{"id":7100,"date":"2012-01-19T09:54:42","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T17:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=7100"},"modified":"2012-01-23T09:58:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-23T17:58:00","slug":"et-and-politics-the-search-for-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/et-and-politics-the-search-for-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"ET and Politics, The Search for Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Chuck
Chuck Colson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Chuck Colson –
\nIn his book, Lost in the Cosmos<\/em>, Walker Percy asked \u201cwhy is Carl Sagan so lonely?\u201d Percy\u2019s question was prompted by the popular scientist Carl Sagan\u2019s insistence that ET must be out there somewhere, despite the lack of any evidence to back it up. Percy believed that this insistence said more about Sagan and people like him, than it did about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.<\/p>\n

According to Percy, Sagan and others who reduced everything, including man, to soulless atoms, were desperate for something to transcend this purely-material existence. Not believing in God, they hoped a phone call from ET would do the trick.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for the scientists, thirty years after the publication of Percy\u2019s book, we still haven\u2019t heard from ET. And it\u2019s not for lack of looking: Scarcely a week goes by when we don\u2019t read or hear about yet another \u201cearth-like\u201d planet being discovered by astronomers. <\/p>\n

Yet ET remains silent. <\/p>\n

With each passing year, more and more scientists suspect that Enrico Fermi may have been right when he asked \u201cwhere is everybody?\u201d If the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligent life was as high as people say it is, why haven\u2019t we heard from them?<\/p>\n

Considering all that had to go \u201cjust right\u201d to make complex life on Earth possible, a reasonable inference is that Sagan\u2019s confidence was unwarranted. If there is intelligent complex life beyond Earth, it\u2019s so rare and so far away that we will never know for sure.<\/p>\n

Which prompts the question \u201cwhat then?\u201d As Percy observed, Western man may have rejected the traditional sources of meaning and purpose, but he hasn\u2019t \u201coutgrown\u201d his need for meaning and purpose. Believing that you are nothing more than a collection of soulless atoms is still unbearable.<\/p>\n

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, who suspects that Fermi was right, suggested recently that a possible source of meaning and purpose might be found in politics. While some people might scoff at the suggestion, he is onto something\u2014if by \u201cpolitics\u201d he means the consideration of how we order our common life together.<\/p>\n

After all, ancient Greece\u2019s and Republican Rome\u2019s reflections on the subject did inspire the Founding Fathers. Yet, as the Founders themselves acknowledged, that alone wasn\u2019t enough. The kind of virtue needed to make self-government possible didn\u2019t and couldn\u2019t come from politics. Its source lay elsewhere: in religion, and specifically, Christianity. It was Christianity that produced the habits and customs that made their political experiment possible. Not simply because it taught people right from wrong but because of what it taught them about who they are and why we were placed on Earth.<\/p>\n

Whatever else you can say about the people who created America \u2014 for whom there were only six planets, including Earth \u2014 they certainly weren\u2019t lonely or lacking in purpose.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s modern Western man, for whom the universe literally grows bigger every day, who feels increasingly lonely and pointless. Instead of wonder, his response is apathy.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because he has confused science, which is the knowledge of nature obtained through observation, with scientism, which is the \u201creduction of all knowledge to only that which is measurable.\u201d<\/p>\n

This confusion has left him, as Percy would put it, \u201clost in the Cosmos,\u201d waiting by a phone that is unlikely to ring.
\nYes, worldviews do matter. <\/p>\n

HT: Break Point<\/a> (read full article)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Chuck Colson – In his book, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy asked \u201cwhy is Carl Sagan so lonely?\u201d Percy\u2019s question was prompted by the popular scientist Carl Sagan\u2019s insistence that ET must be out there somewhere, despite the lack of any evidence to back it up. Percy believed that this insistence said more … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,35,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligent-design","category-philosophy","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}