richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

THE GOD HYPOTHESIS 71
longer based on the principle of mediocrity; they are informed by
direct evidence. The spectroscope, nemesis of Comte's positivism,
strikes again. Our telescopes are scarcely powerful enough to see
planets around other stars directly. But the position of a star is perturbed
by the gravitational pull of its planets as they whirl around
it, and spectroscopes can pick up the Doppler shifts in the star's
spectrum, at least in cases where the perturbing planet is large.
Mostly using this method, at the time of writing we now know of
170 extra-solar planets orbiting 147 stars, 44 but the figure will
certainly have increased by the time you read this book. So far, they
are bulky 'Jupiters', because only Jupiters are large enough to
perturb their stars into the zone of detectability of present-day
spectroscopes.
We have at least quantitatively improved our estimate of one
previously shrouded term of the Drake Equation. This permits a
significant, if still moderate, easing of our agnosticism about the
final value yielded by the equation. We must still be agnostic about
life on other worlds - but a little bit less agnostic, because we are
just that bit less ignorant. Science can chip away at agnosticism, in
a way that Huxley bent over backwards to deny for the special case
of God. I am arguing that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of
Huxley, Gould and many others, the God question is not in
principle and forever outside the remit of science. As with the
nature of the stars, contra Comte, and as with the likelihood of life
in orbit around them, science can make at least probabilistic
inroads into the territory of agnosticism.
My definition of the God Hypothesis included the words 'superhuman'
and 'supernatural'. To clarify the difference, imagine that a
SETI radio telescope actually did pick up a signal from outer space
which showed, unequivocally, that we are not alone. It is a nontrivial
question, by the way, what kind of signal would convince us
of its intelligent origin. A good approach is to turn the question
around. What should we intelligently do in order to advertise our
presence to extraterrestrial listeners? Rhythmic pulses wouldn't do
it. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the radio astronomer who first discovered
the pulsar in 1967, was moved by the precision of its 1.33-second
periodicity to name it, tongue in cheek, the LGM (Little Green
Men) signal. She later found a second pulsar, elsewhere in the sky