Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?

space.com ^ | 06/01/06 | David Darling

[KevinDavis]

Is SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a religion? This is one of the topics that Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and I discussed on "Are We Alone?", the SETI Institute's weekly radio program on Wednesday May 17.

The discussion by Jill and I was in response to a claim made by George Basalla (professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware) in his book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford University Press: 2006) that SETI is more of a faith-based enterprise than a genuine science. He points to SETI's failure to make "contact" after more than forty years of trying and its continuing efforts in the absence of any positive evidence as a sign that it relies more on a kind of religious zeal than anything else. (Incidentally, Basalla was invited to appear on the show but declined.)

[Calvin Locke]

So if the SETI folks finally get an intelligible signal...

They're too busy squabbling right now to pay attention to it.

At least the S@H people are, for the past week.

Check out any of threads at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_forum.php?id=10
with subject words as crunc3r, on strike, tony, or words meaning immature, apology, etc.

In a nutshell, an apparently people-skills-challenged mod publicly accused a highly regarded volunteer of "cheating"
on the amount of "work" claimed by 2 of 20 pcs that look for ET.

[The_Reader_David]

Well, yes and no.

SETI is looking for signals that arguably have an intelligent cause, while in another corner there a very loud 'defenders of science' who say that intelligent causation can't be a scientific hypothesis.