Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun
nourishes a “chorus of worlds” just like ours. Ethan Allen, the
self-taught leader of the Green Mountain Boys, insisted that the inhabitants of these other earths included intelligent beings just like us. David Rittenhouse, the famous Philadelphia inventor and astronomer,
made it official in a 1775 lecture that was reprinted for the benefit of
the Second Continental Congress. “The doctrine of the plurality of
worlds,” he said, “is inseparable from the principles of astronomy.”...
If these peace-loving aliens were a threat to anything, it was to
theology. John Adams put his finger on the problem as a young man in a
diary entry from 1756. Given the near-certainty of alien life, he
reasoned, Evangelical Christians must either condemn our
extraterrestrial brothers to everlasting perdition or suppose that Jesus
shows up on an endless number of planets in ever-changing alien
incarnations. Thomas Paine later made the same point in print, rather
more caustically: “The person who is irreverently called the Son of God,
and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel
from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a
momentary interval of life.”
More at the link re the roots of these theories in Greco-Roman antiquity.
The "plurality of worlds" concept has an interesting history as it goes from being a theological position to slowly being claimed by astronomy (see Fontanelle, Huygens), to the current conception of alien life.
ReplyDeleteThat article is shallow click-bait, obviously, but it shouldn't be that surprising that intelligent philosophically-read people of the period would believe in extra-terrestrial life - it does follow quite easily from the 'new' astronomical theories that made the universe less anthropocentric. (Though obviously still working in a special creation philosophy rather than an evolutionary one, they would have different ideas than us moderns about what ET would look like).
Of course as fellow devotee of No Such Thing as a Fish, you already know about "True History" by Lucian of Samosata who (satirically) suggested life on other worlds as early as the 2nd century BCE.
ReplyDeleteI have a copy on my bookshelf, in a volume imaginatively titled "Selected Dialogues" ... (I don't recall Lucian being mentioned on NSTAAF, though.)
DeletePut me down among the skeptics.
ReplyDeleteThere has been no convincing evidence to this present date. Why is that a problem?
If one were to take three commonly held assumptions: the modern estimate of the age of the Universe, its vast size, and the process of evolution being able to generate life on other earth-like planets (and possibly, life on non-earth like planets), there should be a great many technologically advanced alien civilizations. And yet, this does not corroborate with the evidence. Thus, the "Fermi paradox" is born.
There are several potential solutions to the paradox. One is that one (or more) of those basic assumptions is incorrect, thus the likelihood or even the very possibility of life existing on other planets is more remote than we had thought or impossible.
Other possibilities are discussed in this very excellent video:
http://sploid.gizmodo.com/simple-video-explains-where-all-the-aliens-are-1702613476#
I am not religious, but let's be fair here: any argument against religion that takes the form "God couldn't possibly find the time to do X" is not much of an argument.
ReplyDeleteIt just might be that the Adam and Eve of other worlds never ate of the wrong tree.... Maybe they are not a fallen world. Only fallen worlds need a Savior. And further, if God is omnipresent, He can be a trillion different places at once...dying, rising, and offering redemption. Just a thought: Jesus was not God in disguise...but God REVEALED.
ReplyDeleteThere's an interesting science fiction series written by C.S. Lewis that posits a couple of those ideas. The first book is called "Out of the Silent Planet" and the series is called "The Space Trilogy."
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