The Telegraph recently reported some perplexing news – “respected” American astrobiologists casually discuss the potential existence of extraterrestrial life forms, i.e., “aliens”:
The Fermi paradox questions why aliens have never visited Earth despite the Universe being so old and so vast that races should have evolved interstellar travel and come calling by now.
Now two scientists believe they may have the answer.
Astrobiologists Dr Michael Wong, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and Dr Stuart Bartlett, of California Institute of Technology, have hypothesised that civilisations burn out when they grow too large and technical.
Faced with an ever-growing population and eye-watering energy consumption, worlds hit a crisis point known as a “singularity” where innovation can no longer keep up with demand.
The only alternative to collapse is to abandon “unyielding growth” and adopt a balance that allows survival but prevents the society moving any further forward, or venturing far from its own spot in the universe.
Writing in the Royal Society Open Science, Dr Wong and Dr Bartlett said: “We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilisations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritising homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely.
And it’s not just scientists. We also recently learned that the US Congress is set to “hold the first open hearing on UFOs in half-century”.
All of this raises two interesting points:
- Western scientists considering the probable existence of aliens; and
- A critique of “growth” ideology, one of the main features of modern capitalism, which is to industry and technology what “progressivism” is to traditional cultures and moral values.
Within this article we will only be focusing on the first point: secular belief in aliens. The second point (regarding “growth” ideology) may be discussed in a future article, if Allah permits.
RELATED: Progressive Muslims Are Pathetic
Aliens: Secularism’s Jinn
The belief in the ghayb, i.e., “the unseen” or “the invisible” as it’s often translated (or the non-empirical in general) is a foundational Muslim belief mentioned in the Qur’an and Sunnah.Part of this belief is the existence of extra-sensorial non-human beings such as the angels and the jinn. The latter even has an entire Qur’anic chapter (surah 72) named after them. This surah also describes how not all jinn are “evil” as many of them are actually Muslims.
Some modernists have adopted a materialistic approach to jinn, declaring them to be germs or microbes. This is due to such modernists having fallen under the spell of Western science – especially modern discoveries in medicine and bacteriology. In normative Islam however, we know that the jinn are a unique being, like “spirits” (for lack of a better term). They possess “consciousness” and volition, and although they exist in our world and are able to influence it, they have a somewhat parallel existence to our own.
And it seems that the secular West has found its own jinn in the form of aliens.
RELATED: Angels Are Not Mindless Robots
The secular West’s double standards are glaringly evident from how they deal with “irrationality”. When this so-called irrationality is linked with religion it’s a problem. However, when it comes to things like “gender fluidity” it’s completely fine. Another example that can be mentioned is how the “clairvoyant” Edgar Cayce was extremely popular during the early 20th-century.
And it’s the same story when it comes to aliens. The secular West, unable to fight its innate tendency to believe in the ghayb, proposes the likely existence of a non-human species which could communicate with our world – the same way Muslims believe in the jinn!
Of course all of this is done in the name of their own religion: science. They even have their own priests in the form of astrobiologists etc.