If Christians widen their world picture to include intelligent aliens, the next questions are unavoidable: Do the ETs have souls? Do they need salvation?
Science-fiction writer James Blish (1921–1975) pondered those questions in A Case of Conscience, which won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel of 1959. In it, a Jesuit missionary to a lizardlike alien race suffered a crisis of faith when he realized that the aliens seemed not to need salvation, never having suffered original sin. In 1996, Mary Doria Russell published The Sparrow, a multiple-award-winning novel about another Jesuit priest confronting the theological implications of first contact with sentient aliens. Believe it or not, the movie starring Brad Pitt is expected in 2010.
If ETIs have souls and need salvation, the next question all but asks itself. In 2003, previous Vatican Observatory director George Coyne wrote: “God chose a very specific way to redeem human beings. . . . He sent his only son, Jesus, to them. . . . Did God do this for extraterrestrials?”
Current Vatican Observatory director Jose Gabriel Funes got his job by not saying anything Father Coyne said, and, in his much-ballyhooed Osservatore Romano interview, Funes declared that “Jesus incarnated once and for all. The incarnation is a unique and non-repeatable event.” (How does he know?) Mid-twentieth century English Catholic divine E.L. Mascall (1905–1993) had the opposite view, arguing that if God had made multiple races of sentient beings, each would need its own incarnation and salvific sacrifice. The English Quaker poet-composer Sydney Carter (1915–2004) even penned “Every Star Shall Sing a Carol,” a 1961 Christmas hymn that envisioned other mangers and even other crosses on other worlds: “Who can tell what other cradle / High above the milky way / Still may rock the King of heaven / On another Christmas day? . . . Who can count how many crosses / Still to come or long ago / Crucify the King of heaven? / Holy is the name I know.”
So, to borrow a phrase from Templeton Prize recipient Paul Davies, does Jesus “take on little green flesh to save little green men?” The question has been debated longer than you might think. Thomas Paine pondered it in part one of The Age of Reason (1794)! Apparently speculation about extraterrestrial beings—and how Jesus might save them—was then in vogue. Paine ridiculed the notion that “the Son of God” might “have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death.” He thought the idea was so ludicrous that whether they knew it or not, people who seriously believed in extraterrestrial beings could not logically also be Christians.
For whatever it’s worth, my own science-fiction novel Galactic Rapture presented an ironic future in which the Roman Catholic Church endeared itself to a faintly addle-pated galactic civilization by preaching the very idea Paine scorned: in the theology of “serial incarnation,” an endlessly shuttling Cosmic Christ met a different ghastly end on world after world, and for a fat fee the church would send a panel of cardinals to your planet to tell you which (if any) of its historic holy men was a true incarnation.
Perhaps the last word should belong to Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006), scientist, theologian, and Templeton Prize recipient: “Does not the mere possibility of extraterrestrial life render nonsensical all the superlative claims made by the Christian church about the significance” of Jesus?"
Does it not, indeed?
—Tom Flynn
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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