The Surprising Spirituality of SETI.

There’s a surprising amount of overlap between seekers of extraterrestrial life and seekers of God.

Not that the folks at SETI are actually hoping to detect the deep-space transmissions of a bearded deity from SGR 1900+14, handing them off to Vatican astronomers for inscription on silicon tablets. Far from it. But in my reporting for an article on the religious implications of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, I noticed that much research was produced in collaboration between scientists and theologians.

Why this partnership between parties whose relationship typically amounts to a truce, and an uneasy one at that?

In part it’s practical: Christianity boasts a small but rich history of so-called astrotheology, particularly within the Catholic Church. It makes sense that they’d run in some of the same circles as the SETI crowd. And since discovering aliens would prompt religious self-examination — if God is universal, maybe the image of God isn’t a hairless biped called homo sapiens — and perhaps devotion, it’s probably good that they’re already talking.

But after speaking this morning to Lutheran theology professor Ted Peters and then to Douglas Vakoch, the generally secular (he’s Unitarian) director of interstellar message composition at SETI, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was going on — some union of the like-minded, nominally separated by their titles and duties.
Towards the end of the interview, after Vakoch had explained the incredible unlikelihood of both receiving and comprehending interstellar signals, I asked him what it’s like to dedicate a career to something that would almost certainly not be realized in his own life, and perhaps not ever.
"One of the greatest misconceptions about SETI is that we know in our hearts that there is life out there, and the question is whether we’re going to be the generation that finds it. That’s false," he said.

"SETI requires an acceptance of ambiguity. If there’s a virtue to SETI, it’s that it’s making ambiguity acceptable at a time when people are focused on the concrete and short-term. It is very often uncomfortable not having the answers, but we need to accept that. We try to recognize that, in this domain, with what we now know, the best we can do, the most honest thing we can do, is live with a sense of ambiguity."

"That sounds deeply spiritual," I told Vakoch. He asked what I meant. "The act of coming to peace with the unknowable," I said.
"It’s not necessarily a matter of being at peace with it," he replied. "There’s a passage in the Bible — ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ In a sense, I think science and religion are not ultimately in opposition to one another. They are both attempting to understand things as they are. They understand different aspects of what is."

Now, before those of us conditioned by ugly fights against anti-evolution classroom sabotage paint Vakoch as a young earth creationist who stole a SETI lab coat, he’s certainly not insisting that religious principle trump testable hypothesis. He’s talking humbly about the Big Questions, and acknowledging the difficulty of answering them — something that truly religious people tend to do, too.

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