See also past Handiwork and   
George Murphy's new book, Pulpit Science Fiction   

Is Anybody Out There?

Some years ago a prominent science fiction writer called the biblical idea that humanity is created in the image of God a time bomb ticking at the foundations of Christianity. We will find that there is intelligent life beyond Earth, and the fact that we are not unique will be a severe blow to the Christian conception of our place in the world.

Not a New Idea
We may think that such claims are recent, born in an age of space exploration and searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials (ETs). Actually discussions about the possibility of life on other worlds go back to the early days of modern science and have roots in the Middle Ages and antiquity. It may surprise people that well before the space age some Christians argued strongly for many inhabited planets. In 1854 the Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster wrote a book titled More Worlds than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian.

The idea of a plurality of worlds was widely accepted. There are other planets in our solar system, and what is their purpose if not to be a home for living things? The telescope has revealed millions of stars beyond our system. What could be their purpose if not to light and heat planets, which in turn must house life as Earth does? This sort of argument used by Brewster and others seems strange to us now because we don’t think purpose can be read out of scientific observations in such an obvious way.

By no means were all proponents of a plurality of inhabited worlds orthodox Christians. In the heyday of Deism the concept could be turned against Christian concepts of incarnation and salvation. If there are millions of inhabited worlds, why would God have become human on just one, and how could Calvary have any significance for a planet circling Sirius? Such arguments were, for example, a major part of Thomas Paine’s scathing attack on traditional religion.

One Incarnation?
There is no problem with the idea that God could have created intelligent beings on other planets, whether immediately or through evolution. It’s the incarnation and a belief that “all things” are to be reconciled to God through the cross (Colossians 1:20) that provide challenges. As I pointed out in an earlier column, what we know of terrestrial evolution suggests that sin is virtually inevitable for intelligent species, so all such species would be in need of salvation.

But perhaps we’re getting ahead of the story. Are there any intelligent ETs?

Today we seem to be in a better position to answer that question than were people two hundred years ago, and we don’t have to rely on arguments from design or analogy. We can write a formula, the Drake equation, to estimate the number of “advanced technical civilizations” in our galaxy today. It involves such factors as the probabilities for a star to have a planetary system, for life to evolve on a suitable planet, for such life to become intelligent, and the average lifetime of a technical civilization.

Some of those factors can be estimated. Astronomers have detected planetary systems around other stars, and it is likely that some include Earth-like planets. But we don’t know all the factors in the Drake equation and aren’t even able to make good guesses at some. After all, we know only one planet on which life has evolved. The equation is correct, but we don’t know all the numbers to put into it to get a number out!

Nevertheless, many people think it likely that the galaxy abounds with ETs. Science fiction and fear of a universe empty of other life encourage this belief. (Atheists and agnostics do get lonely sometimes.) But there are more solid arguments. Life on Earth developed relatively quickly after the planet formed, so it is reasonable to think that similar things would happen on similar planets, of which there are probably a lot in a galaxy with a hundred billion stars.

But there are counterarguments. The simplest is “Where are they?” Why have we detected no radio transmissions (let alone starships) from advanced technical civilizations if they exist? And if (as “anthropic principles” suggest) the universe had to have the physical parameters that it does in order for intelligent life to evolve once, it is unlikely that such life has evolved very often.

We are far from a definitive answer here and may continue to be unless we receive the type of signal that Jodie Foster’s character got in the film Contact. This does not relieve the church of the need to think about the challenges such a discovery would bring. If we get unambiguous evidence for ETs, people will want to know what we have to say about it. Could we still make sense of the universal claims about Christ like those in Colossians?

The popularity of pluralistic religious ideas on Earth might encourage us just to drop such claims. Maybe Jesus is the savior only of terrestrials. But, all theological problems with such a view aside, it seems too much like the easy way out. We ought to look at other possibilities.

What about multiple incarnations? There may be ways to state such a concept that are not theologically objectionable, but, as C. S. Lewis said, the assembly-line image of ET species waiting in line for their turn is offputting.

Stretching Tradition
People have tried various ways of understanding how the saving work of Christ may be made available to those outside the church on Earth. One, which goes back to Justin Martyr in the second century, appeals to the preincarnate Christ, or “unfleshed Logos.” Justin argued that the heathen who had lived according to reason participated in the Logos and thus were Christians even if they had seemed to be atheists. The idea has some attraction, but it is difficult to combine it with the strong Lutheran emphasis on God in the flesh and a theology of the cross.

A distinctively Lutheran concept may be helpful here: the belief in the omnipresence of Christ’s humanity that was developed in connection with Eucharistic doctrine. How this could be related to the salvation of ETs is far from obvious, but it seems like an idea worth exploring further.

Or Christ may be made present to the inhabitants of other planets in the same way that this happens for people on Earth today — through the ministry of Word and Sacrament. If this is the case, the church is called to a genuinely cosmic mission, as Ephesians 3:10, appropriately demythologized, suggests. But such a mission has to be freed from the types of cultural, political, and economic imperialism that have too often been associated with missionaries.

This is not a front-burner issue for the church. But if someone in your confirmation class asks about it, it is good to have devoted some thought to the matter.

Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Dover, 1999), and Steven J. Dick, Life on Other Worlds: The 20th Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate (Cambridge, 1998), cover scientific and religious discussions in their historical context. Though dated in some ways, Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden-Day, 1966) is a delightful collaboration.

George L. Murphy, an ELCA pastor and physicist living in Tallmadge, Ohio, is an adjunct faculty member at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus and a pastoral associate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron. His e-mail address is gmurphy@raex.com.