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Reasons To Believe Home PageOur deficit-conscious leaders have recently cut government spending on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). So the small team of diehard astronomy researchers has found a new source of funding: zealots committed to finding an "Encyclopedia Galactica," the book of answers to all humanity’s problems. (Obviously, they reject the book already provided for that purpose.) In late summer 1996, the team announced its first significant research result. Tuning in to 202 solar-type stars within a radius of 155 light years, listening for radio signals as strong as those routinely produced by large radar systems on Earth, they detected nothing, not even a single mysterious blip.1
This null result has weakened at least a few scientists’ faith that life arises by natural processes alone and evolves by the same processes into intelligent life. Others will only admit that it may not arise quite as easily as they had thought, or that it may exist at a different stage of development. Zoologist Ernest Mayr points out, for example, that only one of Earth’s 50 billion species has acquired technology. 2 No lack of evidence will discourage the SETI faithful, for their pursuit has more to do with spiritual fervor than with scientific rationalism. Those I have met say that finding an Encyclopedia Galactica is worth any amount of effort, time, and money that the human race could possibly expend. The only price they will not pay is the humility of heart necessary to pick up a Bible and submit themselves to its transgalactic, supra-cosmic, life-transforming Gospel
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