Despite the unreliability of the media, the public is more convinced by alien reports than arguments for the existence of God.
In early January, the internet underwent the latest in a long line of cases of mass hysteria when footage aired of an oddly shaped pillar of a smoke-like substance blowing near a massive horde of police cars lined up on the outskirts of the Miami Mall in Florida to deal with rowdy juveniles.
What was, in reality, just some movement of debris shot on camera from up high was immediately attributed with a word that regularly kills any semblance of reasoned discourse: “aliens.”
While this assumption was quickly rebutted by the many local police on the scene, such a reaction was not unprecedented or surprising. Government officials spent a suspicious amount of time and dedication last year stirring up internet clamor by dramatically unveiling vague and unsupported claims that it is in possession of alien artifacts.
The purpose of this was clearly to point the public toward something shiny and trendy and distract them from the disastrous job the Biden administration has been doing. Biden’s scheme paid off, as reports of supposed alien corpses in Mexico soon followed and spread like wildfire, and the societal claptrap on the matter of the extraterrestrial and the government’s hand in hiding it took over public discourse for enough time to distract everyone from pressing domestic real-world problems.
The public has largely played into this trap, and it is a trap that has been well set up for many years. A Pew Research Center poll in 2021 found that 65% believe that other planets hold intelligent life. A Gallup poll in 2019 found that 68% are convinced that the government is hiding more information about aliens than it is letting on.
The most bewildering fact is that the Pew Research Center poll also found that only 49% firmly believe in the existence of God. This is the case despite nearly all humans prior to the last few centuries agreeing that our universe was the work of the divine, despite the Bible being the most carefully and accurately preserved document ever, and despite the nearly three millennia of intellectual discourse that affirms its claims.
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It is true that many Christians are open to the possibility of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, myself included. However, 85% of atheists and agnostics confidently believe in aliens. All humans yearn to understand the incomprehensible nature of our universe. Those who reject religion have to grab on to something of a cosmic nature, so they are left with no alternative other than the extraterrestrial.
The public is increasingly more convinced by the existence of creatures found in the pages of mid-20th-century science fiction novels and our disreputable bureaucracy than by the profound arguments of the most reliably recorded primary source in history.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.