Willett's Wager

This is no metaphysical proposition. This is a straight forward cash bet. The stake:- One week's income. The bet IF and when ALIEN, extraterrestrial INTELLIGENT life makes contact with us, or vice versa, the said extraterrestrial intelligence will be a mixed community of atheists and theists or deists. They will NOT be in possession of knowledge or proof of either the definite existence or non-existence of a god or creative supernatural force. Some of the intelligent beings will exhibit FAITH without proof. That is the wager. It is based on my firm contention that memetic transmission of faith and religion is literally inevitable within any community of intelligent beings. I do not have any other predictions to make about the nature of alien civilization. They could be silicon based octopoids with IQs in the 2 and a half billion range but some of them will believe in the bogeyman.

I am certain that any intelligent species can only exist as a direct or indirect result of evolution. They must have either evolved or been made by entities that evolved. Given that basic premise I also think that it is inevitable that memetic evolution will have occurred. Ideas will have spread because communication is inevitable within an intelligent species. Ideas will spread because the vectors for those Ideas feel reasons to spread them. Religion is inevitable once a base level of communication skills and intelligence has been achieved. The memetic adaptations required to keep an idea going within a particular community will arise. If the community has an IQ of 80 then a simple religion will emerge with simple memetic hooks, simple rewards and simple defences against contrary ideas. If the community has an IQ of 180 then the brighter minds will be able to come up with better ideas, more fiendishly complicated religions with more cunning reasons to believe in them. Ideas like the afterlife, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, faith.

I see no reason to believe that brighter minds in a brighter community would not be free of religion. Their religions would be much more infectious and powerful, they will have developed better defences against logical arguments than are capable of thinking of. There is one little fly in the ointment of all this religion, it is all bullshit. In every community infected by religion would be intelligence capable of appreciating the power of religion and also capable of resisting it. The pendulum will swing between belief and doubt across the aeons but neither will be able to win in any community, at any given level of sophistication. That is my contention. And I'll put money on it.

I would like to add that regardless of the philosophical sleight-of-hand the aliens would use to justify their religion, the bottom line will be that they too will twist themselves into philosophical knots to avoid the need for objective proof.

Absolutely. Thinking further on the subject gave me the coldest feeling in my gut, imagine an alien race discovers intelligent life here, they have not discovered faster than light travel but some decide to come here. Why? There is only one possibility, they will send the equivalent of MISSIONARIES. Just imagine a super-intelligent alien Jesuit or Conquistador. Let's hope that instead they just want to eat us.

Hmm - as we on Earth have matured (and grown more experienced in meme warfare), the nature of such irrational memes has changed, from predominantly religious memes, to UFOs, telepathy, cold fusion, and so forth. Perhaps at increased levels of intelligence the memes which are most successful don't simply become more complex and sophisticated, but radically change in character. Way back in time, we didn't even believe in gods, but just had superstitions, without rationalisation. Just as religious memes suppressed superstitious memes, so later memes might be expected to suppress religious memes....

Good point. New memes are emerging. But they don't *replace* religion. The catholic church is still very strong after absorbing and deflecting every scientific advance since the iron age.

Newer stuff, new age bullshit, fills a need in many people who can't cope with reality and a rational Universe. Try selling a book called "Twenty great solved mysteries", people want mystery and the magical, and controversy and competing faiths not consensus building scientific inquiry. People will believe anything. And memeplexes that have survived the enquiries of all the scientific brains of twenty centuries are not just going to fade away to be replaced by beliefs in alien abductions and Feng Shui. Just name me one religion based on Christianity that has survived three generations and then died. I can't think of any. Cults and churches die young or are immortal.

Of course one of the greatest arguments for Christianity v Evolution is that according to evolution there should be billions of other worlds which have life, because there are endless possibilities for life. We are listening Hello hello Hello hello....if any life exists it has not in 16 billion light years. We send out radio and micro-waves so we would know even if anyone was within a billion years of contacting us ..nothing...nothing...nothing...you should listen to the NASA probes (dead boring) The latest findings say there is no extraterrestial life - so life on Earth is special - so presidents reinvent themselves and start talking about God.

Our signals can only be detected by sensitive tuned-in receivers within the suitable distance. Earth is emitting a "shell" of radio signals which have been modulated in a non-random way (laughably known as intelligence). These signals are travelling at the speed of light. To be detected there has to be an intelligent alien civilization within 100 light years of us who is also listening to those frequencies, and doing so with very sensitive equipment. I speculate that the earliest truly detectable signals were not emitted by man until high power VHF and UHF transmissions of television began in the mid twentieth century.

I think that life is inevitable. Complex life is common. Intelligent life is extremely rare, and it may well be only a brief interlude in the story of life. Through all our planet's four billion or so years as a life supporting planet there has been just fifty or so years of detectable signals from an intelligent civilization. The chances of us actually meeting or even noticing aliens is very slim. That is why I feel safe to wager money on what these aliens (don't call them creatures, they would not have been created, they will have evolved) actually think. I expect that they will be just as much infected with religious memes as we are.

Science cures ignorance, but it doesn't stop anybody believing in God. It never has, I strongly suspect that it never will and never could, ANYWHERE in the Universe. If you ever feel complacent about life just consider the possibility that as we sit here having our own lives, starting wars and watching Jerry Springer, there may be a batch of aliens in suspended animation in a space ship travelling at near light speed, headed our way. With one goal, to CONVERT YOU to their own peculiar idea of the only way to heaven. They know they are on a one way trip. They can never return. Religious zeal is the only motivation that could get an intelligent being to do something like that. Just think, they could have three arms, breath methane, carry guns and spout puerile dogma...

huh.. first of all, lets look at "religion". would an alien race that is NOT mamal and primate in nature have "religion" as we understand it? doubtful. if you inspect all forms of relions -panteism, polytheism, and monotheism you would notice they begin with blind nature forces and gradute to "big daddy" principle. A Big daddy is observed among primates ONLY. True, asians managed to go above it with monism but they were the onyl ones. Funny huh?...No, I dont think religion is "unversal" and unstoppable. What a thought! Read Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash and get re-educated

I do not predict that every alien will believe certain things. What I predict is that any alien civilization, if it exists, must be based on evolution and must be open to the spread of memes. An idea like religion does not need to be reinvented every time an alien reaches the age of majority, sentient beings do not work like that, they catch ideas from their culture. Religion only needs to be invented once. Just as biological replication does not have to happen anew constantly, which is just as well, the spontaneous assembly of a self replicating molecule is fantastically unlikely, but it seems that it has happened at least once.

Once it has happened evolution of biological replicators will begin. Similarly I believe that religion only has to be invented once, then it evolves. There is much more proof that memetic transmission of religion is inevitable than there is for the belief that biological replication is inevitable. Everywhere we find man we find religion. We have found multiple independent theologies, but only one biology, every piece of replicating biological tissue seems to have the same single ancestor. There are hundreds of examples to show that religion is universal, no negative examples. We cannot say that this proves the case but it does put the onus on those that doubt the proposition to come up with some reasonable explanations as to why it is wrong. I do not want it to be true, I am not wishing it. But I believe that it is true.

Memetics is replication science. Replication science is a branch of mathematics, it is not limited to a real universe. Arithmetic would work without space and time, so would replication science, it is a matter of logic. Once an idea begins to spread it will meet other ideas, it will either be subsumed or emerge stronger. My contention is that this process will be universal within any communicating community, whether or not they are primates, mammals, carbon based lifeforms or even whether they exist in a universe with any given number of dimensions. The universality is with the memes, not their vectors. Eventually a community of intelligent communicating beings will come up with some bullshit story that has got what it takes to survive in that particular memepool. The idea will be communicated because of the power of it's memetic hooks. The aliens will want to spread the ideas and they will spread. The ideas will meet hostile responses and the ideas will emerge with protective packages such as the faith meme, the religious toleration meme and the blasphemy meme.

Meme complexes will emerge that protect the central ideas and these complexes can then be hijacked by other memes to become their survival machines. Just as Islam and Mormonism borrowed the survival machines of Christianity, which had borrowed ideas and protective strategies of earlier religious memes and meme complexes. This holds true of religions outside the Asian tradition too, the central American religions of the Aztecs and Incas were not built on bedrock, they were built on foundations of previously successful religions. Certain ideas have travelled through time across hundreds of generations. For me this is almost self evident. Ideas travel once there is a reason to pass them on. My contention is that any community that has the intelligence to both communicate and speculate about the nature of reality will find itself thoroughly infected by virulent religious memes. The virulence of the memes will be determined by the *aggregate* intelligence of the community involved.

We are just as smart or dumb as our ancestors who first walked out of Africa. As individuals and as communities our average intelligence is no higher, but our aggregate intelligence is now much higher. In Newton's wonderful phrase we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Unfortunately we are standing on the shoulders of religious giants.

I do not believe that an alien community that is smart enough to make contact with us must be smart enough to have left religion behind. Religion will not want to be left behind. Religion will "want" to keep up. Just as the Roman Catholic church has taken on board heliocentrism, the true age of the Earth and the theory of evolution but still manages to cling on to the doctrine of the trinity and the immaculate conception. Catholics are not stupid, they are just infected by very powerful memes that will not allow themselves to be lost. I see absolutely no reason to assume that this process of absorbing and neutralizing science cannot continue indefinitely. Nobody gave up religion when the Wright brothers flew, why should anybody do the same when a functional starship is built?

Exobiology is the study of biology of aliens. I am interested in their beliefs, hence Exotheology

Do any of you memetically aware people have any ideas on what kind of ideas are inherently universal? What kind of ideas are likely to occur to any species with the intelligence to communicate? I have been thinking about it recently and I have graduated from a belief that religion is both universal and unstoppable to an even worse conclusion. I have been thinking what would motivate a sentient being to ride a spaceship that will take a journey of many years, with no possibility of return. I assume that the speed of light is a true barrier. Just because previous barriers have been broken doesn't give me the confidence to extrapolate this as an inevitable trend, eventually a barrier will be just that. So what would provide sufficient motivation to make such a trip? The answer is the most spine-chilling thought I have ever had, alien spaceships will be full of deep frozen, hand picked volunteers with one driving ambition; to convert our souls to their religion.

Sorry to launch such an idea. Anyway, comments would be most welcome.

Well until we meet any aliens, it will be tricky to determine what we have in common. Given that we are limited in this fashion there doesn't seem to be any way of determining that anything we know about communication would apply at all in other worlds.

The team that put together the records that went on the voyager satellites went on the hunch that mathematics would be universal enough, and tried to build a mathematically decodable message about us, our world, and how to build a record player to listen to the record, but it's anyone's guess whether it'll ever be found let alone decoded.

Please tell me why you think religion is universal. I understand why it's a somewhat natural consequence of the human condition ( of our biology ?? ) but I can't see why this should necessarily be applicable to other races.

The reply is simple. Communication is inevitable within an intelligent species, probably it is the prerequisite to develop intelligence in the first place, beyond the baboon, chimpanzee, pig or parrot level.

Once there is communication there is a memepool waiting for infection. Just as leaving a bottle of milk long enough, even in the refrigerator, you are bound to get infections with moulds or bacteria, any memepool will be bound to develop memes. Eventually some of those newly created memes will be religious. Remember, the biological analogy breaks down here, Pasteur proved that moulds would not grow in broth not exposed to airborne spores but memes *do* arise spontaneously, pure replicators arising from their nutrients; intelligent, communicating minds.

I am not saying that religion is particularly liable to emerge as a meme as opposed to other memes but that once religious memes have spontaneously arisen they will spread because they are inherently powerful memes. I am making a bit of a leap of faith (is that bad taste for a militant atheist? Who cares) in sticking my neck out and assuming that religion will spread in other, non-human memepools but I think that I am justified. Replication is very powerful. A powerful meme like a religion will get passed on, if it survives three generations it is likely to be immortal unless it is blasted out of the way by a more powerful and fully evolved memeplex. That is the lesson of history. I am not aware of any mature sect based on any well evolved religious memeplex, such as Christianity or Islam, dying after surviving three generations. Religions either die young, are immortal or are swallowed up by a more powerful and better evolved memeplex. I think this will prove to be the case wherever intelligence arises.

Our only chance of getting rid of religion is to get invaded by atheist aliens who are significantly more intelligent than ourselves, but who would have rid those aliens of their destructive religious memes? Perhaps this is a perpetual struggle across all intelligent communities.

Anybody fancy setting up an Intergalactic task force of religious meme suppressers? I'm too old and fat for the spandex jump-suits but I think it would be terrific. Captain Memo and the Intergalactic Meme Suppressers. Watch out for that Martian monk, I think he's going to pull an ontological argument, POW , ZAP.... Maybe not.

I suspect that along with life and evolution something else is likely to be universal, something that is likely to generate religious memes, the Victorians called it The Great Certainty, DEATH. When an intelligent animal (I never use the word creature when I can help it, that word applies a creator) faces death and the unfairness of it all it must strike them deeply. Religious mumbo-jumbo is sure to arise. Neanderthal burials show evidence of flowers being scattered on bodies and I am unaware of any human society that treats a human corpse as just another bit of organic matter to dispose of. Alien intelligences may well have developed beyond our level but they must have passed through our level of sophistication, the level at which religions will be born. I have yet to see any evidence of any well developed religious memeplex ever dying. Religions are short lived and fade away, get superseded by more powerful memeplexes or they last as long as the society that gave rise to them.

A species without death, inequality, unfairness? I know this whole alien speculation is like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but I cannot imagine any species or environmental condition that would prevent some intelligent sentient being asking the fundamental and unanswerable questions. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? And once questions like that are asked somebody will come up with some answers, religious memes will be born. Undoubtedly the answers will be bullshit, undoubtedly they will spread. Memes spread because we are good for them, not because they are good for us.

I was a young and bright eyed atheist once. But time and experience has taught me that truth will not win an argument just because it is true. Science beats religion hands down but religion does not play by those rules. The Pope believes in evolution and the Big Bang but he also believes in the trinity and transubstantiation, whatever that may be. Religion plays by its own rules. It is a case of the irresistible force of science meeting the immovable object of religion. But religion yields and changes its shape. There are people who can calculate the effect of smashing positrons into neutrinos at 5000 kilovolts or whatever but who still believe in an elephant headed god.

My contention is that somewhere out there may be other intelligent communities who make Steven Hawking look like the intellectual equivalent of a baboon but who still believe in groundless concepts like fate and the afterlife. And so far I have yet to come across an argument that will put my mind at ease. I don't want to face a future of a universe eternally infected by religious memes. I would love somebody to convince me that my previous faith in the power of reason was justified. Will science become a religion? Probably, at least that way it has a chance to survive in the memepool. I'm off to read the rest of Saint Sue's book.

Do aliens believe in us?

Posting to alt.alien and others of that ilk.

What do aliens believe in? I suspect that they believe in many things that are totally unfounded. After all, we do. People believe in fate, destiny, the afterlife, alien visitors, astrology, the human soul, gods and devils. Why should we assume that we are alone in being capable of deluding each other?

You might think that aliens with greater technology than us will have greater science, and that will oust their religions. Exactly what happened here, NOT!

How many people gave up religion when the Earth was found to move around the Sun, contrary to the bible? How many gave up religion when the age of the Earth was shown to be millions of times more than the bible account? How many people gave up religion when man stepped on the Moon? So, this process of giving up religion, which is not happening, will develop an unstoppable momentum when a species becomes space-faring? Hardly likely.

This idea leads me to the scariest idea I have ever had. When alien societies do develop space faring ability who will want to travel and why? Who would want to get in a spacecraft and travel for so long that they could never expect to return to their previous lives? To me the horrendous conclusion is simple:- MISSIONARIES

You would have enjoyed what Jill Tarter had to say about this subject--Extra-terrestrial technology, what would they message us? Would it be religious? Would they be religious? at a recent conference of Council for Secular Humanism.

"I would speculate that if and when we ever get a message, it's going to be a missionary appeal to try and convert us all. [audience laughter] And on the other hand, if we get a message and it's secular in nature, I think that really does say there's no organized religion--that they've outgrown it."

Dr. Jill Tarter, Project Phoenix, SETI

Thanks for this. I thought I was the only person to have seen the missionary threat. So it is not new, but it was original in the sense that I thought it out from basic principles of memetics, the evolutionary algorithm applied to ideas. I hope that Dr Tarter is right about her optimism, I hope that they will have "outgrown it" but I fear they will not. There are millions of more intelligent and better educated people than myself who are deluding themselves systematically with ideas of God, faith, fate and destiny. And they have been doing it for centuries.

No one is suggesting we give up religion . . .

Aren't they? I certainly am! I would love us to free ourselves of religion. I am just deeply pessimistic about the possibility of achieving it it.

However, religion must adapt itself to the scientific breakthroughs and advancements of the day. I suggest we merely need to dispense with the Organized Religions whose restrictive sexual morals (sex is dirty, masturbation causes guilt, abortion is murder) have done nothing but cause unfulfillment, blue balls, frigidity and frustration. No one is suggesting that crimes, which are acts that harm another, be sanctioned. Do aliens believe in us? I suppose that depends on which aliens you are speaking of. Earthly humans with their very limited breadth of vision, erroneously assume that ALL aliens are the same, that they all consist of tall or short spindly and grotesque creatures with grey skin whose favorite activity is to abduct humans and mutilate cattle . . . How about the "good" aliens? The ones that you consider to be "Gods" but are really only highly technologically and spiritually advanced human beings from another planet that love us as their children? Yes, those ones . . . our loving parents, the Elohim. Do they believe in us? They must . . . they created us, they sent us messengers and prophets . . .

Oh, aliens created us. So that explains it all. That explains how complex life arose out of...hang on a minute...who created them? Prophets sent by aliens. Really. I prefer a much simpler explanation, prophets are either loonies or liars. That also explains why they constantly contradict each other. The “Do aliens believe in us?” line was just a little trick to get people to read my posting, which was just a little trick to get people to visit my website, to boost the counter rating and make out that lots of people agree with me. Which is just a way for me to gain a little satisfaction out of a life without a purpose.

Life is, because it can.

I would not place a penny against you. I think much the same way as you do. That is, all creatures evolve by evolution of some kind. To be intelligent there must be memetic evolution of some kind. This will inevitably produce selfplexes that promote the idea of a continuous self, and from there religious memes that promise an afterlife. I would expect any intelligent life form, of whatever construction, to show features of this kind - but I could just be lacking in imagination. Maybe there are ways of overcoming such memes that we have not found but other species might? So I won't make any bets, just say I think you are probably right. But in any case I do not expect the imminent arrival of such aliens. I fear that carrying memes is a dangerous business and many intelligent species may have ended up carrying memes that wiped them all out before they could develp the technology to leave their planets or to send out virtual creatures to other regions of space. We may yet go that way.

Sue Blackmore Department of Psychology University of the West of England