The Great Filter
Through a post at Topmost Apple, I found this article dealing with the so-called Great Filter, the theory that somewhere there’s an evolutionary bump in the road so big that almost no species can get over it, but instead become extinct. The article poses it as a reason why we have no evidence that other species are “out there” somewhere in the universe; Topmost Apple takes it as a pointer to Divine Guidance of which we are the unique benificiary. But I would propose my own version of the Great Filter.
This version has one advantage over that discussed in the post and article: it doesn’t require that species become extinct. So you don’t need to go around saying “We iz dumed!” under my plan. Nor can you can go around saying “We iz da bomb of intelligent life in the univerz!”
Let’s start off by making two observations that are fairly obvious ones–so obvious that even an atheist would probably not cavil at them.
First, we observe that throughout human history, whenever two religions claiming to originate in a specific revelation of the Divine have encountered each other, the encounter has always started off on a less than friendly basis and can take centuries before even some degree of tolerance breaks out between them. Witness the way the three Abrahamic faiths have co-existed with each other.
Second, if God exists, it is probable to the point of certainty that It would reveal Itself to every intelligent species in the universe, and not just to one favored species on one planet. Each species would therefore have as part of its intellectual baggage the specificity of that revelation and consequent ideations about God.
Now, imagine two species encountering each other, and with all the other points of contact, having to deal with the idea that God revealed Itself in two entirely different ways. Some would try to blend the two revelations, some would reject the revelation given to the other species; there might be religious wars and all the other nonsense that human religions have inflicted on each other in the name of God over the millenia. Even if there was no violence, there would be incredible confusion. It would require two cultures of high intellectual maturity to be able to handle the interactions and come up with something that understands two revelations as complementary, not competing. We don’t know if other species have reached that level, but I think it fairly obvious that homo sapiens of Sol 3, Mutter’s Spiral, have yet to reach that level.
Faced with that, wouldn’t it be logical for God to arrange for the two species not to meet until both were ready for the contact? Not only at the spiritual levels but the intellectual levels? Maybe God is the Great Filter keeping us isolated for our own good until we’re ready.
