Chris McKay, “Mars, ET, and all that: Are we ‘at home’ in the universe?

Description:
Although the Viking results may indicate that Mars has no life today, there is direct geomorphological evidence that, in the past, Mars had large amounts of liquid water on its surface --- possibly due to a thicker atmosphere. From a biological perspective the existence of liquid water, by itself, motivates the question of the origin of life on Mars. One of the martian meteorites dates back to this early period and may contain evidence consistent with life.

Granted that life on Mars at best may never have gone beyond a rudimentary level, if in fact it once existed this fact raises a profound question about life on earth: What can we learn about humankind from the discovery of life on Mars that we can not learn without it? More generally, if complex forms of life are eventually found elsewhere in the solar system, and especially if truly intelligent life — ET — is discovered elsewhere in the galaxy, this raises the question to an exponentially higher level. McKay will offer some tantalizing speculations as a scientist fascinated by these possible discoveries on what just what we might learn about ourselves and about life’s role and ultimate meaning in the universe.

Readings:

McKay, C. P. “What is life - and how do we search for it on other worlds?” PLoS Biol, 2, 1260-1263, 2004.

McKay, C.P. and M.M. Marinova, “The physics, biology, and environmental ethics of making Mars habitable,” Astrobiology, 1, 89-109, 2001.

Paul Davies, “The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life?”

Description:
For thousands of years, human beings have gazed in wonder at the world about them and asked the big questions: How did the universe come to exist? What is it made of? Where do human beings fit in? Is there some sort of meaning behind the great cosmic scheme of things? Most of the big questions can be subsumed under a single enigma that has become the focus of much recent scientific research: Why does the universe appear to be so well suited for life? Many different aspects of the cosmos, from the properties of the carbon atom to the speed of light, seem almost tailor-made to encourage biology. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe looks "just right" for life. In fact, it looks like a fix. So what is going on? One theory says it's because our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, each one slightly different, and that our particular universe is bio-friendly by accident; we just happened to win the cosmic jackpot. While this "multiverse" explanation is popular, it has bizarre implications, from infinite copies of each of us to Matrix-like simulated universes. And it still leaves a lot unexplained. So is cosmic bio-friendliness the product of a pre-existing Designer, or some sort teleological principle? In my lecture I will weigh up various explanations for the Goldilocks enigma – and find them all wanting. To progress the discussion, I shall suggest a radical new approach in which life, consciousness, physical laws and mathematics are co-emergent and co-explanatory, providing a basis for properties like “meaning” and “purpose” to be inherent in the evolution of the cosmos rather than imprinted from without. I shall argue that a fixation with Platonism has impeded the search for an ultimate explanation of existence.

Readings:

Paul Davies, "Article in The Daily Telegraph."

Paul Davies, "The implications of a holographic universe for quantum information science and the nature of physical law."

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life?, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press (2006), to be published in the USA by Houghton Mifflin under the title Cosmic Jackpot (April 2007).

Paul Davies, "Lecture delivered at the Beyond Belief conference."

Paul Davies, "Multiverse Cosmological Models."

Paul Davies, "The Problem of What Exists."

Paul Davies, "The Search for Life in the Universe."

Paul Davies, "Virtual Worlds in the Multiverse."

Paul Davies, "Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?"

Paul Benioff, "Towards a Coherent Theory of Physics and Mathematics: The Theory-Experiment Connection."

Paul Benioff, "Resource Limited Theories and their Extensions."

Francisco Ayala, "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion"

Description:
Science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction. Science has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that living organisms evolve and diversify over time, and that their features have come about by a process, natural selection, that accounts for their "design." We may accept this scientific knowledge without denying the existence of God, or God's presence in the universe and all natural phenomena. Science cannot endorse, nor can it reject, religious beliefs. Conversely, we should not interpret the Bible as a textbook of astronomy, geology, or biology.

The notion of "intelligent design" (ID) has a long history in Christianity, from Augustine, through Aquinas, to William Paley, who at the start of the 19th century argued that the eye and other adaptive features of organisms evince that they have been designed by an omniscient Creator. Paley's argument-from-design was revived in the 1990s (without making reference to Paley) by several authors, starting the ID movement.

I will make two points: (1) the evidence and arguments of ID proponents are bad science; they have no scientific cogency whatsoever. (2) ID is also bad religion, because the design of organisms is imperfect and riddled with dysfunctionalities, oddities and cruelties; ID implies attributes of God that are incompatible with Christianity and other monotheistic religions; it amounts to blasphemy. Darwin's discovery of natural selection provided a scientific explanation of the design of organisms. Natural selection also explains why organisms change over eons of time and diversify as they adapt to environments that are enormously diverse. Natural selection is Darwin's gift to religion, because it solves the theodicy problem, why the imperfections and cruelties of the living world need not be attributed to the Creator, but are the result of natural processes. Evolution (more generally, science) is not incompatible with religion. Indeed, science and religion cannot be incompatible, because they concern nonoverlapping domains of knowledge. Science is a very successful way of acquiring knowledge, but it is not the only way. We acquire knowledge about the nature of the world, about values, and about the meaning and purpose of life and the universe from other sources of knowledge, which include literature, art, philosophy, and religion.

Readings:

Francisco J. Ayala. 2006. Darwin and Intelligent Design. Fortress Press, Minneapolis.

Francisco J. Ayala. 2003. “Intelligent Design: The Original Version.” Theology and Science 1:9-32.

Robert John Russell, “Life in the Universe: ‘Back to the drawing boards’ or ‘the Cosmic Christ’?”

Here's an online version of Bob Russell's PowerPoint lecture from the conference. We're making it available because it suggests at least one way to restructure the standard material in "theology and science" in terms of potentially STARS-fundable research.

Description:
Over the past five decades, the interdisciplinary field of ‘theology and science’ has undergone tremendous growth involving scholars from the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, the natural sciences, theology, ethics, history and related fields. Surprisingly underrepresented in this rapidly growing interaction, however, is a focus on the philosophical and theological issues raised by the possibility of extraterrestrial life (EL) and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).

In this lecture Russell will focus on three issues: 1) Will the discovery that life is abundant or rare in the universe influence its value or meaning? 2) Will intelligent life be capable of both rationality and moral reasoning? 3) Will ETI experience moral failure or be entirely benign? Russell offers two caveats to the lecture: 1) He will speak from the context of Christian theology and welcome others to widen the circle of religious discussions of EL/ETI. 2) He will assume that we will share relatively similar modes of sensory awareness and adaptive forms of rationality with ETI. It may be that some extraterrestrial civilizations are millions or even billions of years older than ours; for such advanced ETI, the usual ‘contact’ scenarios may simply not apply. For the present purposes, Russell will focus on the possible discovery of ETI for which ‘contact’ would be a reasonable hypothesis.

Readings:

Steven Dick, ed., Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life & the Theological Implications (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000).

Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), Ch. 19.

Ted Peters, "Exo-Theology: Speculations on Extra-Terrestrial Life," CTNS Bulletin 14.3 (Summer 1994) (Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences).

Richard O. Randolph, Margaret S. Race and Christopher P. McKay, "Reconsidering the Theological and Ethical Implications of Extraterrestrial Life," CTNS Bulletin 17.3 (Summer 1997) (Berkeley: CTNS).

Allen Tough, ed., When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact (Bellevue, Washington: Foundation for the Future, 2000).

Robert John Russell, “Life in the Universe: Philosophical and Theological Issues”, First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe, proceedings, Sixth Trieste Conference on Chemical Evolution, Julian Chela-Flores, Tobias Owen and François Raulin, eds. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

For a recent survey article of “theology and science” with extensive references see Robert John Russell, “Theology and Science: Current Issues and Future Directions” at http://www.ctns.org/russell_article.html

Conference Description: Near the end of the 19th century, research into the evolution of species split into two distinct programs: evolutionary biology, including systematics, ecology and comparative anatomy, and developmental mechanics. Out of the former grew the “modern synthesis” or neo-Darwinian evolution; this has today become the predominant field of research. Developmental mechanics led to the study of genetics on the one hand and experimental embryology on the other. The study of genetics bifurcated, with one strand reconnecting with neo-Darwinian evolution through population genetics and the other developing into molecular genetics. Experimental embryology in turn led to developmental biology which combined with molecular genetics to produce the field of developmental genetics. Evolutionary and developmental biology have recently merged into the burgeoning subdiscipline of evolutionary developmental biology known as evo-devo. Today biologists face three broad issues: the egg-to-adult transformation, the brain-to-mind transformation, and the ape-to-human transformation. Perhaps all three can be "solved" at the conjunction of evolutionary and developmental biology plus the rapidly advancing disciplines of neurobiology and genomics.

Human distinctiveness in the context of evolutionary biology. Both neo-Darwinism and developmental genetics shed light on the perennial question: What is distinctive about being human in the context of evolutionary biology? An important response from within the neo-Darwinian paradigm is that intelligence evolved in homo sapiens as an adaptive advantage driven by the pressures of natural selection. But what about the capacity for ethical behavior such as altruism? Some scholars argue reductively that such behavior is just “mentalized instinctive altruism.” Others, however, argue that the capacity for ethical behavior evolved not because it was adaptive but as a surplus consequence of human intelligence. Thus while ethics is grounded in biology, the specific forms it takes, and the diverse normative contents found throughout human cultures and world religions, are shaped by, but might not be determined by, or derivable from, evolutionary biology (the “naturalistic fallacy”). What then is its source: human culture per se, or an ultimate reality that is coincident with and immanent in nature, or an ultimate reality which transcends (while including) nature and culture? How do scientists in developmental genetics and evo-devo respond to these questions and issues about human distinctiveness and, in turn, about humanity’s relation to ultimate reality?

Human typicality in the context of life in the universe: Exobiologists believe we will eventually discover rudimentary forms of life within our solar system, perhaps on Mars or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. But suppose we discover much more than that: evidence of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the goal of the SETI project. What can we learn about human nature from this discovery that we can not learn without it? The discovery of a recognizable signal from ET suggests that its capacity for reason, science and technology, is similar to ours or perhaps much more advanced than ours. But would ET’s moral behavior and spirituality also be similar to ours or radically different from ours? If it is similar, would that imply that the struggle between virtue and moral failure that characterizes the human condition is more than a random byproduct of terrestrial evolution? But if it is different, will ET be essentially benign and “saint-like,” as some scientists argue, or remorselessly malignant and “demonic”? What, in turn, would these discoveries tell us about the ultimate source and grounds of reason, ethics, morality and spirituality? In sum, would the discovery of ET undercut the religions and spiritualities of humankind, sending them “back to the drawing board,” or would it complement and synergize human religious experiences and beliefs?

Ayala, Francisco J. "Darwin's Devolution: Design Without Designer" (summary...)

Barbour, Ian G. "Five Models of God and Evolution." (summary...)

McKay, Christopher, "Reconsidering the Theological and Ethical Implications of Extraterrestrial Life" (with Richard O. Randolph and Margaret S. Race), Volume 17, No. 3 (Summer 1997): 1-8 - (CTNS Bulletin) - © The Center for Theology and the Natural Science.

Murphy, Nancey. "Supervenience and the Nonreducibility of Ethics to Biology." (summary...)

Peters, Ted: Exo-Theology: Speculations on Extra-Terrestrial Life, Volume 14, No. 3 (Summer 1994): 1-9 - CTNS Bulletin available online to members) - © The Center for Theology and the Natural Science.