I watched a programme on National Geographic the other day concerning the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. My wife warned me I would just get annoyed. She was right.

Despite the fact that there is no evidence at all for intelligent life anywhere in the universe apart from on earth, these programmes are produced with monotonous regularity. The front runner at the moment is the idea of the ‘multiverse’ – the idea that ours  is not the only universe. There could be an infinite number of universes. If so, there are bound to be other planets like ours, with people just like us. Max Tegmark, the poster child of popular multiversism, loves to speculate on whether there might be other versions of him.

The logic of all this is somewhat inept, and I’ll put together some thoughts on that another time.In any case, that’s not what gets me annoyed. The thing that puts up my blood pressure is that all this is regularly paraded as somehow ‘scientific’, whereas if one points to the evidence for the existence of God that is attacked as outmoded.

People seem instinctively to feel that ‘we are not alone’. Religion is sometimes pilloried for cashing in on that. But now science is doing the same thing. In these sort of programmes at least, it seems to have forsaken its foundation of evidence in favour of preconceived ideas. Popular ‘science’ is becoming the new religion.