Arthur C. Clarke's 'Credo'

People have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years--and that is precisely why we should be skeptical of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time.

For thousands of years the subtlest minds of the human species have been focused on the great questions of life and death, of time and space--and of man's place in the universe. The answers have been encapsulated in the holy books of countless religions and whole libraries of philosophy, folklore, and myth.

Can our age contribute anything both new and true to these ancient debates? I believe so. We have been lucky enough to live at a time when knowledge that once seemed forever beyond reach can be found in elementary school-books. Our generation has seen the far side of the Moon, and close-ups of all the major bodies circling the Sun. We have opened the Pandora's box of the atomic nucleus. And perhaps most marvelous of all, we have uncovered the secret of life itself, in the endless twining and untwining of the DNA spiral. This is perhaps the greatest discovery in the whole history of science, yet even now it is barely thirty years old.

There are those who claim not to be impressed by such achievements, arguing that science deals with unimportant questions that can be solved, while religion is concerned with important ones that can't. The logical positivists would maintain that this is nonsense; if a problem can't be solved, at least in principle, it doesn't really exist. In other words, there's no such animal as metaphysics.

Without knowing it, I became a logical positivist at about the age of ten. Every Sunday, I was supposed to make the two-mile walk to the local Church of England--it was a long time before I discovered there was any other variety--to attend a service for the village youth. To encourage us to sit through the sermons, we were rewarded with stamps illustrating scenes from the Bible. When we had filled an album with these, we were entitled to an "outing"--i.e., a bus trip to some exotic and remote part of Somerset, perhaps as far as twenty miles away. I stuck with it for a few weeks, then decided--to quote Churchill's famous memorandum on the necessity of ending sentences with a proposition--"This is nonsense up with which I will not put."

Half a century of travel, reading, and contact with other faiths has endorsed that early insight.

Now I myself am not completely innocent, according to one of the last letters I received from the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Shortly before he died (going not gently but heroically into the good night with a witty poem entitled "Cancer Can Be Fun") he wrote: "I would like to see you awarded a prize for theology, as you are one of the very few living persons who has written anything original about God. You have in fact, written several mutually incompatible things.... If you had stuck to one theological hypothesis you might be a serious public danger."

I am only sorry that J.B.S. never had a chance to criticize my later (doubtless yet more incompatible) speculations, developed in the novels The Fountains of Paradise and The Songs of Distant Earth. He would, I am sure, have enjoyed this specimen from Fountains:

There can be no such subject as comparative religion as long as we study only the religions of man.... If we find that religion occurs exclusively among intelligent analogs of apes, dolphins, elephants, dogs, etc., but not among extraterrestrial computers, termites, fish, turtles, or social amoebae, we may have to draw some painful conclusions.... Perhaps both love and religion can arise only among mammals, and for much the same reasons. This is also suggested by a study of their pathologies; anyone who doubts the connection between religious fanaticism and perversion should take a long, hard look at the Malleus Maleficarum or Huxley's The Devils of Londun.

But I am quite serious about the profound philosophical importance of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI); this may be its supreme justification. The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life--much less intelligence--beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive; we may well be like jungle savages listening for throbbing of tom-toms, while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable--even necessary--that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

Having disposed of religion (at least until next Wednesday), let us consider something really important: God--aka Allah/Brahma/Jehovah, etc. ad infinitum. In The Songs of Distant Earth, I distinguished between two aspects of this hypothetical entity, calling them Alpha and Omega to defuse emotional reactions.