Congressional UFO Hearings!

I suppose that in a week where Amber Heard returns to the witness stand and the number of fake accounts on Twitter could be as high as 20%, there should be nothing unusual about congressional hearings on UFOs. But I was doing a web search on "UFO religion" and came up with an interesting piece on VOX -- interesting in how much it gets wrong:

It’s a great time to believe in aliens.

. . . According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think.

More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident.

. . . On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.

According to Wikipedia, Diana Walsh Pasulka is a writer and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. But in the interview at the link above, her knowledge of religion is pretty one-dimensional:

Sean Illing

You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?

Diana Pasulka

One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.

Which would presumably put Aquinas on the same level as Erich von Däniken -- the problem is that Jesus of Nazareth, as well as Moses and, heck, Mohammed and Buddha, are fully human, and none came from the sky. So this is your pretty standard liberal arts prof conjuring comfortable bromides from thin air. She goes on:

There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. I’m a historian of Catholicism, for instance, and what I find when I interact with people in Catholic communities is that they have faith that Jesus walked on water and that the Virgin Mary apparitions were true.

Prof Pasulka claims to be some sort of expert on Catholicism, but she misses an important distinction. According to this explanation:

Catholics are obligated in faith to accept all general or public revelation, but they are not guilty of sin if they decline to believe in particular private revelations, even if those private revelations really occurred. If you find the evidence for a particular apparition unconvincing, you’re free to disbelieve in it. In fact, you should disbelieve in it, because you’d do yourself a disservice if you believed in something you think didn’t occur.

Marian apparitions and apparitions of other saints are examples of what we call private revelations. They are given to individuals in private. General or public revelation is given to the whole Church, is enshrined in Scripture and sacred Tradition, and ended with the death of the last apostle. General revelation is binding on all Christians, but private revelations are binding only on their recipients.

So she misses the distinction between the scriptural account of Christ walking on water, a general revelation, and Marian apparitions, which are private, and over which individual Catholics are entitled to differ, especially if they find the evidence unconvincing. But then she goes off in a truly weird direction:

But there’s something different about the UFO narrative. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.

She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.

But the belief that UFOs and aliens are potentially true, and can potentially be proven, makes this a uniquely powerful narrative for the people who believe in it.

Is it fair to call this a new form of religion? I think so.

The reasoning here seems to be that Ellen Stofan is an "actual scientist", so we must give her predictions special validity. Old time religion was "based on faith in things unseen and unprovable", but now we're in a realm where actual scientists are predicting that UFOs and aliens are "potentially true, and can potentially be proven". According to Wikipedia,

The Great Pumpkin is an unseen character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. According to Linus van Pelt, the Great Pumpkin is a supernatural figure who rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween evening, and flies around bringing toys to sincere and believing children. Linus continues to have faith in the Great Pumpkin, despite his friends' mockery and disbelief.

Well, I've been to academic presentations where the latest recipient of the Professor of the Year award goes on smoothly about Science or whatever, and he or she simply ignores basic objections in the question period, and I would guess Prof Pasulka would do the same if I were to raise that sort of question. But how does Ellen Stofan differ from Linus if neither the Great Pumpkin nor any superhuman space alien has provably appeared?

I think Prof Pasulka does provide an intriguing pathway to further inquiry if we identify a popularized conception of "science" as something that's arisen in the wake of Hume, Kant, and Darwin as what we might call a replacement for naive fideism, a belief that faith and reason are incompatible, while reason is an exclsively reliable guide to living. The problem is that "science" keeps needing to reach out to the unproven to justify itself.