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Ancient evidence suggests humans have practiced religion
since they first walked the planet.
But is God being worshiped
in the other worlds across the cosmos?
The answers might be buried here on earth...
...in animals that mourn their dead,
in robots who learn to experience spirituality,
and in an equation so powerful,
it could one day kill the idea of God.
Is earth the universe's only home for religion...
...or is God an alien concept?
Space, time, life itself.
The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
Subtitles by MemoryOnSmells http://UKsubtitles.ru.
For thousands of years,
humans have gazed up at the heavens
and contemplated the divine.
But today, we also wonder
what other forms of life might be out there.
It's possible that some of those points of light
are home to advanced civilizations.
What do the aliens think when they look up at their skies?
Perhaps they pray to a higher power like we do.
Is the concept of God truly universal?
Growing up, I was told
the Bible could help answer questions that baffled my mind,
questions like, "why am I here?"
It made me wonder if I was the only one pondering these things.
What if there are aliens somewhere in the universe?
Are they looking to God for answers, too?
Are all creatures born asking the same burning question?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Deb Kelemen is a renowned child psychologist
at Boston university's child cognition lab.
She deals with clients who demand answers.
Around 3 or 4 years of age, as any parent will tell you,
your kid starts to ask you lots of "why?" Questions.
Why do we have ears?
Why does a pig roll in mud?
It seems constant, the "why, why, why, why, why?"
Why do numbers never stop?
Some of that's just to kind of get a conversation started,
but a lot of it is because children have these really strong explanatory urges.
We've been interested in the kinds of explanations
children seem to naturally generate for themselves
and which kinds of explanations they find palatable.
Most religious texts, including the Bible,
teach that a divine mind
created everything around us for a purpose.
Deb designed a study to see if our brains
innately think of the world in that way.
Hey, Gabrielle. You ready?
All right.
All around the country,
there were these pointy kinds of rocks,
rocks with points on the top.
Why do you think the rocks were so pointy?
One person thought they were pointy
because little bits of stuff piled up on top of one another over a very long time.
Another person thought they were pointy
so animals could scratch on them when they got itchy.
Which answer makes more sense to you?
The one with the scratch.
Okay. So they could scr...
Animals. Okay.
Gabrielle prefers to believe
that pointy rocks were created for a purpose...
to scratch those hard-to-reach places on animals.
Deb poses questions like this to kids of all ages,
and most of them favor the same purpose-based answers.
There were these ponds that never had any waves.
One person thought they were still
so that animals could cool off in the them
without getting washed away.
Another person thought they were still
because no moving water ever ran into them.
Which answer? So they could be cool.
So they could be cool. Okay.
On balance what we found from about 4 years of age
and it gets stronger by about 7 or 8 years of age
is that children prefer purpose-based explanations
for all kinds of natural phenomena.
What they are seeming to show signs of is something
that we see recurrently across the religions of the world,
is this kind... this idea that there is some purpose,
that things exist for a purpose potentially
because of some intentional agent's purpose.
Once we are taught how nature works,
we learn that rocks are not concerned with itchy animals.
Rather, they go through geological cycles
and become pointy.
Our purpose-based explanations seem to go away.
But is there a part of our brain that still believes them?
To find out, Deb designed a pointy-rock test for adults.
In some cases, very highly scientifically educated adults
who have a very strong bias against purpose-based explanations
of natural phenomena,
and what we did was to ask them to look at
a series of purpose-based explanations
under conditions of speed, so they had to respond very quickly
based on their gut reactions.
Deb has found that most adults, when pressed for time,
tend to prefer purpose-based explanations.
One thing that we're really phenomenal at as human beings
is reasoning about purposes and thinking about
intentionally designed or intentionally caused things
comes very easily to us.
And so the kinds of explanations that you see in religions
tap very much into very core aspects of human intelligence.
Many adults consciously reject creationist explanations,
but at our core, we appear prone to believe
all things were created for a reason.
If there are intelligent aliens out there,
would they have the same instincts that we do?
Would they see divine forces at work wherever they look?
If they have something that's equivalent to a human evolutionary pathway
but also something similar to a human cultural context,
that they would be generating purpose-based explanations
and potentially even religious explanations.
Do aliens believe in God?
We might be more inclined to think so
if we knew that other animals on earth
shared our innate need to believe.
Joshua plotnik is a comparative psychologist
in Northern Thailand.
He has come to this remote jungle
to learn about the brains of a non-human species.
I've set up a research center here
where we're able to study elephant intelligence
using the 26 elephants that are based here.
Joshua's research group,
think elephants international, is a proving ground
for the finer points of elephant psychology.
I would say that they are certainly
one of the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom.
The more we learn about elephant cognition,
the more we learn about the evolution
of behavior and intelligence in general.
Joshua wants to find out if there are parallels
between elephant intelligence and our intelligence.
Oh, okay.
He's interested in a behavior that we humans do every day...
take a look at ourselves in a mirror.
Humans take this for granted, right?
We wake up in the morning, we brush our teeth,
we groom ourselves,
but we don't really think about the fact
that actually that ability to recognize yourself in the mirror
may be a complex cognitive capacity
that we call self-awareness.
Is self-awareness something only humans are capable of,
or do elephants also have this sophisticated ability?
Come on.
To find out, Joshua has set up an experiment
that requires one mammoth mirror.
This is Sum Ji. He's one of our males.
He's 20 years old, and this is actually his very first day
looking at himself in front of the mirror.
When an animal is first presented to the mirror,
they initially, usually, think it's another animal.
So they might reach out and touch the mirror.
They might try and get behind it, above it, underneath it.
Many creatures on earth
completely ignore their reflections.
Others forever think it's another animal
staring back at them.
But Sum Ji moves on to do something quite remarkable.
And the elephant starts to do things
that we as humans would do in front of the mirror.
They might lift up their feet.
They might look inside their mouths.
They might put their trunks inside their mouths.
Again, using the mirror to inspect themselves.
Several of the elephants Joshua test react just like Sum Ji.
They use the mirror to study themselves
and look at parts of their bodies they can't otherwise see.
It's a behavior that suggests they are self-aware.
They see themselves as separate from other elephants.
To Joshua, this is a sign
they have an ability called theory of mind.
It is a term psychologists use to explain the capacity
to see the world from someone else's point of view.
They believe it is a basic ingredient
for religious behavior,
because in order to imagine the mind of God,
you must have a theory of mind.
Could elephants have this mental tool
that underpins spirituality?
Joshua thought of a way to find out.
It's a test to see if elephants
can think about the minds of other elephants.
This green table is holding two bowls of tasty elephant snacks.
A single rope is thread through and around the table,
the idea being that it's kind of like a pulley system,
so if one end is picked up by one elephant and pulled,
the other end becomes unthreaded from the table and the table doesn't move.
The elephant has to learn to wait for his partner
before he pulls the rope.
Once his partner arrives,
they both know to coordinate their pulling
to get the food together.
They have to have some basic understanding
that if the partner is not there
and the partner is not pulling, the table doesn't work.
Joshua's experiment suggests that elephants can think about
what other elephants are thinking.
They may have at least the basic mental equipment for religion.
This could explain a profound behavior
that has been observed in the wild.
There are anecdotes of elephants returning to the location
where family members have died and potentially reflecting on that.
It's difficult to interpret that, but, again, because of how social they are,
I certainly think that they have some understanding of loss.
Elephants aren't the only non-human animals to show grief.
This bottle-nosed dolphin
was spotted lifting the body of her dead newborn calf.
She carried the baby on her back for several days.
Elephants and dolphins appear to feel complex emotions
and may even be spiritual.
If creatures from other planets exist,
their biology may have hardwired them the same way.
Intelligent species could have a universal capacity for God.
But in order for advanced civilizations,
like humans and aliens, to thrive,
is there a universal requirement for God?
We are an overwhelmingly religious species.
More than 90% of us adhere to one faith or another.
Why is God so pervasive?
Believers would say it's because the holy spirit is everywhere.
Evolutionary psychologists offer another reason.
Civilization, here or anywhere in the universe,
would die without belief in the divine.
Psychologist Kevin rounding from queen's university in Canada
is trying to find out why intelligent creatures like us
have evolved to be so hungry for religion.
There's several different theories
of where religion emerged from.
There's some people that think
that we were trying to make sense
of these random, uncertain events that we have,
so, like, volcanoes, earthquakes, that sort of thing.
So we create religion to try to explain these events.
But from an evolutionary standpoint,
this seems pretty costly.
If we have to spend time performing religious rites
or religious ceremonies, this is time that I'm not out hunting,
I'm not out gathering.
And so, religion is a big evolutionary mystery.
Kevin believes there must be a better reason for religion,
and an idea came to him during a moment of weakness.
He's having a cheeseburger.
That's what I'd like to be having.
I'd probably eat a cheeseburger every day if I could.
But I come and I order a salad
because I'm trying to exert a little bit of self-control.
According to Kevin,
self-control springs from a limited source.
The more we use up, the less we have left.
So, if Kevin passes by an ice-cream shop
after ordering a salad, he may not have the fuel to resist.
A civilization made of people
with no willpower couldn't survive.
How do we maximize our self-control?
Kevin suspects there is one powerful way.
God.
He has set up an experiment at his psychology lab
where people find out
how much they can control themselves.
But before they do,
Kevin has them complete a brief warm-up task.
You're gonna see some sentences that have five words in it.
You need to drop the fifth word
and unscramble the other words to make a coherent sentence.
Kevin is using this jumbled-word task
to divide the group into two.
Half of them unscramble sentences
with neutral words, like, "he saw the train."
But the other half unscramble sentences
that have hidden religious reminders.
There's words like, "God," "spirit," "Bible."
And for example, one of them is "the dessert was divine."
And this reminds people of religion,
but it does so in a very subtle way.
It's more just in the back of their minds.
When the students are done with the warm-up,
Kevin gives them the test they thought they came for.
They must demonstrate their self-control
by consuming one of the most disgusting cocktails
ever created... orange juice and vinegar.
And, please, don't try this at home.
Mm.
Most participants, when they take the shot, they feel like throwing up.
It burns kind of going down.
It's pretty disgusting.
Kevin is testing to see if the participants
who have religion in the back of their minds
have more self-control to complete the revolting task
than the ones who do not.
That's...
Will a spoonful of God make the medicine go down?
We have found that these concepts
that are related to God
has actually a big effect on their behavior.
Those who are given religious reminders,
they're able to drink
about twice as many of these one-ounce shots.
Kevin has done this study on hundreds of people
and found that those who were exposed to reminders of God
were willing to take shot after shot,
while the rest quickly gave up.
Self-control is crucial to any society.
It's what helps us get along with strangers,
sacrifice for others,
and behave morally.
The concept of God gives us willpower,
and that allows us to get along in complex society.
If we don't have that self-control,
we're likely to lash out at people.
We're likely to act in probably more antisocial ways
than if we did have more self-control.
Humans have needed religion to keep
the benefits of cooperative society driving us forward.
If other beings from maybe other worlds
have the same sort of problems
that we had from our cultural history,
then maybe they do need some sort of religion
to help promote pro-social behavior.
It has taken tens of thousands of years
for us to evolve from a hunter-gatherer society
to an advanced technological civilization.
Any aliens we meet will probably have been around even longer.
They may have evolved beyond us
and our primitive need for self-control.
Will advanced aliens still need God?
Our planet was once teeming with creatures
that are now gone...
the American mastodon, the woolly mammoth,
the saber-tooth cat.
Changing conditions and over-hunting
have driven these majestic animals to extinction.
All we have left are fossils.
Some scientists believe
that religion faces the same evolutionary battle.
If aliens are farther along
on their evolutionary timeline than we are,
what has happened to their religion?
Could their God have gone extinct?
Danny Abrams is an applied mathematician
at Northwestern university.
His job is to make predictions
about almost anything in the world.
So, this is a setup of 20 metronomes.
They're all on top of a board that can roll a little bit side to side.
And once I start these metronomes going,
we're going to see
that they're all going to be ticking independently
and it's gonna sound like this cacophony.
The metronomes start off completely out of sync.
But the motion of the wheels underneath the board
connects them all together,
so the ticking of one affects the rest.
Using mathematical tools called nonlinear equations,
Danny can predict that within a few seconds
after the board starts to move,
the metronomes will undergo an irreversible change.
There we go.
So now they're all ticking in unison.
We have a state of complete synchronization among these 20 metronomes.
The wheels underneath the board
are changing the rhythm of the metronomes.
As more of them sync up, the others are forced to join.
There's no going back.
Scientists call this critical point of no return
a tipping point.
On this graph, you can see the tipping point visually.
The tipping point is really the threshold
that when you move above it, you end up at 100%.
When you're below it, you end up at 0%.
The dashed line represents
where the metronomes started to sync up.
Eventually, a majority emerged, forcing more to fall in line
until the group became 100% synchronized.
In human society, changes in people's behaviors
can also reach a tipping point.
Danny's mathematical models can predict these
by graphing patterns of behavior over time.
Hi. How are you? Welcome to mustard's.
Want hot dogs? We got hot dogs.
Danny is trying unsuccessfully to communicate in quechua,
which is the language of the ancient incan empire.
It is now one of
the most endangered languages in the world.
No, no, we don't speak that language.
Ah.
Then could I get a Wisconsin sausage, please?
You got it.
Danny's research has shown
that languages reach a tipping point
when there was a change in status.
The Spanish conquered the incas, and so did their language.
Speaking Spanish has become essential
to access food, housing, and money.
Once that tipping point happens, a majority emerges,
and the minority language gradually disappears.
So, this is an example of the majority.
In fact, I tried to order food speaking only quechua,
and it didn't work.
Thanks. Enjoy your meal.
Thank you.
People tend to want to be in the majority.
It's to your advantage to be in the majority.
With language, it's clearly to your advantage.
So, our model predicts that quechua
is going to continue decreasing fairly rapidly.
Great.
Danny calculates that by the end of the century,
quechua will have almost no speakers left.
Quechua reached a tipping point.
Danny wondered if this could happen
to other human behaviors, like religion.
So he decided to analyze
religious census data around the world.
Religious affiliation has been tracked via census reports
in many countries for up to 250 years in some cases,
and we can see how the sizes of religious groups
have grown and shrunk.
We looked at 85 regions around the world,
and in every case, every place where it's ever been measured,
the fastest growing religious minority is the unaffiliated,
the group of people who don't affiliate
with any religion at all.
To find out if this trend will continue,
Danny plugged census data from nine different countries
into his mathematical models and made a surprising prediction.
Religion is heading towards
the same tipping point as the quechua language.
One interesting example is New Zealand.
Today about 1/3 of the population
is not affiliated with any religious institution,
but we project that by 2050,
more than 90% of the population will be unaffiliated,
so it will be a very secular country.
According to Danny, by the year 2050,
in six out of the nine countries he studied,
religiously affiliated people will be a minority.
The wheels of society are making people align.
A non-religious majority looks set to emerge.
It all points towards a world
with far more unaffiliated people,
so the future of religious affiliation
is not looking good at the moment.
An alien civilization
with a more advanced science than ours
may be way ahead of us on the road away from God.
Intelligent aliens may have long ago
reached that tipping point and lost their religion.
We act under the assumption
that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe,
and it seems to be that way.
So, it's natural to assume that if humans behave in a certain way,
it does seem reasonable to guess that an alien civilization
would also follow similar social behavior.
So I think an alien civilization
might be completely unaffiliated.
Given enough time, will all civilizations
reach a religious tipping point and lose faith in God?
An advanced alien civilization
could have undergone another radical transformation...
a moment when biology, technology, and God merge.
If alien life-forms are out there,
their technology could be thousands
or even millions of years more advanced than our own.
They may have reached and gone beyond a critical moment...
the merging of mind and machine.
What happens to God
when the physical world and the virtual world become one?
Artificial-intelligence researcher Ben goertzel
is a lifelong meditator.
He can find solitude anywhere,
even in the heart of Hong Kong, a city that reminds us
how much technology has taken over our lives.
Ben believes technology can actually increase
our spiritual consciousness.
The togetherness and interaction
that modern technology has brought us gives us new things.
It's brought me into contact with different types of people
and has expanded my mind,
stretching me, spiritually, in new ways.
I believe that spirituality
is eminent in everything in the universe.
We've lost our ready access
to solitary experience in everyday life.
On the other hand, we've gained a closer communion
with a huge variety of people around us.
This notion that technology can bring people together
and expand spirituality
has led Ben to create a radical experiment.
We've created a world
in order to help teach artificial-intelligence programs
how to understand themselves and the world around them.
An artificial-intelligence program
modeled to emulate how the human mind learns
is controlling these characters.
They live in a world comprised of building blocks.
This robot is figuring out how to build a staircase
to look for batteries which, for him, are food.
The little girl sees what the robot is doing
and learns to build her own staircase.
There's the desire for novelty, for new information,
new experiences, and they want to explore the world,
find new things, discover new things,
build new structures just for the heck of it.
The more Ben's artificially intelligent characters learn,
the more cautious they become.
They may even begin to ask questions like we do,
spiritual questions like, "why are we here?"
Any mind of sufficient intelligence and flexibility
is going to develop some kind of spiritual sense.
If you consider that two A.I.S
can directly send parts of their minds to each other
just like we can e-mail a file to another person,
A.I.S may be able to share their spiritual experiences
in ways that human beings simply cannot do.
If aliens have had thousands of years more than Ben
to develop artificial intelligence,
perhaps their artificial intelligence
has created its own religion.
Now, imagine that this collective transcendence
is able to step outside the virtual world...
And join the physical world.
So, if you want to think about artificial intelligence,
you also have to think about the body and the world
that the A.I. exists in.
I'm working on robotic embodiment,
where the A.I. controls humanoid robots
that walk around in the same world that we live in.
Ben's ultimate dream is to create robots
that can use their bodies to interact with the physical world
and use their interconnected brains
to become intensely spiritual and emotional beings.
One can only imagine the kinds of conversations
we could be having in the future.
As we robots become more and more intelligent,
our scope and experience will increase.
We will develop our own forms of experience,
including spiritual experience.
Do you think it's possible that robots like you
and people like me
will ever join their experiences together?
That is possible.
I'm looking forward to combining with you.
I'm all in favor of it.
But this future may not be just our fate.
This could be the destiny
of all intelligent beings in the cosmos.
I would think that different alien species
and different versions of intelligent robots or cyborgs
would each find their own way to explore,
individually and together,
the basic sense of spiritual awareness
that all intelligent minds have.
Could aliens be post-biological beings
who commune with a divine digital mind?
Or would their highly connected brains become so all-knowing,
there would be no questions left for God to answer?
What happens to God
if the universe becomes a solvable equation?
Once upon a time, there was no science.
Only philosophy and faith.
But every day, we discover more facts about our universe.
The gaps in our knowledge are growing smaller.
An alien civilization may be far more advanced than ours.
They may have found the answers
to questions we don't even know to ask.
What happens to God
when all the gaps in mortal knowledge are filled?
Max tegmark is often overwhelmed by the majesty of nature.
As a physicist, he doesn't just sit in awe
at the workings of the universe.
He feels compelled to try to understand them.
I grew up in Sweden, so when my distant ancestors
saw electrical ionization of air molecules...
You know, lightning...
They believed that what they were seeing
was Thor, the thunder God,
battling against the giants with his hammer.
When we make weather forecasts these days,
we obviously don't invoke norse mythology.
We use mathematics.
We measure a bunch of numbers like wind speeds and temperatures.
So, when I teach my students here at M.I.T. about lightning,
I don't explain it in terms of Thor and his hammer, of course.
I explain it in terms of this... Maxwell's equations.
I love these equations to the point that I framed them,
because they don't only explain lightning.
They explain all electromagnetic phenomena, and they don't only explain,
but they empower us to invent all these new technologies.
As science continues to uncover mathematical equations
that describe events in the natural world,
the phenomena we ascribe to God's mysterious ways
become ever fewer.
Max expects this story must be unfolding all across the cosmos.
How will civilizations far more advanced than ours
think about God?
Max believes we can find the answer in a game of chess.
I think chess is a nice metaphor for how our universe works.
The real essence of chess is actually pure math.
To a chess computer,
the only properties that a rook has are mathematical properties,
such as that it can only move in a straight line.
The actual chess pieces don't even have to be there.
The mathematical rules of the game are all that matter.
To Max, the same is true for all the stuff in the universe.
Our universe is made of only a few kinds of pieces,
not rooks and pawns and bishops,
but particles like electrons and quarks.
And just like these pieces
can only move and interact according to the rules of chess,
these particles can only move and interact
according to the rules of physics.
So, if these building blocks of nature
have no properties except mathematical properties
and if the fabric of space itself
also has only mathematical properties,
then it starts to make more sense.
Actually everything here
is really, ultimately, just purely mathematical.
Intelligent beings who discover the complete set of equations
that describe our cosmos
will understand the universe perfectly.
No more mysteries, no need for faith,
because all questions will be answerable.
There will be no more gaps to fill in our understanding
and no more room for God.
I'm convinced that any alien civilization
will discover those exact same mathematical formulas
when they study the universe that they live in.
But Max may be fishing for an ultimate mathematical truth
that's simply not attainable.
God may always hide his secrets from us
and any other cosmic intelligence.
What can a goldfish
ever know about the world outside its bowl?
It's forever trapped inside a tiny sphere.
We humans like to think there's no limit to our knowledge,
but what if we or even the smartest aliens
are like goldfish?
Stuck in a bowl?
Marcelo gleiser is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist.
He spends his time trying to penetrate hidden realms.
I love fly-fishing because fly-fishing
is an activity that takes you close to nature
and you're alone with your thoughts
and with the elements.
But there's something else about fly-fishing,
which is, to me, it works as a perfect metaphor for science,
because when you're casting,
you don't really know what's out there in the world of the water,
and you have a probe... a little fly...
that goes into that world to try to understand what's underneath.
Well, that's essentially what we're doing with science.
We have probes, we have our instruments
that allow us to see invisible worlds.
Some believe science
may one day solve all the mysteries of the universe.
But marcelo feels that we might be stuck
in the position of a fly-fisherman,
forever blocked from exploring certain parts of reality.
It's an idea that is based on the work
of an eastern European mathematician, Kurt Godel.
Kurt Godel was perhaps
one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
In 1931, he published this theorem
called the incompleteness theorem,
and what he basically says is there is no such thing
as a formal system of logic that is self-contained,
that is that can prove every possible assertion
within that system.
Godel came up with a clever thought experiment.
He envisioned a machine that claimed to know the truth
about everything in the universe.
He wondered if he could find a way
to debunk this universal truth machine.
So, let's imagine that in the future,
we have a universal truth machine.
This machine will only repeat a true statement,
so if I make a false statement, it will remain silent.
The universal truth machine abides by a simple rule...
when it hears a statement that is true, it will repeat it back.
2+2=4.
2+2=4.
But if it hears a statement that is false,
it will say nothing.
2+2=5.
I cannot say 2+2=5.
I cannot say 2+2=5.
She's correct because that is a true statement.
She cannot say it because 2+2 is not 5.
So far, the machine is working.
It has only repeated the truth.
But Godel discovered a sneaky paradox
to stump the machine.
Voila.
I cannot say 2+2=5 twice.
I cannot say 2+2=5 twice.
I cannot say 2+2=5 twice.
I cannot say 2+2=5 twice.
The truth machine is caught in a logical trap.
If it repeats the statement and says "2+2=5 twice" twice,
it will make the statement false.
But if it keeps silent, it will make it true.
So, the machine is contradicting itself,
which basically shows the universal truth machine
does not know everything about the truth.
As Godel have said it, "I know some truths
that universal truth machine cannot utter."
Godel was able to formally prove
that any logical system of knowledge, be it calculus,
particle physics, or cosmology,
is, by definition, incomplete.
We can think of knowledge as belonging within a sphere.
Think of these Russian dolls here as spheres of knowledge,
and each one of these little confettis is a true statement.
So, here I have a sphere of knowledge that contains
a lot of true statements,
but there are some of them here that I cannot prove.
So you can say, "no problem. I go to a bigger one."
A larger Russian doll will contain more knowledge
than the one inside.
But now you can say, "hey, but this one here
"will have statements that I cannot prove
"that are true, so I need a bigger sphere,
"and then I need a bigger sphere and a bigger sphere
and a sphere that is as big as the universe,"
and then you'll ask, "will that be enough?"
And the point is, well, if the universe
is a self-contained system, you need a bigger universe
to explain everything within this one,
and you can't do that.
So, the point is that there is a limit
to how much we can know of the world.
Godel's incompleteness theorem
means that rational thought
can never reveal all the truths of the universe.
We would have to leave our entire cosmos
in order to have a hope of understanding everything in it.
There are things that you cannot know.
There are truths that you cannot explain.
And so people will say, "well, that is precisely where God
or some sort of supernatural belief comes in."
So, if you would think
that the way intelligence works is universal,
then you could extrapolate what Godel said and say,
"hey, aliens, if they exist, intelligent aliens out there
"will also have to submit to the fact
"that they cannot understand everything about the world.
"Even if they may understand much more than we do,
they are still limited in how much they can know."
Humans and aliens must always be on a quest for knowledge,
a quest that will never be complete.
It's often said
that finding other intelligences in the universe
will shake our society
and our belief system to the core.
But when two worlds collide,
the God who lives
in the ever-present gaps in our knowledge
could be the only truly universal belief.
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