Speculation about why alien civilizations are concealing themselves is approximately as reasonable as speculation about why angels and demons apparently are concealing themselves.
That applies much more strongly to your comment than mine. I linked you to an essay’s worth of supporting arguments, you just offered a flat assertion.
Well we have plausible reason to believe in aliens. The copernican principle, that the Earth isn’t particularly special and the universe is enormous. There’s literally no reason to believe angels and demons are plausible.
And god do I hate skeptics and how they pattern match everything “weird” to religion. Yes aliens are weird. That doesn’t mean they have literally the same probability of existing as demons.
I imagine that a few centuries ago a RationalWiki page on microorganisms would describe them as: “A pseudoscientific belief that human diseases are caused by invisible beings. Coincidentally, exactly the same thing as described in the Bible. This dangerous myth is spread by opponents of scientific bloodletting and other uneducated people.”
Microorganisms do not have to make any special effort to hide themselves (at least not from human beings, if they may do some hiding from certain other microelements of humans).
Likewise, if you propose a theory of aliens which does not involve hiding from humans, e.g. there are aliens, but too distant to be visible to us, that theory will be reasonable. The hiding theory is not.
Speculation about why alien civilizations are concealing themselves is approximately as reasonable as speculation about why angels and demons apparently are concealing themselves.
Sorry, I’m gonna be that guy. http://lesswrong.com/lw/vx/failure_by_analogy/
Easily asserted, easily denied.
That applies much more strongly to your comment than mine. I linked you to an essay’s worth of supporting arguments, you just offered a flat assertion.
Well we have plausible reason to believe in aliens. The copernican principle, that the Earth isn’t particularly special and the universe is enormous. There’s literally no reason to believe angels and demons are plausible.
And god do I hate skeptics and how they pattern match everything “weird” to religion. Yes aliens are weird. That doesn’t mean they have literally the same probability of existing as demons.
I imagine that a few centuries ago a RationalWiki page on microorganisms would describe them as: “A pseudoscientific belief that human diseases are caused by invisible beings. Coincidentally, exactly the same thing as described in the Bible. This dangerous myth is spread by opponents of scientific bloodletting and other uneducated people.”
Microorganisms do not have to make any special effort to hide themselves (at least not from human beings, if they may do some hiding from certain other microelements of humans).
Likewise, if you propose a theory of aliens which does not involve hiding from humans, e.g. there are aliens, but too distant to be visible to us, that theory will be reasonable. The hiding theory is not.
In fact, I think it’s exactly the same.
There are these powerful entities concealing themselves from us! Let’s call them “angels” and “demons”. No, let’s call them “aliens”.
Yes, they could be entirely the same—theologies do not necessarily say that angels are not also aliens.