» Sunday, 22 January A.D. 2012
taking struggles seriously
I love Francis Schaeffer's writings and outlook. For instance, this quote from a series on Schaeffer's “compassionate engagement”:
As Schaeffer spoke across the United States at various colleges, he would not only impress listeners with his engagement with the wider culture and his ability to make Christianity appear intellectually tenable and relevant to the contemporary era, he also demonstrated a notable compassion for those whose works he would analyze and interpret. This latter characteristic of Schaeffer's approach to intellectual engagement was illustrated vividly when, after reading a nonsensical poem by an unbelieving author, rebuked the laughing crowd, saying,
I get so tired of Bible believing Christians who laugh at these people—who laugh at them when they look at their tortured paintings. Do you laugh at a man at the door of hell? When evangelicals learn to stop their laughing and take such men and their struggles seriously then [evangelicals] can again begin to speak to our generation (Hankins, 77).
I offer this in juxtaposition, from Karl Schroeder's musings on the Fermi paradox:
The mystery deepens almost by the day, because we've now identified 700 extrasolar planets and the count is increasing rapidly. We should shortly be racking up lists of Earthlike worlds, and we're closing in on good estimates of how many there must be in our galaxy. And the number is in the billions. So one central argument against the existence of alien life--the 'rare Earth' argument that environments to host it must be rare--has been more or less disproven. And that, just this year.
As possible explanations dwindle, we are being drawn inexorably toward the one explanation that is no explanation: that we really are alone. Why should this be? As Wiley shows, all it would take would be one alien species with our capabilities appearing, sometime in the past couple of billion years, and for that species to surpass where we are now technologically by, oh, say, a couple of hundred years... and the evidence for their existence should be present right here in our own solar system. It's an astonishing conclusion.
So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.
posted by Nate @ 4:47PM