Any dispassionate survey of the scientific literature will reveal that our age is expending an inordinate amount of financial and intellectual resources on the search for life in the universe. Current space probes and future mission plans are increasingly targeted to finding life on other worlds. A great effort is now currently underway for identifying and characterizing extra-solar planets, presumably with the eventual goal of detecting signs of life on other solar systems. On our own planet, many researchers are concentrating on living organisms which inhabit extreme and hostile ecosystems that resemble extraterrestrial environments. It is almost as if science is determined to find or at least justify the presence of living things in the cosmos. The great interest in SETI, both in our popular culture and our scientific community, is not the only manifestation of this interest. Part of the great activity in this area can be explained by the fact that new technologies have only recently made these investigations possible, but I also believe there is more to it than that.

When Isaac Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants, he unwittingly hammered the first nail into the lid of the coffin of the supernatural. I say unwittingly, because Newton was a profoundly, indeed, fanatically, religious man; but his concept of a solar system ordered by a handful of simple physical laws with concise mathematical expression was something totally new. Prior to Newton, the planets were kept in the precise paths described by Copernicus and Kepler by the hand of God. It was the divine supervision of the creator that guided the astral bodies and specified their motions. Newton showed it to be not a conscious and deliberate direction, but an inevitable result of the same natural law that controlled all matter, from the motions of distant binary stars to falling apples in an orchard. The immediate hand of the divine was not the force that moved the planets, it was the initial author of those physical laws. To the seventeenth century mind, this did not remove God from the picture, it simply assigned him the role of the shipwright and removed him from the position of captain. God created the Laws of Motion and from that point on everything else followed, it did not require him to be presiding over the day-to-day enforcement of those laws. It can be argued that the Enlightenment followed from Newton's work, that the Age of Reason now no longer needed an ever-present, all-knowing God involved in every single detail of the management of the cosmos. He was now relegated to the initial principle that set it all in motion. Like the mechanical timepiece, also a product of that age, the universe ran itself without assistance, once the original clock was built, set, and wound up by the Creator, it no longer needed him. This demotion of God was the first step of the process of the demolition of theism.

The next assault on the religious viewpoint came centuries later with Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Darwin was also a religious man, albeit less doctrinaire than Newton, but his ideas were philosophically no more a threat to the religious cosmology of his contemporaries than Newton's had been. His contribution was to show that the uncannily effective adaptation of life to changing conditions was also the result of a natural, rather than determined process. Natural selection has no equivalent of the Laws of Motion, it does not require forces or fields or mathematical expression. It is simple probability and common sense. It simply HAS to happen, and its eventual result is to give us organisms magnificently adapted to their environment and even capable of modifying themselves to adapt to a changing environment. It neatly explains away the baffling ability of life to be so perfectly suited and precisely fitted to its surroundings without having to posit the existence of an intelligent guiding force. Again, this is really no different than what Newton had done with planetary motion and gravity, but this time, resistance to the concept of a self-managing universe was much better organized and unwilling to concede the field as it had during Newton's day.

Most religious traditions rapidly accepted Darwinian principles, correctly perceiving that there is no fundamentally anti-religious concept behind Darwinism any more than there is one behind classical mechanics or Maxwell's equations or atomic theory. In the West, the major sticking point was that evolution's timetable challenged a literal interpretation of scripture, one that was now directly open to attack by experiments in the laboratory and observations in the field. Evolution was rejected not because it questioned the role of the Great Designer of all living things, but because it contradicted the historical claims of the Old Testament. Influential sects of Protestant Christianity had identified and linked their doctrines to the infallibility and literal interpretation of Scripture. Before long, fundamentalist Christianity found itself at war with not only biology, but geology and astronomy as well. It seems ironic that Newton had fit in perfectly with a theology based on a geocentric universe, but Darwin was irreconcilable with a fundamentalist creation myth. In my view, both are in direct contradiction to the Old Testament, but neither makes any claims whatsoever as to the existence of God. Irregardless, fundamentalism chose the field where it would make its stand. It was not a wise choice.

What Newton and Darwin did to physics and biology, Marx and Freud did to collective and individual Man. Even if you don't accept their particular explanations (their work was neither as successful or as influential as the others), it still suggested that the world was just as easily explained by science as by the divine. Marx and Freud have their critics, but the Church cannot challenge them any more.

These issues have an inordinate impact on the English-speaking world, particularly in North America, where fundamentalist Protestantism is powerful and influential in political and cultural debates, but I believe that to be primarily a sideshow, a secondary yet highly visible, but not particularly important historical or worldwide philosophical controversy. But I do suspect that this ideological division has unforeseen consequences in the sciences, over and above whether evolution is taught in the schools.

When I was a high school student in the the rural deep South, there was considerable discussion and debate between those classmates of mine who shared my materialist, reductionist and agnostic views and the more common paradigm in our community, fundamentalist Protestantism. One particular comment we often endured was "...but science will never find the secret of Life". This is one sentiment you don't hear much any more, indeed, it was pretty much discredited by the 50s when the structure of DNA was revealed by Watson and Crick, although that was not fully appreciated at the time. Today, when biochemical technology based on that science is not only accepted as courtroom evidence and medical practice, but plays an enormous role in our science and industry, it is pretty much accepted that Life with a capital "L" is a chemical phenomenon and can be completely understood in those terms. The fundamentalists have retreated, setting up a fallback position about the issue of Consciousness and the Soul, although that is also under attack from cybernetics and artificial intelligence. I don't wish to get bogged down here in a debate on which of these viewpoints is correct (whatever that means, after all, maybe they're both right) but to explore the idea that this debate continues to influence not only religious thought, but scientific fashion as well.

I believe the great interest now evident in science about life on other worlds, intelligent or otherwise, is religiously motivated. From the subconscious point of view of scientists active and interested in this area, the discovery of extraterrestrial life will be yet another successful attack against the religious viewpoint. It is the final justification of the Principle of Mediocrity, the idea that there is nothing special or unique about Man or his position in the universe. This is a guiding principle of science, and anathema to religion. I further submit that at least part of this scientific interest is religious, or more properly, anti-religious. The discovery of life in space, particularly intelligent life, will be the final proof that life is a physical, natural phenomenon, entirely understandable in terms of and due solely to chemical and physical forces. I suspect that this is true, but I am rather concerned by the philosophical nature of this drive. Science is going beyond the collection and interpretation of facts. It appears that it has a foregone conclusion and it is collecting observations to support it. As a scientist, I find this troubling. Too often, I have learned that when you deliberately set out to prove something, you very often do exactly that.

Personally, my own opinions are that life is a purely natural process, without supernatural origins, and that living things are common in the universe. I further believe that if there is a supernatural agency involved with the universe, it is in the distant past and no longer plays a role in the evolution or future of the cosmos. If it ever existed, it was only to define the rules of the game, not to play it or to reward the winners. Intelligent life is only different in degree, not in kind, from organic life itself. But I also recognize that these are my opinions, and that others, some of them much cleverer than I, don't feel the same way. I also know that even though I may believe I'm right, it may very well turn out that none of these questions will ever be answered to anyone's satisfaction. I also recognize that sometimes science leads us to places where we may not want to go.

The search for life, and by extension, intelligence, in space is now accelerating as fast as technology will allow it. I think sometime soon there will be a breakthrough, but it may not turn out to be what any of us expect.