Charles Hoy Fort was not anti science. He was a turnof-the-nineteenth century American writer and researcher who specialised in investigating unexplained and anomalous phenomena which he believed were not being covered adequately or even understood by science.In his 1932 book Wild Talents, he wrote: “…(there are things) that may someday be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic.” It was echoed later by the science fiction writer Leigh Brackett in her 1942 story The Sorcerer of Rhiannon when she wrote:”Witchcraft to the ignorant…is simple science to the learned.” But nowhere was this sentiment so well developed than in the best known third law of the three laws of Arthur C Clarke as enunciated in his essay, The Hazards Of Prophecy in 1962. He said:”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Which brings us seamlessly to the pro-science atheist and author Michael Shermer who modified Clarke’s law to:”Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.” So finally, the question devolves to: would it? To answer that, we need to fasttrack to the latest October issue of scientific American which carries an article by Shermer called Belief in Aliens May Be A Religious Impulse.In it he quotes the physicist Paul Davis as saying: “What I am more concerned with is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest.” Or the historian George Basalla who made a similar remark in his 2006 book Civilized Life In The Universe: “The idea of the superiority of celestial beings is neither new nor scientific.It is a widespread and old belief in religious thought.” A brief sojourn into the annals of Indian religious mythology shows that this is not a totally invalid observation. Consider for instance the Mahabharata – the great war of the descendents of Bharata.The epic poem is probably based on historical facts, but over the course of many millennia,it has gradually attracted and incorporated within itself a huge variety of episodes, treatises of didactic intent and any number of other miscellaneous materials.
However, what it remained consistent in was its approach regarding the gods portrayed in it as being basically non-human beings, and their assorted artefacts as alien derivatives such as flying machines, fantastic explosive devices and magical powers. The same can also be said of the Ramayana or, for that matter, the great Greek Homeric epics known as Iliad and Odyssey.
