UFOs Don’t Cancel Out Christianity

T here’s a scene in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel movie in which the popular atheist intellectual Neil deGrasse Tyson appears on a news program to explain how Superman’s arrival on Earth changes our species’ understanding of itself. Tyson’s lines in the film are a fairly representative sample of the vague and hazy Enlightenment-inflected assumptions that often substitute for an education in history these days:

We’re talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe. If you go back to Copernicus, when he restored the sun to the center of the known universe, displacing Earth, and you get to Darwinian evolution and you find out we’re not special on this Earth, we’re just one among other life forms. And now we learn that we’re not even special in the entire universe because there is Superman.

The familiar story, adapted in this instance to suit the plot of the movie, seems to go like this: In ages past, human beings, swayed by the benighted scepter of primitive religion, thought that they lived alone as the special and unique lords of creation at the geographic and symbolic center of a cozy, well-ordered, tailor-made universe. But when capital-S Science began its march through history, the superstitions of this anthropocentric cosmos were swept away. Copernicus displaced the Earth from its special location at the center of creation, Darwin displaced man’s special status as a creature qualitatively distinct from the lower animals, and then modern astronomy revealed just how infinitesimally small our planet is in relation to the vast and impersonal expanse of outer space.

Those who think of history as a narrative recording the progressive humiliation of homo religio often assume that the revelation of intelligent alien life would deal a final death blow to these religious pretensions. After all, if our ancient ancestors had had access to the knowledge we now have about the architecture of the cosmos, surely they would never have entertained the notion that the God of the universe could plausibly take a special interest in them? And if they’d further suspected that other intelligent life forms dwelled out there amid the starry firmament, then their belief in God’s special interest in our race would have become unsustainable, let alone any further belief they might have had in said deity’s identification with the children of Israel or with Jesus of Nazareth.

These speculations about how religious people would react to the revelation of alien life have become relevant again in light of the videos of UFOs recently released by the Pentagon. There has been a slew of articles debating the nature of these sightings, and some even touch on the potential religious ramifications of first contact. I’m inclined to think that Ezra Klein of the New York Times is right:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

More interesting, however, than the question of how religious people might react to alien life is the question of how we ever came to believe that they’d struggle to assimilate such a discovery to their worldview in the first place. The just-so story that Tyson tells — of mankind’s gradual relinquishing of his initially high estimate of himself — finds no support in the historical record, so why has it become so widespread?

It takes no great feat of historical scholarship to falsify it, for one thing. It’s well known that the most widely used and broadly accepted work of astronomy in late antiquity was Ptolemy of Alexandria’s Almagest, written in the second century a.d. In Book I, chapter 5, Ptolemy writes that “the Earth, in relation to the distance between itself and the nearest star, has no appreciable size and must therefore be treated as a mathematical point.” In other words, he — and, by extension, his readership — was just as aware as we are of how tiny our planet is in relation to the vastness of space.

At around the same time and in the same city, the Christian theologian and rhetorician Origen set about writing his many voluminous works, always taking for granted the notion that the cosmos is populated with many intelligent beings, most of whom have much more important responsibilities than those of humans. As the scholar Alan Scott writes, “like all his contemporaries, Origen thinks that the universe was filled with rational, spiritual beings who had powers and responsibilities which were much greater than anything in the human race.”

It’s true that the ancients thought the Earth to be the center of the cosmos, but this was not as self-aggrandizing an opinion as is often portrayed. First of all, this idea is a product of Aristotle, not of the Bible. It was accepted as the best scientific theory of its day, but it had religious connotations, too, though not the ones we might imagine. Aristotelians thought that the farther one ascended up through the heavenly spheres, the closer one was to the immutable, eternal God. Conversely, the Earth, with all its base matter and changeableness, was thought to be something like the sewer, or even toilet, of the universe — a most unenviable place, and certainly nothing to boast of.

It was, furthermore, Christianity that finally loosened the grip of this Aristotelian model over the mind of Western man. The sixth-century Christian John Philoponus, for instance, made certain clairvoyant criticisms of the Aristotelian model that the assumptions of his Greek pagan contemporaries rejected axiomatically. He argued against the immutability of the stars, he denied that the realm above the moon was eternal, he argued that the Earth and outer space are similarly changeable, that the appearance of changelessness in the stars is a result of huge temporal and spatial intervals of movement, and that the sun is made of fire, not dissimilar to earthly fire. To Philoponus, all of creation both on Earth and in space was the work of a single creator, and the same rational laws therefore applied across the whole universe. As David Bentley Hart writes:

Philoponus was able to cast off metaphysical dogma and apply himself to a rigorous reconsideration of the science of his time not despite but because of his Christianity and his consequent impatience for any “superstitious” confusion between material objects and gods. He also hypothesized that the space above the atmosphere might be a vacuum. He argued, against Aristotle, that light moves, and that the eye receives it simply according to the rules of optical geometry. And, most important perhaps, he rejected the Aristotelian dynamic theory of motion and proposed in its place a theory of kinetic impetus.

Because of the Christianization of the heavens that thinkers such as Philoponus (and later Copernicus) effected over time, the old,Greek idea of a universe populated by immortal spirits soon gave way to the more familiar notion of aliens as we think of them today: other embodied, rational creatures living on other planets. By the 15th century, the theologian Nicholas of Cusa could write, “We surmise that none of the other regions of the stars is empty of inhabitants.” Cusa also argued that the Earth is likely unexceptional given the number of worlds that probably exist: “The Earth is a noble star which has a light and a heat and an influence that are distinct from that of all other stars, just as each star differs from each other star with respect to its light, its nature, and its influence.”

By the end of the Middle Ages, the Christian approach to cosmology was different from what’s often portrayed. It was surprisingly humble in its understanding of man’s role in the cosmic drama and largely relaxed about the possibility of a populated universe. Meanwhile, Christians in the field of astronomy, having inherited from the Greeks an utterly wrongheaded Aristotelian starting point, made remarkable scientific strides.

The question remains, then: Why is the historical narrative of religious man’s gradual unmasking as a superstitious lunatic so prevalent?

The answer lies in the fact that we have inherited our mode of historical thinking from the Enlightenment. It was those thinkers, and not our ancient ancestors, who crafted a self-aggrandizing and totally fictitious historical narrative that they then wrapped around their own pretensions. To call one’s own age an Enlightenment necessarily casts a pall of darkness over the ages preceding. Believing that their mastery of the scientific method marked the first and only real discontinuous break in human history, a break that would usher humans into the broad, sunlit uplands of a rational utopia, the Voltaires, Diderots, and Paines of the world injected a kind of chronological snobbery into the bloodstream of Western civilization that persists to this day. They predicted a future that would always and everywhere invalidate and undermine the values of the past. Many still hold on to this belief implicitly, with the conclusion being that since Christendom is of the past and first contact of the future, the latter must ineluctably bury the former under the sands of time.

The irony of it all is that the cosmic parochialism and pretension that we habitually ascribe to our distant ancestors is all our own. How else could we be so oblivious to the casual self-assurance with which they contemplated a reality that we imagine would ruin them? No, Ezra Klein’s observation is correct. The discovery of intelligent life would do much more damage to materialism than to theism, lengthening as it would the already impossibly long odds of rational self-consciousness emerging as the product of material accidents. And if, indeed, extraterrestrial beings do visit us someday and look into the history of our race’s speculations concerning them, they might be surprised to find that amid all the paranoid claimants to abductee status and the cultish conspiracy theorists here on Earth, it was the clergymen and literati of late antiquity who contemplated their arrival with a self-confident, almost blasé cosmic ease.