pointing out the gaping lapses in integrity for this stuff, set within the "Skepticism-Atheism-Scientism" industry and its informal branch in pop culture comes from people who pretend to be superior thinkers should be a source of much hilarity to the people they love to mock and make fun of. They do exactly the same things they mock other people for doing, only they figure, since they do it all without God that makes it OK. Which is one of the most common and, in other contexts, dangerous habits of thought that comes with atheism. As I said, the key issue of atheism as the most important cultural requirement of modernism can unlock a lot of what's wrong with contemporary culture. It seems to be all that is required to permit all kinds of stuff that is forbidden to those who believe in God.
* Thinking it over, I decided to call a spade a spade and updated that sentence. CSICOP, which has morphed into CSI and its myriad of other Paul Kurtz initiated groups are not "quasi-religious atheist groups" they are religious atheist groups, with their own faith and dogma and doctrines and, as I pointed out, Indices of Prohibited Ideas. That their god is the material universe and their method of oracular prophesy is what they understand as constituting science matters not in the least in identifying them as religion. Just to thicken the broth even more.
** I wish I'd preserve the record of the brawl I got into over that point. The typical atheist-materialist will insist that their fundamentalist interpretation of Darwinian natural selection must govern "other life" and the more hard bitten will insist that natural selection proves there must be "other life" and what it is like. Especially nuts on the issue are those things that Daniel Dennett says, wanting to extend natural selection outside of biology, even in ways that are totally inconsistent with the logical necessities of Darwinian natural selection to even be possible. And, note, he's a philosopher who should definitely have mastered the logical analysis necessary to see that point. Atheism can blind people, in his case, I would guess it's the ideological usefulness of Darwin for atheism that makes him act like a snake oil hustler instead of a serious philosopher in that matter. Since he's imagining all kinds of stuff on the basis of no evidence, he may as well make it maximally congenial to his ideological preference.
All that would change with the availability of even resolvable artifacts of dead "other life" about which something definite could be said, though the massive and equally unfounded speculation, filling in the enormous gaps of what the lives of those organisms might have been will rival today's "exobiology" in its unfounded creative invention and certain assertion. You can only really study the lives of organisms when you can see them alive in the environment that allows them to live and function with whatever other conditions or organisms they live with. Which is something you can understand an astrophysicist with a specialty in planets might not get about the study of living organisms and their environments, you have to gape at the ability of biologists to suffer from the same oversight. Without the ability to observe living organisms in their native environment even the massively popular idea that they evolved as life on Earth has is an entirely unfounded assumption.** Yet that doesn't keep the "extraordinary evidence" cult from making up entire biospheres full of imaginary organisms to be believed in, rather fully. I remember Sagan presenting all kinds of organisms he and a colleague made up to live on Jupiter, complete with 60s sci-fi cover art pictures of them. And it was science.
That the pushback you can get from pointing out the gaping lapses in integrity for this stuff, set within the "Skepticism-Atheism-Scientism" industry and its informal branch in pop culture comes from people who pretend to be superior thinkers should be a source of much hilarity to the people they love to mock and make fun of. They do exactly the same things they mock other people for doing, only they figure, since they do it all without God that makes it OK. Which is one of the most common and, in other contexts, dangerous habits of thought that comes with atheism. As I said, the key issue of atheism as the most important cultural requirement of modernism can unlock a lot of what's wrong with contemporary culture. It seems to be all that is required to permit all kinds of stuff that is forbidden to those who believe in God.
* Thinking it over, I decided to call a spade a spade and updated that sentence. CSICOP, which has morphed into CSI and its myriad of other Paul Kurtz initiated groups are not "quasi-religious atheist groups" they are religious atheist groups, with their own faith and dogma and doctrines and, as I pointed out, Indices of Prohibited Ideas. That their god is the material universe and their method of oracular prophesy is what they understand as constituting science matters not in the least in identifying them as religion. Just to thicken the broth even more.
** I wish I'd preserve the record of the brawl I got into over that point. The typical atheist-materialist will insist that their fundamentalist interpretation of Darwinian natural selection must govern "other life" and the more hard bitten will insist that natural selection proves there must be "other life" and what it is like. Especially nuts on the issue are those things that Daniel Dennett says, wanting to extend natural selection outside of biology, even in ways that are totally inconsistent with the logical necessities of Darwinian natural selection to even be possible. And, note, he's a philosopher who should definitely have mastered the logical analysis necessary to see that point. Atheism can blind people, in his case, I would guess it's the ideological usefulness of Darwin for atheism that makes him act like a snake oil hustler instead of a serious philosopher in that matter. Since he's imagining all kinds of stuff on the basis of no evidence, he may as well make it maximally congenial to his ideological preference.
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