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My local paper has a regular column by an atheist. His latest (June 2006) is titled, "UFOs and Other Nonsense”. The point of the article is to link Christianity with superstition and pseudo-science. In a key example he writes, “Christian fundamentalists accept the existence of UFO aliens … skepticism about UFO aliens could encourage skepticism about other beliefs.”
I just spent hours searching the Internet for any corroboration of this claim. I found only two surveys on the subject, and both flatly contradict the columnist. A survey by the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that 70% of "non-churchgoers" believe that there is life on other planets, but only 46% of "churchgoers". A survey of ministers, priests, and rabbis by the National Institute for Discovery Sciences found that 77% said that contact with alien beings would not threaten their beliefs, but only 12% believe that any such contact has occurred to date, by UFOs or any other means. (Their report didn’t separate out "fundamentalists", but Protestants were less likely to believe in UFOs than Catholics or Jews.)
The only evidence the writer offers for this claim is that the wise sage Carl Sagan says it’s so. All his other supposed "facts" are attributed to unnamed "scientists". The whole point of this article is to attack Christians for being anti-science and generally muddle-headed, but he offers no scientific evidence to back up any of his claims, no experiments or research. We are supposed to believe him purely on the basis of the weakest of all arguments: the appeal to authority. If a Christian said that we should believe something because God says so in the Bible, this atheist would surely laugh at our gullibility. But then he tells us that because Carl Sagan said it, we must believe without question. After all, Sagan is a scientist, and scientists are to be respected because they have done so many impressive things, like discovering the law of gravity, genetics, and quantum physics. But neither Sagan nor most of the other "scientists" who ridicule the supposed anti-scientific attitudes of Christians accomplished any of those things: they just call themselves by the same name as these great men and expect to automatically receive the same respect. Indeed, the examples I just gave were the discoveries of Isaac Newton (gravity), Gregor Mendel (genetics), and Max Planck (quantum physics) – all devout Christians. The scientific method itself is generally credited to Roger Bacon. Bacon first described his ideas in his book Opus Majus, which happens to also include a call for more teaching of the Bible in schools.
While I was researching this article, I came across this interesting historical tidbit: In the 1860s, atheist Francis Galton wrote that the "priestly mind" was not conducive to science. At the same time that he was writing this, a devout Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel was laying the groundwork for modern genetics.
I’d love to refute this atheist’s other arguments point by point, but I just don’t have the time: It takes a lot longer to do research and actually find the truth than to just make things up.
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