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.

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.

Past, Present, and Future

Light (whatever it is) travels at 186,282 miles per second. It's fast. Right? The mean distance from the Earth to the Sun is 92,955,807.3 miles. This means that, on average, it takes light emitted by the Sun about 8.32 minutes to reach our pupils. In other words, the Sun could have exploded 8.32 minutes ago and we would just be finding out.

Am I the only one who is really freaked out by this? If you think about it, we can extend this principle to every last thing we can see. For example, if I ride the elevator to the top of the Omni Hotel in downtown Fort Worth and look east I can see Reunion Tower in downtown Dallas 30.32 miles away. From this distance, I'm viewing the Reunion Tower of approximately .16 milliseconds ago.

Bottom line, even though the time differential remains relatively small, the world you are currently experiencing is actually the world of the past. To make the situation even worse, because the distance between you and specific objects in the world around you varies, each visible object is actually seen at a slightly different point in its existence. Add to all that the 30 odd milliseconds it takes for your brain to process sensory data it receives from your eyes, and the world suddenly seems quite a bit further away than it did before.

What does all this mean? It means that there can be no truly present and immediate perception of anything. One can never really know what is going on in the "now." Everything we perceive is actually the very recent past.

Does it matter? What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comment box.