Are Public Schools Teaching a Stealth Religion?

According to the account by educational authorities, there is no teaching of religious doctrine in United States public schools. We are told that such a thing is strictly forbidden, because it would be a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which holds that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This has been interpreted to mean that taxpayer funds should not be used to support any particular religion, and since public schools receive taxpayer dollars, it is held that such schools cannot be supporting any type of religion.

But while it is widely believed that teaching of a religion is forbidden inside public schools, it may be that exactly such a forbidden thing is actually occurring in almost every public high school. This is because a substantial case can be made that a particular belief system spoon-fed to our children throughout high school is itself a religion or a religious position or a faith-based ideology.

The particular belief system I refer to is what we may call Darwinist materialism. Below is one way to describe the tenets of this creed:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

Although constantly marketed and branded simply as “science,” Darwinist materialism seems to involve a very large element of faith. In particular, it has never been proven that any one complex visible organism or any of its organs or appendages or cell types has ever appeared mainly because of natural selection, or natural selection and random mutations. We can imagine no mathematically credible scenario under which natural selection could produce the fine-tuned protein molecules upon which life depends. An average protein molecule has a length of about 375 amino acids, and getting an arrangement of such amino acids by chance to produce the functionality of the protein molecule requires an arrangement with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 10 to the two-hundredth power (even if you assume only half of the amino acid sequence has to match the actual sequence of amino acids in the protein). It would seem such molecules cannot appear through any gradually rewarded "each step yields a benefit" kind of process, because half-versions or quarter-versions of such molecules are useless. Yet Darwinist materialism wishes us to accept natural selection as an explanation for most or almost all biology. Since there seems to be a very large article of faith here, it would seem that we should at least be calling Darwinist materialism a kind of faith-based ideology.

But would it be correct to go even farther, and brand Darwinist materialism as a kind of religion? A supporter of such a belief system would immediately dismiss such an idea as an absurdity. He would vigorously argue: religion is some belief in God, and Darwinist materialism does not entail that.

But such a definition of “religion” is too narrow. Let's consider Eastern religions. These include Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. There are certainly major forms of each of these religions that do not require any belief in a deity. One can be either an atheist or a theist, and still follow either Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. In a religion such as Buddhism, there are some sects that pray to some entity that might be called a deity or the equivalent of a deity, but there are other sects that do not do that. Consider also a modern American religion such as Scientology. Again we have a religion which does not have any belief in a deity at the core of its teachings. As a Scientologist, you can be either an atheist or a theist.

It seems, therefore, that defining religion as some belief in a deity or some system of worship is too narrow a definition of the word “religion.” Scholars have offered many conflicting definitions of “religion,” some of which are too narrow to cover some of the known religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We need a definition that seems to cover almost all cases of religious belief.  One such definition was given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Here is another rather similar definition: we can define a religion as  a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs. This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The idea that Darwinist materialism may be a religion should not seem unreasonable when we consider the activities of two young men, Rod and Bill. Rod decides to become a minister in a church. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented minister-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (parishioners), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Rod may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his church, contributing to things such as religion journals and theological books. If a heretic arises in his church to dispute the accepted teachings, Rod may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.

Bill, however, decides to become a professor of evolutionary biology. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented professor-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (university students), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Bill may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his scholastic tribe, contributing to things such as science journals and science books. If a heretic arises to dispute the accepted teachings, such as someone suggesting there may be purposeful design in living things, Bill may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance. 

Given all these similarities, it seems both Bill and Rod are kind of spear-carriers for a particular belief tribe, products of a sociological structure that encourages regimentation of belief and strongly sanctions deviations from its orthodoxy of belief norms. In this light, the idea that Darwinist materialism may actually be a religion does not seem too far-fetched. Darwinist materialism has a sociological and authoritarian structure strongly resembling the sociological and authoritarian structure of a religion, with evolutionary biology professors and neuroscientists acting like some new priesthood, and members of the National Academy of Sciences or Nobel laureates having a higher authority (just as bishops or cardinals have a higher authority than priests).

It may be argued that we should not call Darwinist materialism as a religion, because its proponents are very level-headed people who don't get all emotional and carried away about their teachings, in the way that religious people do. But that's not always true. Let us consider the following quote from page 93 of the book The Origins of Creativity by biologist Edward O. Wilson:

"The preeminence of this universal process was nicely expressed in 1973 by the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and often quoted since: 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.'  This claim should now be boldly expanded: Nothing in science and the humanities makes sense except in the light of evolution. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett has put it, evolution by natural selection is the acid that burns through every myth about ordained purposes and meanings."

The quote by Dobzhansky is very often quoted, but is not at all correct. For example, the thirtieth edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry is an 800-page textbook describing cells, genes, enzymes, proteins, metabolism, hormones, and biochemisty in the greatest detail, with abundant illustrations. The book makes no mention of Darwin, no mention of natural selection, and only a single mention of evolution, on a page talking only about whether evolution had anything to do with limited lifespans. So it is clearly not true that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. As for Wilson's claim that nothing in science or the humanities makes sense except in the light of Darwinian evolution, it is just nonsense. Darwin's theory of evolution has no appreciable place in cosmology, astrophysics, chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer science, poetry, mathematics, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and most forms of literature.

Clearly Wilson feels the same way about his Darwinist materialism as a fervent fundamentalist feels about his Bible, and we can compare Wilson's statement to a fundamentalist's claim that nothing in science or nature makes sense except in the light of the Bible. When a prominent figure of Darwinist materialism speaks with this type of over-the-top seething fervor about Darwinism, it seems to support the suspicion that Darwinist materialism is a kind of surreptitious religion. And when, in the next sentence, that prominent figure enthuses about some supposed theological effect of his doctrine, we can again take note of the very strong religious motivations here. Given a choice between categorizing such runaway gushing as science or religion, the latter term seems more appropriate.

In the book The Inflamed Mind by Edward Bullmore, we have another example of the same type of zealotry.  Referring to biological explanation on page 158, the book says, "Ultimately the answer must always be Darwin."  This reminds us of a Christian saying that the answer to everything is Jesus. The Royal Society may have the slogan of Nullius in verba or "Take nobody's word for it," but the  authorities of scientific academia seem to be following quite the opposite, a motto of, "Always take Darwin's word for it."  This smells more like religion than science.  The authoritarian structure of a university is very suited for the propagation of a religion, and the first universities were created largely to propagate Christianity. Over the centuries, authoritarian universities seem to have gradually switched from propagating an ancient religion to propagating the more modern religion or belief system of Darwinist materialism. 

For many decades there have been many groups such as the ACLU ready to "scream bloody murder" if anyone tried to teach in public schools any religion that was called a religion by its adherents. But throughout the same period there was a little-known backdoor allowing infiltration of religion into our public schools: the possibility that a religion-in-all-but-name could infiltrate our public high school curriculum under the guise or branding of "science education."  If you think it is incredible that the state has imposed on our children a kind of stealth religion, under the cover of “science education,” simply consider that it is widely admitted that such a thing did happen elsewhere for decades. Between 1920 and 1990, the Soviet Union force-fed a Marxist-Leninist ideology to its students, something that was followed in such a regimented and authoritarian way that it was essentially a religion. But such indoctrination was never called religious indoctrination. When students were taught the catechism of Marxism-Leninism, they were told that they were simply being taught “economic science.”

The main objection you could make to the claim that Darwinist materialism is a stealth religion is to say that it can't be a religion, because it is science; and something cannot be both science and religion. But using a strict definition of science, Darwinist materialism isn't science. Although science can be loosely defined in terms of scientific activity, a strict definition of science is "facts established by observations and experiments."  None of the core tenets of Darwinist materialism is a fact established by observations or experiments. 

Although we know that evolution defined merely as "gene pool change over time" does occur, we absolutely do not know that Darwinian evolution is the correct explanation for the most impressive wonders of complexity and organization we observe in biology.  There are actually very strong reasons for suspecting that Darwinian evolution cannot possibly be the correct explanation for such wonders. One such reason is that the theory of evolution by natural selection is not even a theory of organization, but is something much less, a mere theory of accumulation. Another such reason is the speed at which biological innovation can occur (which in the case of the Cambrian Explosion was an explosive speed). Another such reason is the fact that  DNA does not actually store the body plans of organisms or a specification of how to make them, meaning that no conceivable random DNA mutations could explain one species evolving into some other species with a very different body plan.  As for claims that the brain is the cause of all mental activity, there are very strong scientific reasons for doubting that the brain is the cause of the leading mental activites such as intelligence or memory retrieval.  You can read about some of those reasons at this site.  As for claims that life arose naturally from mere chemicals, there is zero scientific evidence for it. Both the  enormous information complexity of the simplest living thing and the very meager results of scientific experiments trying to produce some of the most important building blocks of life (in conditions simulating the early earth) are scientific reasons for disbelieving in such a thing.  As for the denial of the paranormal that is part of Darwinist materialism,  such a thing is not at all "science," and is actually inconsistent with a huge amount of observational evidence for the paranormal, a good deal of it collected in controlled scientific experiments.  

It is true that the adherents of Darwinist materialism constantly try to brand their belief system as "science," and deny that such a system is a religion.  A religion which positions itself as "science" can be called a stealth religion or a surreptitious religion. 

The average person may regard the claims of Darwinist materialism to be science, because he has been taught them in a science class or read them in books written by scientists.  Similarly, if it were taught in physics class that the Shroud of Turin proved the resurrection of Jesus, and we were taught this again and again in science books, we would regard such a claim as being science, and would look strangely at anyone suggesting that this was a bit of religion that had been sneaked into our science textbooks. And if we were taught in our history textbooks that Noah had saved all the earth's animals, and if such a claim was frequently repeated by historians, we would regard such a claim as simply being an example of history, and would look strangely at anyone suggesting that such a claim was a bit of religion that had been sneaked into our history textbooks. Over the years very much has been sneaked into our science textbooks that is not science (defined as facts established by observations and experiments), but merely belief dogmas that have become popular among scientists who belong to a belief community with its own sociocultural speech customs and speech taboos. 

In 1993 comments to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Darwinist philosopher of science Michael Ruse confessed the following:

"Certainly, historically, that if you look at, say, evolutionary theory, and of course this was brought out I think rather nicely by the talk just before me, it's certainly been the case that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion.... And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion."

Many of the adherents of Darwinist materialism are trying to give this creed new features similar to features of Christianity: a world-transformation eschatology (in which the current world-order will be radically overturned by genetic engineering and intelligent robots), and a kind of afterlife eschatology based on ideas such as mind uploading (the uploading of minds into computer systems or robots).  The materialists saying "soon the robots will take over everything" may be compared to millenialist Christians saying "soon Jesus will take over everything." And the materialists saying "one day I will upload my mind into a robot or computer" are like millenialist evangelicals saying "one day Jesus will lift me and other true believers way up into the sky, when the Rapture happens."  Such transhumanist ideas (stemming from materialist assumptions) haven't yet made it into the high school curriculum, but it should be noted that Darwinist materialists are busy building what seems to be a belief system with all of the main features of modern religions.  In this essay, I list nine characteristics of modern religions, and I discuss how transhumanist versions of Darwinist materialism have all nine of these characteristics. 

Like a Catholic school controlling what its students are exposed to, the modern public high school makes sure to double-indoctrinate students in the creed of Darwinist materialism, and to exclude any teachings that might challenge such a doctrine. Our high school students receive not just one year of materialistic biology, but two years of such study, with the same subject matter being repeated in a different year. In the biology course it will be taught dogmatically that thoughts are created by brains, and that memories are stored in brains, even though scientists have no understanding of how a brain could generate a thought, no credible detailed theory of how a brain could encode human learned information in synapse states or neuron states, no credible theory of how brains could store memories for decades given rapid protein turnover, and no credible theory explaining the instantaneous retrieval of old memories (such as when you remember facts about a name you haven't heard mentioned in many years).  

The high school biology student will not learn about any of the many very substantial reasons for rejecting the dogma that the brain stores our memories and generates the mind, reasons that are mainly just neuroscience facts such as the low transmission reliability of synapses (which in the cortex transmit signals with a probability of less than 50%), and the short lifetimes of synapse proteins (only a few weeks). The student will be given the false impression that human biology has been largely figured out, even though everywhere there are still the most gigantic mysteries. The student will be go away with no understanding of how enormous are the unsolved mysteries of biology such as the origin of life, the origin of biological complexity, the source of human consciousness and cognition, protein folding and morphogenesis (how a newly fertilized egg manages to progress to become a full baby). In his textbook the student will see no chart showing almost all animal phyla appearing in one rather sudden burst of the Cambrian Explosion, lest his faith in the power of gradual random evolution be shaken. The student will probably go away with the false idea of DNA as a blueprint for the human form, when DNA is actually just a list of human chemical ingredients that does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in a human body. The student will not be well educated about the complexity of protein molecules, and will probably leave high school with no idea that in his body are some 20,000 complex inventions, the roughly 20,000 different types of protein molecules in his body, most of them about as complex as a 100-word computer program.  Education in such facts clashes with the causal ideas that our biology teachers are trying to foster. 

It's kind of like this in a public high school

Such students will also receive two years of physics studies. The physics courses will teach all kinds of mathematical calculation algorithms that 95 percent of students will very soon completely forget, but the courses will completely fail to teach the students something that they might remember the rest of their lives: an explanation of how the laws of nature and physical constants of our universe are very fine-tuned to allow for our existence. This is perhaps because teaching such a thing might conflict with the thrust of Darwinist materialism. Similarly, the high school student will also probably never be taught about the Big Bang, the baffling sudden origin of the universe, from what scientists say was a point of infinite density. Such a topic is conveniently omitted from the high school physics curriculum.

No course in psychology is normally required for high-school students. If the student takes such a course, there will be no discussion of any of the huge amount of evidence suggesting that the mind is something that cannot be explained purely by the brain. There will be no discussion of near-death experiences or accounts of apparitions or a discussion of very high-scoring subjects in ESP tests or people who managed to function well after half or 75 percent of their brains were surgically removed or replaced with fluid by hydrocephalus. The “we can't teach about anything spooky” rule will be followed.  In psychology courses and biology courses, there will be no discussion of biology facts that contradict the dogma that brains store memories, such as the extremely short lifetime of synapse proteins.  When the biology courses discuss morphogenesis, the growth of a human body from a tiny fertilized egg, the student may be given the false notion that such a growth occurs because of a reading of a body blueprint in DNA. There does not actually exist any such blueprint or recipe in DNA, which merely stores low-level chemical information, not high-level structural information, nor does there exist in a human womb anything sophisticated enough to read and execute a blueprint or recipe for making a human, which would be a set of instructions 1000 times more complex than a building blueprint (given all the incredibly complicated dynamics of cells).  The student may be given the impression that scientists understand how a fertilized egg progresses to become a full-sized human, even though such a progression is actually a thousand miles over the heads of scientists, being unexplained by any known biochemistry. 

The student enduring such a very dogmatic and one-sided course of study at his high school on a weekday such as Monday may rightfully wonder whether he is being religiously indoctrinated every bit as much as if he were attending a Sunday school class at a church.

Postscript: Julian Huxley has been called one of the founders of the so-called "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology, and he coined that term. In an essay "Eugenics and Society," he made rather clear how Darwinism was to him pretty much a religion; for he stated this:

"Eugenics, Dean Inge writes in one of his essays, is capable of becoming the most sacred ideal of the human race, as a race; one of the supreme religious duties. In this I entirely agree with him. Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion."

We saw the disastrous results of eugenics enthusiasm in the twisted work of the Nazis. A paper on Huxley states, "Julian Huxley was untroubled by this post-Orwellian 1984 nightmare – instead he continued to proselytize for the opposite: the idea of an evolutionary religion, based on objective science rather than revelation." So spellbound by his Darwinist religion, Huxley kept acting as a salesman for eugenics long after the horrors of the Nazis had been uncovered. 

Earthly Immortality Fantasists Are Poor Scholars of the Human Body's Gigantic Fine-tuned Organization and Complexity

The Reuters news agency is 173 years old, and Reuters is about as reliable a mainstream news source as you can find. A recent news article published by Reuters is entitled "Hot Mic Picks Up Putin and Xi Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality." It seems that when Vladimir Putin (the leader of Russia) recently met with Xi (the leader of China), a microphone picked up a conversation between them discussing the prospects of 150-year lifespans and earthly immortality. 

The article states this:

"As Putin and Xi walked toward the Tiananmen rostrum where they viewed the parade with Kim, Putin's translator could be heard saying in Chinese: 'Biotechnology is continuously developing.'

The translator added, after an inaudible passage: 'Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality.' 

In response, Xi, who was off camera, can be heard responding in Chinese: 'Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.' "

Later in the article we read this:

"Putin confirmed later that he and Xi had discussed the subject on Wednesday.

'I think when we went to the parade, the chairman talked about it,' Putin told reporters in Beijing when asked about the leaked conversation.

'Modern means of health improvement, medical means, even surgical ones related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue differently than it does today,' he said."

The statement of Xi is not objectionable. It is true that "some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old. " The statement from Putin's translator is a nutty-sounding one. It obviously is untrue that "the longer you live, the younger you become." That's the opposite of the truth, which is that the longer you live, the older you become. 

The article makes Putin sounds like an earthly immortality fantasist. The earthly immortality fantasist is one who thinks that breakthroughs in medical science will discover some way for a human to keep living on Earth indefinitely, with a lifespan of greater than 1000 years. 

The people who have such fantasies tend to be materialists, and they also tend to be very poor scholars of the human body and its enormous heights of physical organization and component interdependence and fine-tuned functional complexity. The more you study such topics, the less likely you will be to believe in the possibility of humans ever achieving physical immortality on this planet. The better you understand how there had to occur a thousand miracles of hard-to-achieve fine-tuning and accidentally unachievable component interdependence for there to exist a normal human lifespan, the less likely you will be to believe that human medicine will be able to reverse the endless types of biological deterioration that occurs as people age. Similarly, someone who does not understand the complexity of a jet aircraft might think that a few modifications might allow a jet aircraft to keep flying forever. 

Human bodies have enormously high levels of organization. A human body is built from organ systems and a skeletal system; organ systems are built from organs and other extremely complex components; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells; cells are enormously complex units built from organelles; organelles are built from proteins and protein complexes;  protein complexes (often so complex they are called molecular machines) are built from various types of protein molecules; protein molecules are very special arrangements of hundreds or thousands of amino acids; and amino acids are built from about twenty atoms.   The human body has a more impressive degree of organization and complexity than any machines humans have ever manufactured. 

A long-standing characteristic of materialism and Darwinism is a failure to adequately describe the enormous organization and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms, and the huge interdependence of their parts. There is a reason why materialists and Darwinists have habitually tended to avoid describing the human body in a way that adequately depicts the enormous levels of organization in the human body.  The reason is that the better job you do at describing such organization, the less plausible materialism and Darwinism appear to be.  

The Darwinist materialist wants you to believe that human bodies arose because of blind accidental processes.  Most of us can intuitively realize a principle that I have called the first rule of accidental construction. In a previous post I defined that rule as follows:

The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.

I can illustrate the principle with a simple example. A person throwing some cards into the air might accidentally achieve a "house of cards" consisting of one card diagonally resting against another. But the larger the number of well-arranged cards, the smaller the chance that the result could be the work of chance. You might believe someone if he said he threw some cards into the air and produced a result like this by mere chance:

But you would be a fool if you believed someone who told you that he threw a deck of cards into the air, and it produced the result shown below (which would never be produced by chance even if 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a deck of cards was thrown into the air). 

The more well-arranged parts something requires, and the greater the variety of the part types, and the greater the complexity and interdependence of the parts, and the higher the number of systems the thing requires, the less likely that thing could be the result of unguided processes. So because materialists want us to believe that human bodies arose from unguided processes, they tend to poorly describe the organization and functional complexity of human bodies. A materialist may say "you're just some meat" or "you're just some flesh" rather than correctly describing your body as a fine-tuned whole that is a set of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems.

In the world of materialism you are constantly inhibited and steered away from engaging in proper scholarship of biological organization and biological complexity and the interdependence of enormously well-arranged biological components. This results in what we might call biocomplexity ignoramuses. And such biocomplexity ignoramuses may believe in the possibility of earthly immortality, which they may think is "not too much of a stretch." 

The idea of earthly immortality is utterly unbelievable. Human bodies look just like unfathomably complex systems that were deliberately designed to wear out and fail after about 70 or 80 years (with a slim possibility of a few decades more of earthly life). There are countless factors that limit the human lifespan. There are no little tweaks that will transform such bodies into systems that can live on Earth for centuries. 

A fundamental fact of biology limiting human lifespans is something called the Hayflick limit. The wikipedia.org article on the topic explains the concept well. A Nobel Prize winning scientist (Alexis Carrel) had maintained that human cells can reproduce pretty much endlessly. The scientist Leonard Hayflick did research refuting the idea. Hayflick showed that human cells can only reproduce about 50 or 60 times. The limit is called the Hayflick limit. 

There are about 200 types of cells in the human body. Many types of cells in the human body have limited lifespans. For example:

• Intestinal cells have a lifetime of only four days. 
• Skin cells only last days to weeks. 
• Fat cells only last about 8 years. 
• Liver cells only last about 10 to 16 months. 
• Pancreas cells only last about a year. 
• Red blood cells only last about 120 days. 
• White blood cells only last between hours and years. 

The Hayflick limit is one of many reasons why there is a built-in limit to the human lifespan. The main reason is that the human body is such a miracle of superbly arranged organization, intricate fine-tuning and just right biochemistry, dynamism and component interdependence  that there are endless opportunities for things to go wrong, and endless possibilities for gradual deterioration.  The longer a person lives, the smaller the chance of escaping the endless ways that superbly intricate and enormously fine-tuned systems in the human body can break down. Similarly, if a man plays Russian Roulette every year, firing a gun with 1 chance in 6 of killing him, then with each passing decade his chance of surviving will diminish.

The software industry has a great expression: "It's not a bug, it's a feature." We can say that about the limited human lifespan. But that limit should be no cause of concern for the person who has adequately studied the evidence for paranormal phenomena and life after death, the extremely many reasons for disbelieving that the human mind and human memory can be explained by the brain, and the very many reasons for thinking that we live in a purposeful universe in which  human beings are no accident of nature, but instead creatures who are here on purpose as part of some grand plan.  

The world's religions have very many diverse forms, and only some of them involve a belief in a deity. It was pointed out by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that you can have a religion without any belief in a deity. The communism of the Soviet Union in the 20th century was a kind of stealth religion, and its features met Geertz's anthropological definition of religion.  He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." In its transhumanist form today's Darwinist materialism seems to be clearly a religion, as I point out in my post " Transhumanism Puts the Finishing Touches on the Materialist Religion," which you can read here.  Below are features of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism, which are also hallmarks of organized religions (read the post for how all of these boxes are checked in the case of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism):

When self-described scientific thinkers start teaching an eternal life eschatology based on technological fantasies requiring poor scholarship about human bodies and human minds, it becomes all the more clear that we are dealing with a religion. That has funding consequences.  We are told that the US constitution prohibits any funding in support of a religion, but what about when the religion is a religion-in-all-but-name, a kind of stealth religion? Why should billions of federal dollars be going to support such a stealth religion, with no similar funding for religions that call themselves religions? As for the idea of a very old man being kept alive by receiving an  organ taken from a younger man, it is in general morally abhorrent, particularly whenever the donor did not die a natural death or whenever there are younger people waiting for transplants of the same organ. Medicine should be focused on allowing people to live full and happy lives to about the age of 70 or 80, rather than being focused on getting very old people to live to be older and older and older. 

The "Ministry of Materialism" Keeps Giving Us Untrue News About the Origin of Life

A substantial case can be made that a particular belief system marketed as "science" is itself a religion or a religious position or a faith-based ideology. The particular belief system I refer to is what we may call Darwinist materialism. Below is one way to describe the tenets of this creed:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

Although constantly marketed and branded simply as “science,” Darwinist materialism seems to involve a very large element of faith. In particular, it has never been proven that any one complex visible organism or any of its organs or appendages or cell types has ever appeared mainly because of natural selection, or natural selection and random mutations. We can imagine no mathematically credible scenario under which natural selection could invent the very many types of fine-tuned protein molecules upon which life depends, each of which typically consists of hundreds of parts that must be well-arranged in a very specific way for the protein molecule to be functional.  In the scientific paper here, a Harvard scientist says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

The average protein molecule has a length of about 375 amino acids, and getting an arrangement of such amino acids by chance to produce the functionality of the protein molecule requires an arrangement with a chance likelihood of less than about 1 in 10 to the two-hundredth power (even if you assume only about half of the amino acid sequence has to match the actual sequence of amino acids in the protein for a functional protein molecule to exist). It would seem such molecules cannot appear through any gradually rewarded "each step yields a benefit" kind of process, because half-versions or quarter-versions of such molecules are useless. Yet Darwinist materialism wishes us to accept natural selection as an explanation for most or almost all the wonders of biology. Since there seems to be a very large element of faith here, it would seem that we should at least be calling Darwinist materialism a kind of faith-based ideology.

But would it be correct to go even farther, and brand Darwinist materialism as a kind of religion? A supporter of such a belief system would immediately dismiss such an idea as an absurdity. He would vigorously argue: religion is some belief in God, and Darwinist materialism does not entail that.

But such a definition of “religion” is too narrow. Let's consider Eastern religions. These include Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. There are certainly major forms of each of these religions that do not require any belief in a deity. One can be either an atheist or a theist, and still follow either Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. In a religion such as Buddhism, there are some sects that pray to some entity that might be called a deity or the equivalent of a deity, but there are other sects that do not do that. Consider also a modern American religion such as Scientology. Again we have a religion which does not have any belief in a deity at the core of its teachings. As a Scientologist, you can be either an atheist or a theist.

It seems, therefore, that defining religion as some belief in a deity or some system of worship is too narrow a definition of the word “religion.” Scholars have offered many conflicting definitions of “religion,” some of which are too narrow to cover some of the known religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We need a definition that seems to cover almost all cases of religious belief.  One such definition was given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Here is another rather similar definition: we can define a religion as  a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs. This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The creed of Darwinist materialism is not propagated by any organization calling itself a church. But it is propagated by a large social infrastructure dedicated to preaching the tenets of Darwinist materialism. Such an infrastructure consists of people such as professors, PhD's, credulous science journalists, editors, web site owners, book publishers, university officials and high school biology teachers. What term would be appropriate to describe such as infrastructure?

It would not be unfair to refer to such an infrastructure as the Ministry of Materialism.  Two of several definitions that the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us for "ministry" are below:

• the body of ministers of religion : CLERGY
• a person or thing through which something is accomplished : AGENCY, INSTRUMENTALITY

Given that the agents professing the stealth religion of Darwinist materialism very much act like clergy by dogmatically professing unproven belief tenets, it seems fair enough to refer to such agents as part of a Ministry of Materialism. The diagram below gives a crude sketch of such a power structure, which is far more complicated than the diagram suggests.  Key players in the power structure include the so-called skeptics mentioned at the bottom right, who do their best to suppress the reporting and studying of thousands of observations that conflict with the materialist worldview, while gaslighting, disparaging and defaming those who report or mention such observations. In psychology analysis of groupthink conformity, such agents are called "mindguards." 

In the past century one of the most notorious tendencies of such a Ministry of Materialism has been to pass off untrue news about the scientifically groundless idea of abiogenesis, news stories falsely suggesting that scientific activity is doing something to substantiate this scientifically unfounded claim. Abiogenesis is the idea that life can arise from non-life. Everything we know about the complexity and amount of organization in living things argues against this idea. Even the simplest living thing is a cell that requires hundred of different types of protein molecules to exist and reproduce. Each of those types of protein molecules is a separate complex invention as unlikely to arise by chance as a well-written 100-word paragraph from a random arrangement of shells and pebbles and seaweed at a seashore.

There are no experiments supporting the idea of abiogenesis. No one has ever produced a living thing from any experiment realistically simulating lifeless early Earth conditions. No one has ever produced a functional protein molecule (one of the building blocks of one-celled life) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. No one has ever even produced one of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (an amino acid) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. The Miller-Urey experiment which produced some amino acids was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, for reasons discussed in my post here.

The latest bit of untrue news in the long, long series of very misleading news stories about the origin of life coming from the Ministry of Materialism is a story that had the headline "New 'Origin of Life' Chemical Reactions Discovered" on the Neuroscience News site (a frequent purveyor of untrue headlines about brain research), and had the headline "Scientists discover new 'origins of life' chemical reactions" on the site phys.org, and had the same headline on the SciTechDaily.com site. No, scientists did not discover any chemical reactions producing life from non-life. Scientists also did not-discover any chemical reactions producing a protein molecule, one of the building blocks of one-celled life. 

Did scientists at least run some experiment that produced a mere amino acid (one of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life) in any experiment simulating early Earth conditions? No, not even that was done. The scientific paper makes no such claim. The abstract of the paper insinuates that some amino acids may have been produced, but makes no claim at all to have produced any amino acids through any experiment simulating early Earth conditions. 

It's almost always the same when scientists studying life's origin insinuate that they've produced some chemical without claiming to have simulated early Earth conditions. Almost invariably upon reading the paper, you will find that the chemical was produced in some modern lab, using a variety of modern scientific equipment such as glass beakers, test tubes and fancy electronic equipment, and using a variety of purposeful interventions by chemists trying to produce a particular result.  Such work does nothing to make it more likely that life would have naturally arisen from non-life on the early Earth.

The source of the news stories mentioned above was a Scripps Research press release that was carelessly parroted word-for-word on July 29 by various news sites. In the original press release  we had this untrue statement: "Now, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that use cyanide, ammonia and carbon dioxide—all thought to be common on the early earth—to generate amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins and DNA."  The scientific paper ("Prebiotic synthesis of α-amino acids and orotate from α-ketoacids potentiates transition to extant metabolic pathways") did not actually claim to have produced a nucleic acid, and does not mention any nucleic acids. And rather than nucleic acids being building blocks of DNA, DNA is instead a type of nucleic acid.  

If a nucleic acid (an RNA or DNA molecule) was produced by some chemists trying to simulate the origin of life in conditions like the early Earth, it would be the scientific achievement of the decade, and we cannot imagine that scientists making so monumental a discovery would fail to mention  it in both the abstract and the title of their paper. Obviously no such nucleic acid was produced by the research described in the above paper. 

The original version of the press release has given us an inaccurate statement sounding as if the writer did not even understand the difference between a nucleotide and a nucleic acid.  But we should not be surprised. University and institutional press releases on scientific topics are routinely written by press office copywriters with little understanding of the very complex topics being discussed. In such press offices there is often an "it's fine just as long you made it sound like a breakthrough" attitude. Very many scientists condone outrageous press-release misstatements about their research in a "wink and a nod" kind of way, aware that such inaccurate hype will help achieve the goal that to them is paramount: the goal of increasing paper citations.  

The news stories that arose about July 29, 2022 from the Scripps Research press release were more "origins of life" untrue  news. No "origin of life" chemical reactions were discovered or produced. No nucleic acids were produced. Nothing has been done to realistically simulate the early Earth. Nothing has been done to substantiate claims of abiogenesis.  This is just the latest in 70+ years of untrue news about origin of life research which we have got from the Ministry of Materialism. The kind of "assistant priests" of that ministry (including workers at various "science news" sites) pass on word-for-word whatever nonsensical press releases promote the cherished tenets of the professor priesthood, no matter how self-contradictory or groundless or bogus-sounding the claims are.  

On the day I read the stories above (July 29, 2022), I sent an email to the press office at Scripps Research, suggesting that they had incorrectly claimed in their press release that nucleic acids were produced, making a claim not matching any claim in the scientific  paper the press release discussed. Below is the full text of my email:

"I  am puzzled by a claim in your recent press release below.

https://www.scripps.edu//news-and-events/press-room/2022/20220728-krishnamurthy-origins-of-life-chemical-reactions.html

The press release makes an untrue claim that 'scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that use cyanide, ammonia and carbon dioxide—all thought to be common on the early earth—to generate amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.'

But the abstract of the paper makes no actual claim to have produced nucleic acids. And nucleic acids are not building blocks of DNA. DNA and RNA are types of nucleic acids.

Later, your press release above states that in the 'process of studying their chemical soup, Krishnamurthy’s group discovered that a byproduct of the same reaction is orotate, a precursor to nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA.' Nucleotides are mere building blocks of DNA and RNA. If a mere precursor to such building blocks was discovered, there would be a vast difference between that and producing a nucleic acid.  Claiming that you produced a nucleic acid when you merely produced orotate would be like claiming you wrote a textbook when you merely planted a tree (a precursor to paper, one of the building blocks of textbooks).  

It would seem that your press release is making a sensational-sounding but very much untrue claim that nucleic acids were produced."

 

Now, I must give a little salute to the good folks at Scripps Research. They did not at all ignore my email. On Tuesday August 2, 2022 I received an email back from the press office of Scripps Research stating exactly this:

"Dear Mr. Mahin,

 

Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention. We have corrected it in the press release (subtitle and first paragraph).

 

Best,

 

Scripps Communications Office."

Now, when I look at the press release on the web site of Scripps Research, I see a change. The press release originally stated the following:

Now the press release has a correction. The erroneous reference to "nucleic acids" has been replaced with a reference to "orotic acid." So now the press release says, "Now, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that use cyanide, ammonia and carbon dioxide—all thought to be common on the early earth—to generate amino acids and orotic acid, the building blocks of proteins and DNA."  In the original version of the press release (repeated in so many news stories), that sentence said "nucleic acids" where it now says "orotic acid." 

It is good that Scripps Research made that correction (apparently because of the email I sent them). But there are still several problems:

(1) The internet is now littered with many a "science news story" that repeated the original erroneous claims about nucleic acids being produced, and such stories have not been updated merely because the Scripps Research press release was updated. So the internet still has many an erroneous story incorrectly claiming that nucleic acids were produced in orgins-of-life research. 

(2) The Scripps Research press release (and the news stories based on it) still contain the misleading claim that "origins of life" chemical reactions were discovered.  The not-very-impressive results of the experiments were not at all "origins of life" chemical reactions, and produced neither a functional protein molecule nor a nucleic acid (DNA or RNA).  
(3) The revised Scripps Research press release now claims that orotic acid is a building block of proteins or DNA, and orotic acid is not a building block of either. 

(4) The revised Scripps Research press release still contains the boastful PR hype claim by an assistant professor claiming, "We’ve come up with a new paradigm to explain this shift from prebiotic to biotic chemistry," something that was not actually done. 

(5) The revised Scripps Research press release still advances the groundless idea that before life existed there was a "primordial soup." No experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any such "primordial soup," and the Miller-Urey experiment was not any such experiment, for reasons discussed here. There is no geological, astronomical or meteorological reason for thinking that amino acids existed in anything other than negligible amounts before life existed, and there is no evidential basis for believing that there ever existed any such thing as a prebiotic "primordial soup" that was rich in either the building blocks of proteins (amino acids) or the building blocks of DNA (nucleotides). 

But let's at least give one cheer (not three cheers) to an example where science journalism turned out to be at least a little bit self-correcting, thanks to some good person at Scripps Research who reads his emails carefully. 

They Concluded (Very "Scientifically") That the Sky Was Full of Gods

When it started out, Darwinism was something pretty simple: it was basically an analgesic.  Various people (mainly those with atheistic tendencies) were very irritated by the idea that the biological world seemed to be filled with objects resembling the product of design rather than chance.  Darwinism was like an aspirin that soothed such irritation, by assuring such people that all in biology was merely the result of chance.  There were some very questionable ingredients in that analgesic, such as a not-actually-truthful slogan of "natural selection" which involved a survival-of-the-fittest effect that did involve any real choice or selection, and an excess of far-fetched speculation, unrealistic generalization, and tall-tale talk. But when someone has irritation that needs to be soothed, he often doesn't care too much about what is in the pain reliever he is taking. 

As it slowly took root in the conformist social structure of the universities,  Darwinism started to grow into something much more than just an analgesic.  Within academia Darwinism started to grow into a kind of religion-in-all-but-name, something offering a new creation myth.  

Universities are the perfect soil for the growth of stealth religions.  Universities have impressive old stone buildings just like the impressive old stone buildings of the Catholic Church. And the hierarchical authority structure of universities resembles the hierarchical authority structure of the Catholic Church, with assistant professors and adjunct professors acting like nuns and deacons, full professors being like priests, assistant deans being like bishops and deans being like cardinals.  Best of all, each university has its own flock of docile listeners (its student body) that resembles the attending members of a church. And while churches ususally don't command their membership to attend church every week, universities do actually command their students to spend a certain number of hours per month listening to the lessons of professors. Darwinism did qualify as a religion under the definition of religion given by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who defined a religion as "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Darwinism lacked any deity, but some other religions such as Daoism, Confucianism, the original form of Buddhism and Scientology also had no deity. 

By about 1930 Darwinism had become an impressive stealth religion that had infiltrated academia, but it was not a very exciting creed.  Its gospel was basically this: "Mankind and all are other species are just accidents of blind natural forces, and let us note how wonderfully clever scientists were to have figured this out."  There was nothing very exciting about such a message. Darwinism in universities was very closely entangled for decades with an interesting program of eugenics that claimed to offer a "how to make the world better" agenda. However, such an agenda became rather radioactive once it was discovered how horribly the Nazis had used similar ideas. 

But things started to get more interesting when people started to ramp Darwinian ideas up to a galactic level.  The basic idea was: let's imagine blind Darwinian evolution occurring not just on Earth, but on planets all over the galaxy.  The real leader in such a leap of imagination was Hollywood.  There were three great leaps propelling us into a world of fantasy. 

• First there was the seminal 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. It told a fascinating story of interstellar astronauts in the 23rd century who used a faster-than-light starship to reach the distant planet Altair IV, a life-bearing revolving around another star.  The story involved a scientist (Dr. Mobius) who was studying a race that used to inhabit Altair IV, and reached god-like powers before mysteriously becoming extinct.  
• Then there was the 1965-1968 TV series Star Trek, which involved space travelers such as Kirk, McCoy and Spock very conveniently traveling around the galaxy in a starship that could travel at "warp speeds" much faster than the speed of light.  The galaxy depicted was incredibly convenient, for it seemed that almost always when visting a new planet,  Kirk, McCoy and Spock found the planet well-inhabited by life, with conditions so hospitable that these astronauts almost never even needed to wear a spacesuit or even put on a light jacket.  The Star Trek series spawned innumerable movie and TV spin-offs in the decades that followed. Another TV series running in the 1960's  (Lost in Space) depicted astronauts shuttling around from inhabited planet to inhabited planet with similar convenience. 
• Then there was the wildly popular 1977 movie Star Wars, the first in an almost endless series of sequels and prequels. Although set in another galaxy, the movie carried the "convenient interstellar travel" theme to a rather ridiculous extreme, by imagining instantaneous interstellar travel by means of wormhole travel involving "jumping through hyperspace." 

There was thus planted in the public mind an exciting vision rooted much more in fantasy than in fact: a vision of a galaxy conveniently filled with planets inhabited by intelligent beings,  with the laws of nature conveniently favoring very rapid travel between such planets, by means of "space warps" or "space-time wormholes." Very much of this vision was contrary to what scientists had actually learned. 

Artist's depiction of a space-time wormhole

For one thing, scientists had made no discoveries justifying any optimism that life would tend to naturally arise on other planets, and had made no discoveries justifying any optimism that intelligent life would tend to naturally arise on other planets. To the contrary, no experiments realistically simulating early earth conditions had produced life, and no such experiments had produced any of the building blocks of life (functional proteins).  In fact, no  experiments realistically simulating early earth conditions had produced any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids, nucleotides and ribose sugars).  Also, nothing had been discovered that would justify optimism that microscopic life would naturally make some leap to become multicellular life, or that multicellular life would become intelligent life. 

As for interstellar travel, the facts told a story totally different from what was depicted in the movies.  Physicists had discovered in the first half of the twentieth century that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit. Since stars are separated by distances such as five light years, this means it should be physically impossible for anyone to ever travel from one solar system to another solar system in less than about five years. 

During the 1960's and 1970's Darwinist scientists offered a rather different version of galactic Darwinism.  This far-less cinematic-friendly version was often realistic about the apparent impossibility of rapid interstellar travel. But it had the same ideas of a galaxy packed with intelligent life. Yes, such scientists told us, the extraterrestrials are out there, in droves, but practically the one way to communicate with them is not by sending spaceships but by using big radio telescope dishes to communicate by radio messages. 

One of the principal spokesmen for this less cinematic-friendly version of galactic Darwinism was the astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan preached that the galaxy was full of extraterrestrial civilizations. He would confidently cite estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy that varied between 1 million and 100 million, assuring us that that such numbers were the "best estimates" of experts such as himself.  The idea that such numbers were based on anything other than wild guesses all over the place was pure fiction, and throughout Sagan's career there was always the strongest scientific basis for suspecting that the number of other civilizations in the galaxy was zero, particularly if only natural factors were at play on other planets.  

Sagan assured us that the galaxy was teeming with super-advanced civilizations, all of which were far more advanced than humans. At about the 1:09 minute mark in the interview here,  Sagan claimed to understand the nature of humanity's status in the galaxy. He stated, “If you look at time scales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that can communicate.” Sagan's rationale for such a claim was that since some extraterrestrial civilization could have arisen at any time in the past billion years, it would almost certainly have arisen millions of years ago rather than just thousands of years ago.  So, he thought, the extraterrestrials must be far, far more advanced than us.  

Of course, any civilization millions of years more advanced than ours would presumably have technological powers that would make them god-like. So this notion of a galaxy filled with god-like races was an enthralling one. A believer in such a notion could look up at the night sky and say to himself, "The sky is full of gods."

Such an ideology was articulated by Stanley Kubrick, the director of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (about god-like extraterrestrials interacting mysteriously with humans). In a 1968 interview Kubrick said this: 

"When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans....these beings would be gods to the billions of less advanced races in the universe, just as man would appear a god to an ant that somehow comprehended man’s existence. They would possess the twin attributes of all deities—omniscience and omnipotence. These entities might be in telepathic communication throughout the cosmos and thus be aware of everything that occurs, tapping every intelligent mind as effortlessly as we switch on the radio; they might not be limited by the speed of light and their presence could penetrate to the farthest corners of the universe; they might possess complete mastery over matter and energy; and in their final evolutionary stage, they might develop into an integrated collective immortal consciousness. They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men’s minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation."

With the addition of such grandiose ideas, it became ever-more-apparent that Darwinism had evolved into a kind of stealth religion. Now this religion had its own powerful gods (the imagined super-advanced extraterrestrials), and various tales could be told of how the world might be transformed when humans interact with such super-powerful beings, tales rather like ancient tales of the Last Days or the millennium or the apocalypse. Also, tales could be told of how humans had interacted with such god-like beings in ancient times, a branch of storytelling that became the specialty of people like Erich von Daniken and the Ancient Aliens TV show. The latter type of tales often resembled the stories of ancient miracles told in churches. 

It's not much fun being lowly inferior Earthlings when the sky is all filled with god-like extraterrestrials, but astronomers such as Carl Sagan tried to make people think that we might soon be able to climb our way up to our own godhood.  He kept suggesting that extraterrestrial civilizations may have prepared what he called an "Encyclopedia Galactica" containing all of their knowledge, and they might send us this treasure trove of knowledge by radio transmission.  It was a new version of "pie in the sky." Many of his readers must have thought that mankind would soon climb its way up to godhood, once our radio transmitters picked up a copy of this "Encyclopedia Galactica."

Very strangely, Sagan mocked observations of UFOs, and did everything he could to discourage claims that Earth is being visited from other planets. This made no sense given his other claims. If it were true that the galaxy is filled with a million or more super-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then we should see signs of such civilizations all over the place, including periodic visits from spaceships to Earth.  A single extraterrestrial civilization would need no more than 10 million years to spread itself throughout the galaxy (which has a diameter of only about 100,000 light-years), particularly since colonized planets would eventually be able to  colonize other planets revolving around other stars, and given a million years we would expect colonies of colonies of colonies of colonies. 

So if there were really a million extraterrestrial civilizations that were typically many millions of years old,  by now the galaxy should be teeming with signs of their activity; and their spaceships should be all over the place. It made no sense to maintain the existence of a vast horde of very old extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, and also to mock the idea that spaceships from such civilizations have recently visited Earth.  Doing such a thing was as silly as maintaining that there will be a thousand nuclear bomb explosions in the cities of the United States, but mocking the idea that anyone will be hurt from such explosions. The same inconsistency was repeated by countless other astrobiologists between 1950 and 2020, who most inconsistently claimed that the galaxy was packed with very old civilizations but that none of them had visited Earth.  

How to explain such an inconsistency, which no independent reasoner ever be expected to reach? We can only explain it by remembering that today's professors are herd-following conformist creatures who are men of a hundred taboos.  An astrobiologist will senselessly believe that organisms more organized than anything humans have ever made can arise by blind accidental processes, because this silly belief has become a required dogma for today's scientists, an obligatory doctrine of faith that each professor must kneel to or risk condemnation for heresy.  But the same astrobiologist will assure us vigorously that he does not at all believe that any of the vast number of very old extraterrestrial civilizations he believes in is visiting our planet, because a belief in UFOs is one of the very many senseless belief taboos in academia, many of which are taboos against believing in the existence of things that have been very well-observed for centuries (such as clairvoyance and apparitions).  

The grandiose ideas of galactic Darwinism described above were never well-supported by observations, and were in very important ways incompatible with observations. The table below summarizes the differences between reality and the fanciful notions of galactic Darwinism.

Claims of galactic Darwinists	Reality
“The stuff of life is all over the place in outer space. The galaxy is teeming with the building blocks of life.”	The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of microscopic life are functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been detected in space.  The building blocks of the building blocks of life are the 20 amino acids used by living things, and the four nucleotides used by living things. None of those 24 things has  ever been found in outer space, with the exception of one or two of them (glycine and alanine), which have merely been detected in no more than the tiniest microscopic trace amounts.
“Experiments show that the building blocks of life would naturally arise.”	No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever produced either the building blocks of microscopic life (protein molecules) nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids or nucleotides). The Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to realistically simulate early Earth conditions.
“The galaxy is filled with planets.”	Correct, and the number of planets may be a few times greater than the number of stars in the galaxy (about 200 billion).
“Scientists have already discovered Earth-like planets revolving around other stars.”	No claim should ever be made that scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet until life has been found on another planet, which has not occurred.
“Many of the planets already discovered could support life as well as Earth does.”	In a recent news article we read, “None of the potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets known to astronomers today have the right conditions to sustain life as we know it on Earth, with a rich biosphere of plants, microbes and animals, a new study has found.”
“Life will arise whenever conditions are right on a planet.”	To the contrary, everything we have learned about the very great organization and complexity of even the simplest living things suggests that the natural origin of life should be impossible, and should be as unlikely as a thrown deck of cards accidentally forming into a house of cards consisting of 52 cards. The concept of abiogenesis (that life can naturally arise from non-life) is a concept with zero observational and experimental support.
“Once life gets started, it will evolve into large complex organisms such as mammals.”	There is no credible theory explaining how microscopic life could evolve into incredibly organized large organisms such as mammals. Darwinism fails to explain a jump from prokaryotic cells to vastly more organized eukaryotic cells. Darwinism fails to credibly explain the origin of the many millions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom (each its own very complex invention too unlikely to appear by any natural process), and also fails to credibly explain the origin of anatomical innovations (which cannot be explained by changes in DNA, since DNA does not specify anatomy).
“We should expect that on a large fraction of the planets with life, intelligent life has arisen."	Humans are completely lacking in any credible natural explanation for the arising of intelligence on our planet. Claims that the appearance of intelligent conscious beings can be explained by an increase in brain size are untenable.  None of the main characteristics of human minds can be credibly explained as being caused by brain activity.  Scientists have no understanding of how neurons could produce thought, understanding, consciousness or self-hood. Scientists have no credible explanation for such basic human mental phenomena as the instant formation of memories, the 50-year preservation of memories, and the instant recall of rarely remembered things learned long ago.  The low-level facts scientists have learned about the brain and synapses reveal them as things with very high instability, very rapid molecular turnover, very high levels of noise, very high signal slowing factors and signal transmission unreliability, factors which make the brain untenable as a source of human mentality.  Therefore we lack any sound basis for predicting how often intelligent life would appear on some planet on which life existed.
“Astrobiologists agree that the galaxy is filled with intelligent beings.”	Appeals to a majority of opinion in some small group of specialists are unpersuasive, because such groups are very prone to groupthink, and some unwarranted belief dogma may become an expected norm in some research community, an orthodoxy which it is heresy to defy.  If 100% of astrobiologists believed that life in the galaxy is common, this would no more prove such a thing than papal infallibility is proven by 100% of Catholic bishops believing in such a doctrine.  Moreover, the only way to reliably measure the opinions of some group is to do secret ballots, and people don't do secret ballots of scientists asking them about their beliefs on scientific topics.  So we don't actually know whether most astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life is common.
“Humans must be one of the most primitive of the intelligent species in the galaxy. Extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy are mostly vastly older than mankind.”	Civilizations vastly older than humanity would presumably have god-like technological powers. But we see no sign of such god-like powers at work in our galaxy. The galaxy looks as it would look if Earth was the only planet with a civilization. The predicted Dyson Spheres have not been found.
“It is the height of arrogance for us to believe that we are the the most advanced race in the galaxy when there are so many other planets.”	Many chances does not mean many successes, and if something is sufficiently improbable, it won't happen even if there are trillions or quadrillions of chances for it to happen. If the chance of intelligent life naturally arising on a planet is much less than 1 in a trillion (and there are many reasons for thinking that it is), then it is reasonable to conclude that there are probably no other intelligent races in our galaxy, unless some intelligent agency is acting to produce such races.  Such a conclusion is straightforward mathematical reasoning involving no arrogance at all.
“We will find proof of extraterrestrial civilizations once we start seriously looking for radio signals from them.”	Well-funded efforts to detect radio signals and optical signals from other planets have been going on for decades, and have not produced any evidence for extraterrestrials.
“Fast travel around the galaxy should be possible by craft using warp drives or space-time- wormholes.”	Warp drives and space-time wormholes are fantasy. It is a law of nature that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So traveling from one star to the nearest star should always take about five years or more, probably very much longer because of the difficulty of building any spaceship capable of reaching even half of the speed of light.
“We are the most primitive intelligent species in the galaxy.”	While it is possible that there are many other intelligent species in our galaxy (particularly if some intelligent causal agency is working to produce such species), as far as we know we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy.
“UFOs show that there are other extraterrestrials in our galaxy.”	We have no evidence that UFOs are from other planets in our galaxy, and there are various alternate possible explanations (some paranormal) for UFOs. If any UFO is from another planet, that does not prove that life can arise  on such a planet by Darwinian processes.