Winston Ewert’s recent (excellent) article on Jocelyn Bell Burnell highlights the next-of-kin or immediate neighbor relationship between observational astronomy, SETI, the Fermi paradox, and design detection. In fact, let’s just say that SETI lives in the same apartment building, even on the same floor, as Dembski, Ewert, Behe, Meyer, and indeed, many readers of Science and Culture Today. Heck, I can even smell the cooking coming from the SETI apartment in the next hallway (tandoori chicken again?).
What do SETI researchers, usually atheists or agnostics (cf. Jill Tarter as an example of the former, Carl Sagan of the latter), want to find? Evidence of MIND. They are design detectors, thus far with zero unambiguous signal to claim success, but mind is their search target. The only target.
Fictional accounts of detection — e.g., Sagan’s novel Contact, Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey — would be inexplicable confusion without their core premise, namely, it is possible, given the right evidence, for humans to know the existence of minds belonging to beings not in our biological lineage.
Here’s a conjecture. The skeptical, even scornful opposition of many leading evolutionary biologists to SETI — see, for example, George Gaylord Simpson’s influential 1964 article in Science, “The Nonprevalence of Humanoids” — stems largely from NOT wanting other minds to be detectable.
A mind lies causally behind a certain pattern found in nature? That’s what Paley said. That’s what Newton said in the Opticks and the Principia. That is Romans 1:20. That’s what Darwin taught us could not be the case. So don’t go wandering off the Darwin campus and hanging out with curious radio astronomers and science fiction writers who know a lot of science (such as Arthur C. Clarke).
Anyway, if you watch this trailer, you’ll see all kinds of ID-adjacent questions being discussed:
You can be certain I’ve got this at the top of my Watch Next list.