Is There Intelligent Life On Other Planets?

As complicated and fascinating a question as this might be to anybody else, it seems to me that for a Christian, the answer is pretty cut and dry: an unequivocal and resounding "No."

In the second volume of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy Perelandra, he explains that the inhabitants of Venus (unlike those of Mars encountered by the protagonist Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet) are human because they were created after the Incarnation.

Lewis understands that it is by virtue of our reason that we share in God's Divine Nature in such a special way. We are animals through and through. But for the faculty of reason we would be nothing more. It is our reason by which we are made in the image of God.

Sometime around the Year of Our Lord 1, Jesus the Christ was born to a pure Virgin in a stable in Bethlehem. God became Man. Henceforth humanity itself has been intimately and personally bound up with the Trinitarian Godhead. The Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, the Logos, Reason himself, is human; therefore, all temporal, rational beings must be human.

I would go even further than Lewis, though. When Christ ascended into heaven 40 days after being raised from the dead, he re-entered the eternal sphere, taking his body and human nature with him. As a result, even though the Incarnation occurred in time, it is an eternal reality, and in fact the second person of the Trinity is now, has always been, and will always be the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth, body, Mother, and all.

This is, for instance, why many scriptural theologians believe Jesus appeared several times in the Old Testament. These appearances are called "Christophanies," which word stems from the Greek Christos and phanein, "to show." This is, of course, related to our words "phantasm" and "epiphany," which means "to show forth." I don't happen to agree with this hypothesis. Nevertheless, I admit that it is possible.

At any rate, the Incarnation and the Ascension make it impossible for intelligent life on other planets to exist. While some might find this disappointing, it really makes sense. If there were intelligent alien species we would have to consider whether or not they, too, were fallen, and, if so, how, seeing as the Incarnation applies to humanity only, how it would be God would redeem them. It's a whole thing.

That being said, there's no reason that we shouldn't find all manner of animal life scattered throughout the universe. It's only fitting as God seems to adore diversity. It gets even more interesting when you consider that they may not be fallen as the creatures here on earth are. (See my Ugly Creatures series).

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part Four

In Part One of this series, we saw that there is an ultimate standard of beauty, namely God, and many of the (so-called) creatures on this planet don't exactly conform to that standard. In Part Two, we looked at the group of animals I ranked at #10, what I called, "screwed up mammals." We talked about how Mankind and Nature have, since the beginning, been wedded to one another as husband and wife. When Man sinned, he brought punishment down upon not only himself, but also the natural world in which he lived. In Part Three, we looked at birds and reptiles, together making up group #9. We also saw how Satan (the Serpent) and his demons have been waging a war with God for the universe since before it was even made.

Well, coming in at #8...

Brontosaurus,

Stegosaurus,

Velociraptor,

Spinosaurus,

and, of course, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Lizard King.

That's right, dinosaurs. And yes, all of those are pictures from Jurassic Park. Tempted as I am to put them lower down on the list on account of their sheer size and ferocity, reptilian as they are, they're rightly included here, just below the other lizards.

Some of you are probably whining about me having included Brontosaurus. After all, it's a friendly plant-eater. Gentle giant and all. Here's the thing, he may not want to eat you, which is a plus. The downside is he'll squash you without even noticing, and that makes him not so great.

We talked last time about Tolkien's creation myth in The Silmarillion. In it, Melkor (his fallen angel) sings his own dissonant tune in contrast to the one of God's design being sung by the other angels and bringing about the creation of the universe. Later, as the angels are shaping the world, Melkor is present to march across the earth, knocking down mountains just as they are raised up, and filling up valleys just as they are hollowed out.

This idea is quite similar to Medieval Cosmology, which has the angels "moving the spheres." We Moderns  laugh at this idea. Before we do, though, we should think about what it was the Medievals really meant. Did they mean the angels literally caused the stars and planets to move across the sky? Yes, they did. But how did they go about this? Were the angels just supposed to be some kind of divine mechanism, actually pushing the planets around on their tracks? No. They were lords of their spheres, which for a Medieval meant they were their spheres. That is to say, their respective domains were intrinsically and essentially bound up in their very being.

We touched on this idea already when we spoke about the way in which the "dominion" of Mankind over creation has been traditionally understood. The Medievals saw the world as one big hierarchy, God at the top, the raw elements at the bottom, Mankind "a little lower than the angels," (Heb. 2:7). Now, we might conceive of this kind of system as being some kind of an arbitrary arrangement imposed on Creation by the Will of God. While it's true the Order in the world has its origin in God, it is not arbitrary. On the contrary, it comes about as a result of the very essences of things. From top to bottom, different beings participate more or less completely in God's own Being.

More than that, though, each being in the Grand Hierarchy, is actually dependent on the class of beings above him for his own existence. This is the sense in which Scripture refers to Man as the king of Creation. It is too easy today to see the effects that the neglect of this Divine calling can cause. This principle obviously extends to Man's political and social machinations as well, thus, Medieval Feudalism and social class system. As we have seen, Mankind was given this kind of hierarchical "dominion" over all the Earth. But what about the rest of Creation?

In Classical Mythology, Athena, for example, is not merely the Queen of Wisdom, she is Wisdom, Wisdom Incarnate, personified. The same is true of the other gods: Hephaestus is Craftsmanship; Aphrodite, Desire; Hera, Womanhood; Ares, Strife; and so on. The traditional view is that this is quite true in the angels. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his question on the angels' government of Creation quotes St. Gregory the Great as saying that "in this visible world, nothing takes place without the agency of the invisible creature." As Man's material body is caused to be and act by his immaterial soul, so the material world is caused to be and move by the immaterial world, which is the Angels, and God above all.

For example, we now know that planets move as a result of the gravitational force exerted on them by the Sun. This is unquestionably true. Is it impossible that there could be more going on with gravity than a lifeless force? Couldn't there be an angel, perhaps a Virtue, who is the supernatural, spiritual, divinely ordained, cause of this force in the material world--that member of God's Divine Order responsible for maintaining the operation of this cause throughout the universe? I would argue that this is not only possible, but, at the very least, probable. Let's call him Gravitas, and thank God for his continued ministrations.

Just as Melkor was present, from the beginning, to do his best to mar and corrupt the creation of Tolkien's God, so Satan was present from the beginning of our universe to inject his evil into it. As God's Creation was issuing into existence from his mind (at the Big Bang) through the mediation of the angels in their various "spheres" of influence, Satan worked to screw up as much as he could. How else could a universe have been produced which includes things like darkness and death? Contrariety itself?

A quick reminder, though, lest we stray into Mani's territory, that Satan too is a creature. There is no ultimate and universal principle of evil that coexists alongside God as universal good. Evil does not exist. It is the absence of existence. Satan didn't make anything; he merely corrupted what God created. As such, Satan is the ultimate evil, but only in that he is the least like God; he is still like God in part, because he exists.

Christian Fatherhood

Little baby Beyer at 13 weeks, 1 day

I'm happy to be able to say that my wife and I are expecting our first child. It's a strange thing, being an expectant father--to know that one has produced a new life and, at the same time, to have that life remain hidden from view. That is to say, I know I have a child, but, not having met him/her, it's a very abstract and theoretical kind of knowledge.

Expectant mothers, on the other hand, begin being affected in very tangible ways very early on. It's kind of amazing how quickly and to what degree a new mother begins to be affected in every way possible. Of course, the new baby has affected me too, but only in a sort of indirect, "I'd be happy to run to the store at 4am to get you a cinnabon," kind of way. In other words, it seems like my role as an expectant father has little to do with the child, except in an indirect way, insofar as I am responsible for caring for its mother.

All of this makes me wonder whether there's something to the fact that motherhood seems to come along gradually, as the baby grows, growing and affecting its mother more and more over time, while fatherhood hits you all of a sudden in the delivery room.

In some ways, I think it's true that my wife has been a mother since we conceived, but I won't really be a father until the baby is born. This turns out to be more than just a feeling of mine, too. Apparently, when the baby is born, it will already recognize its mothers voice, but won't recognize mine over anyone else's for quite some time. I think this speaks to the fact that real fatherhood has to be earned.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." This is the beginning of all faith, the foundation on which all religion lies. Everything that is receives its being, more or less directly, from the first cause of all things, God. This makes him our Lord. But Christ teaches us to call him "Abba, Father." Could we rightly do that if, in good Deist fashion, he had simply created a machine that would run its course while he observed from afar?

It is true that God is the Other, infinitely transcendent. Scripture tells us, "His greatness is unsearchable," (Ps. 145:3). Yet, because all being proceeds from him, everything that is bears his mark, as it were--participates, shares in his ultimate Being, otherwise it would not be. This is the sense in which God is "all in all," for "in him we live and move and have our being," (Acts 17:28). "In the words of Saint Augustine, God is 'higher than my highest and more inward that my innermost self.' With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end," (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 300-301).

The reality, then, looks something like this:

God creating ex nihilo and of his own free will, yet eternally, even though that Creation happens in time.

It is God's act of Creation which makes him our Lord and God. It his continual act of sustaining that Creation from within, that makes him our Father. Our God interacts with his children on a daily basis, sustaining us moment-by-moment, giving us everything we need to succeed. For that matter, giving us everything he is, in Christ, allowing his entire existence to revolve around his beloved children.

Human fatherhood, then, imitating the Divine Fatherhood, sticks around. True Fatherhood lasts a lifetime. It is a gift of self to one's wife and children, a gift of self without reservation, a gift "unto death, even death on a  cross," (Phil. 2:8). This gift is given, not primarily out of a sense of moral responsibility, though this is necessary, but out of love, a love which is action in the family and in the world, day in and day out.

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part Three

Last post we discovered that we contributed to the downfall of Nature when we sinned in the Garden. We also realized that, because fangs and poison and death and other bad stuff seem to have been around before us, they must be due to some other evil influence on the world.

There can only be one answer to who that could be, seeing as, before us, there's only one other source of evil: the Devil and his fallen angels. But why should the Devil have anything to do with God's Creation?

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien recounts his creation myth, called the "Ainulindalë," meaning, "Music of the Ainur." The Ainur ("Holy Ones") are Middle Earth's angels, beings of pure spirit, issuing out of the mind of God before time itself. Together, they perceive God's plan for Creation, and begin to sing their respective parts in harmony with one another, which causes the universe, in all its splendor, to jump into being.

Granted this is a work of fiction, but what Tolkien has done is to synthesize two seemingly contradictory myths of creation, the classical and the Judeo-Christian. God is still the Creator of the universe, and exterior to it, as in Genesis, but his creative act is performed through others, each of which has a domain which they create in accordance with the will of God, and later rule on his behalf. In the end, then, there are Ainur of the sky, and sea, and craftsmanship, and so on, just as in the pagan pantheons.

All of this is to say that God's act of Creation needn't be direct in order for it to be his. It is entirely consonant with Christian theology and what we know from the Book of Genesis for God to have created via the angels, whom he has given charge over the disparate categories of Being.

C.S. Lewis picks up on this idea in his Space Trilogy, when he has different angels (he calls them "eldila") as the caretakers of the various planets in the Solar System. The hero discovers that the rest of the universe refers to Earth as "the silent planet" because Lucifer its caretaker, and when he rebelled against God, he cut us all off with him.

In Tolkien, this notion of the fallen angel occurs when Melkor decides to rebel against the will of God for Creation and begins singing his own, discordant tune, and thus bringing a level of disorder and chaos to the things being made. I think something similar happened at the beginning of time, the Devil doing his best to mess things up even as God and the angels were creating the universe. "Really?" Really:

Last time we saw pictures of messed-up mammals. Today we're obviously looking at birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Technically speaking, I would put birds in between mammals and reptiles, but since they're basically just slightly less terrifying, slightly more highly-evolved reptiles anyway, I decided to include them here.

More than just this list of horrible animals, we see in Genesis that things had already gone wrong long before Mankind showed up. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This verse is likely more of a title than a verse. Oftentimes Jewish literature begins with a short summary of the story it will tell in detail. The story really begins with Genesis 1:2: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep."

"Formlessness," "void," "darkness," does that sound like the work of God to you? It seems to me that Satan was there from the beginning, trying to corrupt everything as best he could. The story of history, then, turns out to have been a rescue mission from the beginning, God fighting a war with the Devil for Creation, in order that he might fashion a world fit for his Son to inhabit, and thus undergo the ultimate act of redemption on behalf of the fallen universe.

UPDATE: Part Four to be found here.

The Big In The Small, The Form In The Matter: Starting With The Literal In Tennyson's Tears, idle tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh at the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ad, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

What is art? It begins as something imagined. An artist imagines something and turns that imagined thing into something concrete. The thing imagined can be a scene, a character, an event, or a whole bunch of these strung together in relationship to one another to make up a story. The medium by which it is made concrete can be marble, sound, movement (as in the case of dance), or spoken or written words. This concretezation (or we can even say incarnation) is what makes it possible for others to share the artist's vision. The artist's skill is greater or lesser depending on the level to which he is able to convert his interior vision into his medium. This is what makes the difference between an artist and the rest of us. We all have imaginations. One is only an artist when one can accurately incarnate a vision into stone, music, or words.

This is the sense in which God is the first artist. It was he who had a vision of Creation and caused it to come into being. Of course, rather than making the universe out of something, God made his art out of nothing. So in fact we should not be comparing Creation to art, but our work to God's. J.R.R. Tolkien did just that when he called the artistic process "sub-creation."

The artist's vision is not the art. The work of art itself is the art. Nevertheless, if the artist is successful, the nature of the concrete work of art flows out of the artist's vision. As such, if we are to truly understand the nature of the work of art, we must come to understand the artist's vision. That being said, it is only by studying the work of art itself that this can occur, since it is the work of art which expresses the artist's vision. It is as the work of art that the vision exists.

This is called the "literal level" of the work of art. It is the incarnated, material form of the artist's imaginal vision. To be sure there are deeper, more spiritual levels of meaning. Nevertheless, if they are truly there, they must develop by way of analogy out of the literal level, for that is what the art truly is. As such, in works of art (like some poetry) where it is not immediately evident what exactly is going on in the poem, the first job of the interpreter is to determine of what the poem itself actually consists.

In Tennyson's poem Tears, idle tears a man looks "on the happy Autumn fields," and the vision conjures up thoughts "of the days that are no more." These thoughts give rise to "idle tears," because it's not like crying over heartbreak or the death of a friend, it's just crying. T reason he can't figure out why exactly the tears are coming is that they're "from the depth of some divine despair." The sadness is too profound, too fundamental to understand completely. All he knows is they have something to do with days gone by. Not sad days, but happy days. The sadness comes in realizing they're gone forever.

He goes on to compare the sadness of lost time to that "fresh" pang "as the first beam glittering on a sail" when one is waiting at the dock for a loved one to return by sea. It is like those tears of "joy" upon reuniting with a long lost friend, which rise because, even if one doesn't realize it at the time, deep down it is always a bittersweet reunion knowing that it will eventually come to an end. It is also like the sadness that accompanies the farewell when the reunion does come to an end.

Tintern Abbey, "the casement"

It is like the birds' first morning chirps with the sunrise for which one has waited up all night. Sad because it too is but a fleeting moment, gone too soon. It is like "remembered kisses after death," or imagining what it might be like to kiss a beautiful woman one will never. It is "deep as first love, and wild with all regret." Is there anything else the realization that time is passing us by can make us do but regret? Regret how poorly we spent it, and how little we have left? "Life" itself is "Death," for all living is really only dying.

By describing a single imaginal and emotional experience, Tennyson has hit at the "deep," "divine despair" at the heart of what it means to be human. This is the essence of humanity: temporality, passability, transitoriness, loss, lamentation, death. For all humanity, all life is an ache for immortality, for eternity, for a perfect world. For all Creation, all life is a longing for the Garden that was lost and that shall be remade better even that it was: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail," (Rom. 8:22-3) awaiting the coming of the Kingdom.

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part Two

The world isn't the way it's supposed to be. Let's look at childbirth by way of example. The first commandment God gave us, way back in Gen. 1:22 was to "be fruitful and multiply." We should remember that God's commandments are not arbitrary. That is to say, moral imperatives are not dictated down from on high for no reason. On the contrary, morality stems from Nature and Being itself. In other words, when Scripture tells us God has commanded us to do something, it is not because that's what God wants, it's because that's what God is, or because that's what we are.

It is of God's very essence (and therefore ours as well) to bring forth life. This is why doing so is an explicit commandment in Scripture. This idea is perfectly consonant with what modern science tells us. Procreation is the earliest and most fundamental aim of evolutionary development, the most basic reason for our existence. The pagan philosopher Aristotle said the same thing almost 2400 years ago when he named the propagation of the species as the ultimate telos (end, goal) toward which all life tends. All of this is to say that, if the world were the way it was supposed to be, childbirth would be the easiest, most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately, like so many other things, it's one of the biggest struggles in life: "in pain you shall bring forth children," (Gen. 3:16).

But it wasn't just humanity that was harmed by our sin: "cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life," (Gen. 3:17). For example:

the star-nosed mole,

this mutant dog thing,

possums,

and cat lady. Messed up as they are, as mammals (and marsupials), this group of horrifying creatures (along with those we saw in Part One) are actually the least horrifying of all.

After God finished his work of creation, he entrusted all of it to Man: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth," (Gen. 1:26).

Much has been made of the word "dominion." What the Hebrew writers of this passage would have meant, and what Western Christians would have understood it to mean until relatively recently, was not a "master/slave" relationship but something more like a "husband/wife" relationship. St. Paul explains Christian marriage in a similar fashion, saying, "Wives, be subject to your husbands," (Eph. 5:22). Of course, he balances this verse with the complementary commandment to husbands, "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her," (Eph. 5:25). The relationship is one of self-gift, each living for the other. In the same way, Man is lord of creation in the same way Christ is Lord of us, by sacrificing himself for it. It is a lordship of love and self-gift, our "dominion" is that of the servant, the caretaker, the Lover.

As Man fell, so fell the World. Our sin could not help but affect our most intimate companion, Nature itself. Scripture confirms this when it prophesies that the New Creation will be quite different from the one we currently inhabit:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord," (Isa. 11:6-9).

If the recreated order after the Parousia is perfect, and in it lions don't eat antelope, it must not be perfect for lions to eat antelope. We saw last post that all this ugliness can't have come from God. Where, then, did it come from? Us. By our sin, evil entered the world and corrupted the operation of Nature. Suddenly only the fittest can survive and things with fangs and claws and venom start popping up. But wait, the fossil record teaches us that fangs, claws, and venom predate Man. It turns out, then, that we just complicated matters and death and destruction entered into the world another way.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Part Three to be found here.

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part One

Here's the deal... Notwithstanding the heartfelt claims of many a wrongheaded scientist or misguided animal lover, there are many creatures which, just... Well, they're not pretty. For example:

the naked mole rat,

the aye-aye,

and the elephant seal bull.

This just can't be what things are supposed to look like. Bottom line, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. That is to say, while it is true that we receive our standards of beauty from cultural and environmental conditioning, these standards themselves are not arbitrary. Here's why:

All things that exist receive their existence from something else. We received existence from our parents, they from their parents, and so on. Keep going and it all gets traced back to the Big Bang (if you believe in the Big Bang, which I do). But the Big Bang had to be caused by something. Basically, you can't keep going on forever. Eventually there has to be a First Cause that is itself un-caused by anything else, an Unmoved Mover, from which every other thing that exists received (and is currently receiving) its existence. This we call God, (cf. Acts 17:28).

Okay. So everything that exists comes ultimately from God. What about evil? If evil exists, then it must come from God too. Thankfully, it doesn't. Evil is the lack of good. You see, "the Good" is what is desirable. But God is the ultimate cause of everything that is desirable. As a result, he must be the ultimate definition of all those desirable qualities. In other words, God is not only the best thing, he is Goodness itself, in all its forms. "None is good but God alone," (Luke 18:19). All other beings are only good insofar as they participate and share in his supreme goodness.

One of the forms of goodness is beauty, for we all desire beauty. There is, then, an ultimate standard of beauty, Beauty himself, against which all other beautiful things must be judged. Ugliness is the lack of beauty, and boy is there plenty of that to go around. How, then, do you end up with animals like those above that were supposedly created by the supremely good and beautiful God? You don't. God didn't create them.

Look forward to the rest of this series in which we shall journey through the most disgustingly horrifying animals Nature has to offer and discuss a possible explanation for how they could have gotten here.

UPDATE: Part Two to be found here.