Alien
Ideas
Christianity and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
By
Benjamin D. Wiker
We
tend to consider speculation about extraterrestrials to be a recent
phenomenon, a task forced on us by the scientific knowledge we’ve
gained during the last century. It’s rather surprising, perhaps,
to find out that the debate about whether there is extraterrestrial
life stretches back just shy of two and a half millennia.
Given
the antiquity of the question, we might be even more surprised
to find that the Catholic Church has never issued any formal pronouncement,
one way or the other, about the existence of extraterrestrial
life.
Yet
unofficial pronouncements have recently come from respected sources
connected to (but not speaking for) the Vatican. Rev. George Coyne,
director of the Vatican Astronomic Observatory, considers the
possibility of extraterrestrials an "exciting prospect, which
must be treated with caution.... The universe is so large that
it would be folly to say that we are the exception." Rev.
Christopher Corbally, S.J., another astronomer at the Vatican
Observatory, believes that if we discover extraterrestrials, it
will entail an expansion of our theology, for "while Christ
is the First and the Last Word (the Alpha and the Omega) spoken
to humanity, he is not necessarily the only word spoken
to the whole universe."
Theologians
have weighed in as well. Thomas O’Meara, O.P., professor of theology
at Notre Dame, argues, "The history of sin and salvation
recorded in the two testaments of the Bible is not a history of
the universe; it is a particular religious history on one planet."
For O’Meara, "the central importance of Jesus for us does
not necessarily imply anything about other races on other planets....
Believers must be prepared for a galactic horizon, even for further
Incarnation."
It
would seem, then, that for Catholics the question of whether to
believe in extraterrestrials is wide open. Tempting as such speculation
is, however, a closer look at the history of the debate in relationship
to Christianity might take some of the wind out of our speculative
sails.
Atomism
and Aliens
To
begin with, Christians inclined toward believing in the existence
of extraterrestrials should be aware that such belief makes for
strange bedfellows. Historically, the idea of aliens arose more
than 2,000 years ago among the ancient atomists (Democritus, but
especially Epicurus and Lucretius) as part of an overall philosophical
argument, rooted not in evidence but in the desire to rid the
world of religion.
According
to Epicurus and Lucretius, belief that the gods interfere in human
affairs was the root of all evil, causing human beings to engage
in all manner of vile and foolish activities from war to child
sacrifice. In Lucretius’s famous words (which 17 centuries later
were to become a favorite taunt of the anti-Christian elements
of the Enlightenment), "Tantum religio potuit suadere
malorum" (Only religion was able to persuade men of [such]
evil things).
The
Epicurean solution? A rather modern-sounding one: Eliminate religion
by embracing a materialist view of the universe. The atomists
got rid of the need for a divine creator of nature by asserting
that everything in the universe came into being as a result of
the chance jostling of brute matter (a.k.a., atoms). Because the
number of atoms in a limitless universe is infinite, the random
motion of the atoms must have produced a "plurality of worlds."
As Lucretius declared in On the Nature of the Universe,
if "the purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms"
brought about all living things in our world—plants, people,
and everything in between—then certainly "in other regions
there are other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of
beasts."
Since
the first speculation about the existence of extraterrestrials
bubbled up from the materialist belief that chance could spin
forth a variety of reasoning creatures with ease, Christians ought
to be a bit more careful about heaving themselves into the same
theoretical hammock, so to speak.
The Advent
of Christianity
To
further sharpen the point, there were both cosmological and theological
reasons why early Christians either did not believe in extraterrestials
or refused to speculate about them. The early Christians held
to a geocentric universe: The earth was the only location possible
for intelligent embodied beings. As patristics scholar Rev. Joseph
Lienhard points out, there were no extraterrestrials in either
the Epicurean or modern sense, because in the world of the early
Christians, "anything ‘extra terram’ (that is, apart from
earth and water) had to live in the air—hence, they would be spirits
of some sort.... In no case I know of did a Father of the Church
postulate corporeal beings living on some other planet."
According to Father Lienhard, the closest thing we find among
the early Christians is the belief of some (rooted in neo-Platonism)
that "the seven planets or wanderers (the sun, moon, and
five visible planets) were indwelt by rational beings or minds"
because their circular motion "had to have a rational origin."
Such
rude cosmology may strike us as irrelevant, but the early Christians
also had theological reasons for their position. First, in direct
contrast to the Epicureans, Genesis makes it clear that God (not
chance) created the universe and, consequently, that human beings
were intentionally (not accidentally) created by God. Second,
according to Scripture, the universe is already quite well populated
with intelligent extraterrestrials; they’re called angels. But
most important of all, the incarnation of Christ was the union
of God’s divinity with our humanity. Human beings were thereby
placed at the center of the cosmic drama, which made no room for
questions about the redemption of other intelligent beings (even
angels).
For
all these reasons, we find no evidence of speculation about extraterrestrials
among the early Christians. Not only did such speculation run
directly against the central doctrinal claims of Christianity,
but it also smacked of Epicureanism (which entailed, among other
things, the denial of the immortal, immaterial soul, heaven, and
hell). Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean
package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal
errors.
And
there it stayed for nearly a thousand years.
The Rise
of the Modern Extraterrestrial Debate
Three
things caused the debate about extraterrestrials to resurface
in the West: the theological anti-Aristotelianism of the late
13th century, the rediscovery of ancient atomism in the 15th century,
and the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century.
Beginning
about 1100 a.d., text after text of the great Greek philosopher
Aristotle reached the West, and Christians were suddenly confronted
with a unified, well- constructed account of the universe, an
account written by a pagan. Aristotle denied that there could
be a plurality of worlds. Of course, if there could not be a plurality
of worlds, then the question of extraterrestrials was moot.
There
were three reactions to Aristotle’s purely natural, non-Christian
philosophical account: vehement rejection (the radical Augustinians),
careful embrace (St. Thomas), and passionate embrace (the radical
Aristotelians).
Around
1265 a conflict between the two radical wings began to heat up,
resulting in the famous (or, for Thomists, infamous) 219 Propositions
in 1277, issued by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. Proposition
27 condemns all who hold the Aristotelian position "that
the first cause cannot make more than one world."
It
should be stressed that the aim of this condemnation was not
to affirm a plurality of worlds but to affirm God’s omnipotence
against any account of nature that seemed to restrict God’s powers.
Aristotle’s insistence that there could only be one world accorded
nicely with the Genesis account of creation, but it appeared to
the radical Augustinians to make God the servant of natural necessity
rather than its master. The remedy, so Bishop Tempier and his
followers thought, was to assert that the first cause could indeed
create a plurality of worlds (even if we know, by revelation,
that He happened to make only one).
But
the condemnation had an unforeseen effect. No sooner had the ink
soaked into the vellum than speculation about a plurality of worlds
began in earnest. By the beginning of the 15th century, that speculation
had led some Christian thinkers to affirm the existence of extraterrestrial
life. In his On Learned Ignorance (1440), Nicholas of Cusa
argued that "life, as it exists here on earth in the form
of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose, in
a higher form in the solar and stellar region." Cusa then
began to churn out a zoology:
It may be
conjectured that in the area of the sun there exist solar beings,
bright and enlightened intellectual denizens, and by nature more
spiritual than such as may inhabit the moon—who are possibly lunatics—whilst
those on earth [i.e., human beings] are more gross and material.
[Quoted in Steven Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of
the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant]
So
it was that Christian speculation about lunatics and solarians
moved from the lunatic fringe closer to the acceptable center.
But exactly what is such let-us-supposing and conjecturing based
on? Evidence? Revelation? Reason? No. In fact, it issued from
an unhappy union of sloppy logic and untethered imagination. To
affirm God’s omnipotence (by condemning the proposition that "the
first cause cannot make more than one world") does not entail
that God indeed has created more than one world (and peopled
it with aliens). As for footloose imagination, the embarrassing
claim about solarians and lunatics speaks for itself.
Dovetailing
neatly with this new Christian affirmation of the plurality of
worlds (and even the possibility of extraterrestrial life), we
have the rediscovery in the 15th century of the long-buried texts
of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. During the next two centuries,
the words of these ancient atomists spread all over Europe, becoming
the foundation of the modern scientific revolution in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
As
we might expect, the atomists’ belief in extraterrestrials blossomed
anew with the advance of the materialistic view of modern science.
But in contrast to the ancient antagonism between such materialism
and religion, modern atomism met with Christian theologians moonstruck
by the possibility of lunatics. The Epicurean-Lucretian cosmology,
designed to eliminate religion, was now welcomed as the bearer
of galactic good news.
We’ll
return to this irony below. Our analysis would be incomplete,
however, if it did not include the visible support that
the plurality-of-worlds theory seemed to receive with the invention
of the telescope. When the new "spyglass" (as Galileo
called it) was trained on the heavens in the early 17th century,
the heavens were found to be far deeper and far, far more populated
with stars than anyone could ever have imagined. Were these not
the suns illuminating the infinite worlds promised by Epicurus
and Lucretius?
When
coupled with the earlier arguments of Copernicus—that the earth
was not (as Aristotle had argued) the center of the universe—this
open expanse of space filled with countless stars seemed to shatter
any notion that our little sun and our little world were anything
other than a drop in the cosmic bucket. For many Christians, the
expanded cosmology seemed to demand an expanded theology.
The Era
of Speculation (and Secularization)
From
approximately 1600 to 1900 there was first a trickle, then a flood
of scientific-philosophical-theological speculation on the nature
of extraterrestrial life.
From
this period, we can cull a veritable bestiary of extraterrestrials
that were supposed to inhabit every known planet in our solar
system, as well as the sun and moon and, beyond that, every star,
planet, and comet in the universe.
Such
speculation often came from the best scientists of the day. Sir
William Herschel (1730-1822), the astronomer who discovered Uranus
(1781), claimed that he saw near-certain evidence of forests,
circular buildings, canals, roads, and pyramids on the moon—all,
of course, signs of lunarians. He was equally certain that the
known planets of our solar system were all peopled and insisted
the sun was "a most magnificent habitable globe" filled
with solarians "whose organs are adapted to the peculiar
circumstances of that vast globe." Sir John Herschel (1792-1871),
William’s son, inherited both his father’s science and his fantasies;
he argued that since the front side of the moon was apparently
dead, lunarians must live on the dark side.
Johann
Bode (1747-1826), a director of the Berlin Observatory and famous
for Bode’s Law, asked of these same solarians, "Who would
doubt their existence?" The reason for such certainty was
quasi-theological. "The most wise author of the world assigns
an insect lodging on a grain of sand and will certainly not permit...the
great ball of the sun to be empty of creatures and still less
of rational inhabitants who are ready gratefully to praise the
author of life." The same reasoning led him to affirm the
existence of extraterrestrials on the moon, Mercury, and Venus.
We
find, throughout this period, similar speculations approved by
equally eminent scientists: Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1856),
Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), François Arago (1786-1853),
J. Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), Jean Liagre (1815-1892), Jules
Janssen (1824-1907), William Pickering (1858-1938)—and the list
goes on well into the 20th century, a Who’s Who of the leading
astronomers. As François Plisson, a French physician and
coolheaded critic of extraterrestrial mania, wrote in 1847, "Almost
all the astronomers of our day, and the most eminent among them,
freely adopt the opinions that not long ago were viewed as being
able to spring only from the mind of a madman."
If
belief in solarians, lunarians, jupiterians, venusians, mercurians,
and martians seems madness now, during the 18th and 19th centuries
it was taken to be the only rational, scientifically grounded
view. Small wonder, then, that theologians—both Christian and
deist—felt not only inspired but obliged to incorporate extraterrestrials
into their systems.
Looking
first at the Christian attempts, one notices immediately that
the doctrine of the Incarnation underwent a transformation as
well-intentioned Christians rushed to keep up with the latest
menagerie of extraterrestrials.
To
cite a few examples: John Wilkins, an Anglican theologian who
would go on to become a bishop, penned a popular account of extraterrestrials
called Discovery of a World in the Moone. Wilkins insisted
that the existence of extraterrestrials would not contradict Christianity.
The absence in Scripture of any mention of other worlds or extraterrestrials
did not preclude the possibility of their existence because "’tis
besides the scope of the Holy Ghost either in the new Testament
or in the old, to reveale any thing unto us concerning the secrets
of Philosophy," and further, an inhabited "Moone"
was an expression of God’s creative power, unduly restricted by
believers, for too long, only to the earth.
A
more famous and far more influential work was the quasi-Christian
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality
of Worlds (1686), which asserted that the existence of creatures
on other planets would not upset Christianity because such creatures
would not be descendants of Adam and therefore would not be subject
to the Incarnation.
A
bit later, and pushing things a bit further, Traité
de l’Infini Créé was published in 1769, allegedly
by Abbé Malebranche but actually by Abbé Jean Terrasson.
In it, Terrasson argued, against Fontenelle, that the Incarnation
was not peculiar to our planet. If "it is asked...if
the eternal Word can unite himself hypostatically to a number
of men [i.e., different rational creatures on multiple planets];
one responds without hesitation—yes. The men would all be men-God
[hommes-Dieu], men in the plural, God in the singular,
because these men-God would in effect be several in number as
to human nature, but they would be only one in respect to divine
nature." Indeed, even where there was no Fall, Christ would
embody Himself as a member of the race, for they deserved this
honor even more than those who had fallen.
Other
attempts to reconcile Christian revelation with extraterrestrials
abound. William Hay (1695-1755) argued for multiple modes of salvation
entailing multiple modes of Christ’s incarnation; James Beattie
(1735-1803) asserted that Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection
served as an inspiring example for all extraterrestrials; and
Beilby Porteus (1731-1808) maintained that the Incarnation actually
extends to all extraterrestrials.
By
the beginning of the 19th century, belief in the plurality of
worlds was so well accepted, especially among Protestants, that
it was now incorporated as an essential element of evangelical
orthodoxy. Some proponents, like Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847),
were fairly cautious. Chalmers would say only that "for anything
we can know by reason, the plan of redemption may have its influences
and its bearings on those creatures of God who people other regions."
But
as we have seen, others showed less restraint. To such speculations,
we should add those of the influential visionary Baron Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772), who claimed to have conversations with
the angels of each of the planets of our solar system and reported
that the lunarians speak very loudly "from the abdomen"
because "the Moon is not surrounded with an atmosphere of
the same kind as that of other earths."
Ellen
Harmon (1827-1915), prophetess and foundress of the Seventh-Day
Adventists, reported after one of her visions that "the inhabitants
[of Jupiter] are a tall, majestic people, so unlike the inhabitants
of earth. Sin has never entered here." The Mormons were another
sect inspired by astronomical speculation; they also believed
in a universe populated by a plurality of gods, angels, and extraterrestrials.
The Infinite
Machine
Of
course, Christians weren’t the only ones busy with theological
speculation about extraterrestrials. The 18th century was a time
of transition for the West, from a Christianized culture to a
secularized culture. Deism, standing midway between Christianity
and atheism, was the religion of transition.
To
be more exact, deism was the religion of the Newtonians. At the
end of the 17th century, Newton had used the materialist atomism,
ultimately rooted in the thought of Epicurus and Lucretius, as
a foundation for his geometrical account of nature. As a result,
the closest Newton could come to Christianity was deism, in which
a distant god created the atoms and gave them an initial shove.
The Incarnation was simply jettisoned as cosmologically incompatible
and therefore irrelevant.
Deist
poet laureate Alexander Pope composed "The Universal Prayer,"
which praised the deist god as the creator of multiple worlds
and was intended by Pope to replace the all-too-provincial Lord’s
Prayer. The works of the archdeist Voltaire, who called himself
the new Lucretius, were shot through with multiple worlds peopled
by extraterrestrials. On America’s own shores, Benjamin Franklin
included such cosmic pluralism in his personal articles of belief,
even claiming that the plurality of extraterrestrials included
a plurality of gods to watch over each of the suns.
Perhaps
more clearly than anyone else of the time, the deist Thomas Paine
realized that the existence of a multitude of worlds (and, thus,
of extraterrestrials) was entirely incompatible with Christianity:
"[T]o believe that God created a plurality of worlds at least
as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian system
of faith at once little and ridiculous and scatters it in the
mind like feathers in the air." For those who attempted a
reconciliation of such plurality with Christianity, Paine warned
that "he who thinks that he believes in both has thought
but little of either." Paine, convinced of plurality, chose
deism.
Many
eminent figures agreed. The existence of extraterrestrials made
belief in the particularity of Christianity an embarrassment.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley found it easy to believe in extraterrestrials
but, as a consequence, "impossible to believe that the Spirit
that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body
of a Jewish woman." John Adams wrote to warn Thomas Jefferson
against hiring anyone at the University of Virginia who holds
the "awful blasphemy" that the "great Principle
which has produced...Newton’s universe...came down to this little
ball, to be spit upon by the Jews."
Scanning
the 18th and 19th centuries, we find, then, two overlapping but
opposing trends—one Christian and the other deist—united in one
pluralist effort. Both sung endless paeans to a mighty God, creator
of heaven and many earths, and both chiseled away at the doctrine
of the Incarnation to make it fit such pluralism. Christians bent
on saving Christianity from irrelevance cheerfully hacked away
at the embarrassing particularity of the Incarnation until the
doctrine itself became largely irrelevant. The deists, true to
their Epicurean-Lucretian origin, simply gouged the Incarnation
out of the cosmos as completely unsuitable to the new cosmology.
The intelligentsia sided with the deists.
The
revolution was not over, however. In the latter half of the 19th
century, the intelligentsia shifted from deism to atheism. To
be more exact, it simply embraced full-scale Epicurean-Lucretian
materialism, now called Darwinism. Since the chance actions of
matter were sufficient to create the universe, a deity was no
longer either necessary or desirable. The deist god was given
the bounce, replaced by the blind materialist forces of cosmic
evolution. Atheism no longer needed the halfway house of deism.
Secularization could now proceed at full throttle. And the belief
in extraterrestrials was an essential part of the new materialist
creed, just as it had been an essential part of the old one.
The Evidence
of Absence
Only
by the beginning of the 20th century was science advanced enough
to move from speculation to the actual search for hard evidence.
As amply documented by Steven Dick in Life on Other Worlds:
The 20th Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate, by the end
of the 20th century, scientists had demonstrated to all but the
most zealously intransigent that—humble Earth excepted—our solar
system was devoid of intelligent life and most likely devoid of
any life. Further, as biologists discovered the ever-greater complexity
of living organisms and the delicate balance of conditions that
make them possible, it became clearer and clearer that fewer and
fewer places in the universe could meet the conditions required
for even the most rudimentary forms of life.
Yet
the dismal result of the high-tech search for extraterrestrials
only stirred advocates all the more, resulting in the optimistic
but defensive battle cry: "The absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence." While this might warm the dwindling
fires in the enthusiast’s heart, it pays little service to reason.
To be blunt, since it was the negative result of a century-long
search for aliens, the absence of evidence is evidence
for absence. What else would it be?
A
naysayer might ask, "But if what you’re saying is true, doesn’t
the lack of scientific evidence for angels prove that angels don’t
exist?" Such a riposte merely deflects attention from the
seriousness of the self-inflicted wound. Again, whether or not
angels exist, scientists were actively looking for extraterrestrials,
convinced without a shred of evidence that they must exist. The
simple truth remains: Over the span of the 20th century, science
systematically eliminated the possibility of extraterrestrials
in our solar system, and their existence elsewhere has dwindled
from an absolute necessity to a dim chance.
Further,
those who compare angels to aliens forget that angels are by definition
immaterial beings. What kind of a scientific test would one devise
to locate a being who, because it is not embodied, has no location?
Extraterrestrials, on the other hand, are supposed to be material
organisms; if they exist, we should be able to detect them the
same way we detect any other physical body.
For
the nonbeliever already convinced that angels don’t exist, to
be forced to admit that he has no more reason to believe in aliens
than in angels is an admission of defeat. This admission is all
the more important precisely because extraterrestrials function
for secularists as material substitutes for angels. In the great
religion of secularism, aliens have now been reduced to, at best,
a matter of faith.
Lessons
for Theology
First,
a humbling lesson for those inclined to hitch theological doctrines
to the science of the day: Think how foolish we would appear today
if the Catholic Church had modified its doctrine of redemption
to make room for the solarians, venusians, mercurians, martians,
and lunarians. We would be in the same speculative boat as Swedenborgians,
Seventh-Day Adventists, and Mormons. The lesson? There’s nothing
more dated than the ideas of those who insist on keeping their
ideas up-to-date. The best remedy for theologians so inclined
is a long, deep draught of the elixir of history, especially the
history of science, where it becomes evident that today’s verities
are often tomorrow’s absurdities.
Second,
as we have seen, belief in the existence of extraterrestrials
is not a modern thing, and that means it does not depend essentially
on any advance in science. Rather, the belief stems from a particular
metaphysical stance, not Christian but Epicurean in origin. As
I argue long and hard in Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists,
such Epicureanism acts as an acid toward any religion but especially
toward Christianity.
Third,
Christians should be wary of leaning on revived forms of the sloppy
logic of omnipotence, which arose after the publication of Tempier’s
219 Propositions in 1277. In its original form, it is a theological
truism: "God is omnipotent; therefore God can create anything."
But all too soon, this became a very different proposition: "Since
it is possible for God to create anything, then God must create
everything possible; therefore, extraterrestrials must exist,
and the doctrine of the Incarnation must be expanded accordingly."
This double inference is not only invalid but leads to foolishness.
Would we say that since God is all-powerful, He must create
fairies and also redeem them?
Fourth,
Christians should be equally wary of the idea that God would somehow
be a second-rate deity if He allowed human beings to be the only
intelligent embodied beings in the universe, since that would
mean a lot of wasted space. What frightens us into making such
claims is, I believe, the immensity of space itself. But while
the vastness of the universe rightly humbles us, its size means
nothing to God, an immaterial intelligence. Since He has no size,
it is all the same to Him whether He makes the universe as big
as a pin or a pin as big as the universe.
A
final, related point: Christians should not be cowed by the materialist’s
logic of probability, which had its birth in Epicurus and Lucretius.
The logic runs thus: Our sun is a star; since the number of stars
is so vast, sheer probability demands that there must be other
inhabited planets beyond our solar system. But probability
does not demand any such thing, unless we think (with Epicurus)
that the universe is governed by chance, and that, of course,
would be a reason to give up our Christianity, not to rerig its
cosmology.
I
can already hear the parting objection: "But what would you
do if extraterrestrials actually show up? It is possible,
after all. And the Church hasn’t pronounced one way or the other."
I
am as prepared for the arrival of extraterrestrials as I am for
that of elves, and for the same reason: All evidence points to
their nonexistence, and yet it remains a very, very remote possibility—so
remote that to change our central doctrines to accommodate either
possibility would be folly.
Benjamin
D. Wiker, a fellow with Discovery Institute, teaches theology
and science at Franciscan University. His Moral Darwinism: How
We Became Hedonists is now available from InterVarsity Press.
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