I thought I’d give all y’all a little taste of the way in which Gus’ theological speculations about Life, the Universe, and Everything tend to anticipate what, two thousand years later, would be done all the time by science fiction and fantasy authors. This is from a book I’ve been working on concerning the Creed:
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The next difficulty with the Church’s proclamation that God has become man is that many post-modern people have a surprisingly physicalist view of our place in the cosmos.
One particularly crude argument is this: Man is infinitesimally small–indeed the entire solar system and even the entire Milky Way Galaxy is infinitesimally small–compared to the size of the universe. All kinds of illustrations of that infinitesimal smallness are produced and they make wonderful gee whiz graphics for popular science shows. The camera pulls back until the earth shrinks (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) to a “pale blue dot”.[1] The solar system becomes a pinpoint and vanishes into an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. Then the Milky Way itself becomes a mere indistinct smudge of light disappearing among trillions of other galaxies. Finally, the Physicalist Creed is invoked: “How could God become man? Man is utterly insignificant compared to the size of the Universe! The supposition that specks of protein on a dust mote are special is the height of human arrogance!”
People set real store by such thinking. But that’s not because they are hard-headed scientists looking at cold fact. It’s because they are poets who think they are philosophers. It’s because they can’t refrain from supposing they know that immense differences in physical size mean something. They have never internalized the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who drily replied, “It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.”[2]
In short, size doesn’t matter. In our sane hours, we realize this. A tall man does not have greater worth than a short one. Just because people are the size of ants compared to the Twin Towers does not mean the buildings were more important than the people killed in them on September 11, 2001. But when size differences become vast, the poet in us awakens and we start to forget these obvious facts.
Another odd manifestation of physicalism focuses on location rather than size. The argument goes, “We’re on a planet like billions of others, orbiting an average star about two-thirds of the way out on a spiral arm of an average galaxy. Why would anybody suppose God admires us so much as to become one of us?”
But the reality is, just as humans have dignity because they are creatures made in the image and likeness of God and not because of their size, so they have dignity no matter where they happen to be physically located. Such crude physicalism was put to bed three thousand years ago, when the king of Syria was rudely disabused of the notion that God was a God of the hills, but not of the plains (cf. 1 Kings 20:23). Neither is he a God of galaxies, but not of the earth. Wherever we may be physically, spiritually we are always at the center of God’s love, because (as the medievals were fond of saying) God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Yet to say this still often reveals lingering doubts in the postmodern mind. It can be summed up in the words, “What about the Vulcans?” Surely, say many people, there is something terribly provincial about the Christian conviction that humans are “special” in a 14-billion-year-old, 93-billion-light-year-wide universe. How dare the Church say we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that Jesus became man for us!
Prescinding from the fact already discussed in Chapter 2—that the Church has always acknowledged the existence of intelligent, non-corporeal creatures called “angels and demons”–corporeal, non-human, intelligent creatures called “extraterrestrials” will only pose a problem to the Faith if we know the answers to five questions:
1. Are there creatures on other planets? Answer: We don’t know. We don’t even know if we will ever know.
2. Do these entirely hypothetical creatures possess what we call “rational souls”: that is, the ability to know God?
3. Assuming rational creatures exist on other worlds, are they fallen? If not, there is no need for God to redeem them. An oyster on Altair IV cannot sin any more than ours do and therefore does not need salvation.
4. Assuming the answer to all the previous questions is “yes”, do we know our mode of redemption is what such hypothetical, rational, fallen creatures require for salvation? If not, then Christianity is not shown to be provincial. It merely shows that the Great Physician prescribes a particular medicine for the particular illness of a particular species.
5. Finally, (assuming unknowable affirmatives to all the previous questions) do we know redemption will always be denied to these hypothetical rational fallen creatures? A visit to earth ten thousand years ago would not have yielded much information to the outside observer about what God was up to in preparing the way for the Incarnation of the Son of God. Likewise, it would probably be extraordinarily difficult for human observers to tell what God has done, is doing, and will do toward the salvation of what are, after all, entirely hypothetical, rational, fallen creatures.
That said, I want to return to two assumptions that tend to underlie this whole line of criticism.
Chronological Snobbery
Chronological Snobbery is the notion that, because we have blenders and microwaves we are just naturally hundreds of years smarter than our ancestors. The appeals to astronomical knowledge and science fiction speculations as some kind of argument against the Incarnation presuppose that ancient Christians had no idea the universe was huge and never gave any thought to the question “Are there other intelligent forms of life and does God care about them?”
Both assumptions are demonstrably false. Ancients lived in a world without city lights. They could see the immensity of the universe from around their camp fires each night. An Iron Age poet wrote three thousand years ago:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you have established;
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4)
Similarly, though the ancients had no knowledge of other worlds in the sky beyond what they could see with the naked eye, they had copious travelers’ tales which performed exactly the same imaginative and speculative function that science fiction does for us today, inviting them to ponder exactly the same questions. So, for instance, St. Augustine explores the question of what we would today call “alien life” in the fifth century. Only he places his aliens on remote islands and strange shores instead of other planets:
Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah’s Sons.
It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history, have sprung from Noah’s sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks Pigmies: they say that in some places the woman conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvelous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities. But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful. [3]
It will be noted that Augustine is relying on the data to which he has access and so makes no distinction between dog-headed men (which turned out not to exist) and pigmies (which do). But that is unimportant. The point is that he recognizes that a rational soul is what matters, not how you look. For Augustine, there would be no doubt that Mr. Spock was “human”, whatever the color of his blood or the shape of his ears.
Indeed, the medieval mind would take this very far, even granting (in popular legend, not in the Church’s actual teaching) the rank of saint to a dog-headed man.
Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. ‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted.’ An angel of God came to him and said: ‘God has heard your prayer.’ The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.[4]
So far from being unimaginative bigots who thought you must look human to be human, medievals understood that a rational soul was all you needed. If you had that, you were human. And if human, then eligible for redemption–if you came of a race of sinners as we do.
[1] Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011)
[3] St. Augustine, The City of God XVI.8. (Available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120116.htm as of June 27, 2018.)
[4] For a fuller account of this and other curious medieval legends about non-human intelligent races, see Michael Flynn’s “St. Christopher, ET, and the Middle Ages” available at https://strangenotions.com/st-christopher-et-and-the-middle-ages/ as of June 27, 2018.
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looking forward to the book – I have a hunch that those who doubt we are special because of our size relative to the universe no doubt think that they, themselves, are special nonetheless…
There’s a proposition called the “anthropic principle”, also known as the “observation selection effect”.
From Wikipedia: It proposes that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing observers in the first place.
Proponents of the anthropic principle argue that it explains why the universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate intelligent life. If either had been significantly different, no one would have been around to make observations. Anthropic reasoning has been used to address the question as to why certain measured physical constants take the values that they do, rather than some other arbitrary values, and to explain a perception that the universe appears to be finely tuned for the existence of life.
It’s almost like they’re on to something, but then fail to properly apply it in other fields. The anthropic principle explains:
• Why we’re located on a relatively small rocky planet. One proposed example is that on a larger planet, our bodies would have to be disproportionately larger and perhaps too complex to evolve. Besides, how much larger planet are we talking about to make it comfortably large to call it significant? Significantly larger and it collapses under gravity and becomes a star.
• Why we’re orbiting a yellow dwarf instead of some super-large, super-important star. Large stars are (relatively) short-lived. The largest supergiant stars live so short and have such a high gravity that a protoplanetary disc around them can’t form before they collapse and explode. If a planet was miraculously formed around one such star (or a wandering planet was caught by the star’s gravity), it would need to be at a sufficient distance from the star to not be torn apart by tidal forces, and then it would be outside the habitable zone. The smaller the star, the less of a problem these pose, but another problem appears: giant stars have planets around them, potentially within the habitable zone, but the star is short-lived and may exist for too short for evolution to occur, even if it was orders of magnitude faster than presumed on Earth. So we’re back to the dwarf main-sequence star.
• Why we’re in the rim of the Milky Way instead of the core, and why the Milky Way is such an uninteresting galaxy. The closer to the galactic core, the more radiation the planet is exposed to. A planet closer to the core would be exposed to much higher radiation in which life as we know it wouldn’t exist. Besides radiation, charged particles (like the solar wind, only orders of magnitude greater) would scour the atmosphere from the planet. Finally, the closer to the core, the more nova and supernova events the planet is exposed to. A larger and/or denser galaxy poses the same problems even in its outer regions.
All this explains Earth’s underwhelming size and location. It is by necessity that it’s like this. Can other life exist? Life as we know it, yes, on another uninteresting planet like ours. Are such planets common? Science fiction writers believe they are. But it’s a paradox that no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere was ever found.
Wikipedia quotes Michael Frayn’s book “The Human Touch”:
“It’s this simple paradox. The Universe is very old and very large. Humankind, by comparison, is only a tiny disturbance in one small corner of it–and a very recent one. Yet the Universe is only very large and very old because we are here to say it is… And yet, of course, we all know perfectly well that it is what it is whether we are here or not.”
God is patient. He is timeless and can afford to wait billions of years for humanity to evolve. We weren’t created by Him so that He has worshipers, and yet if we *knew* that He Is, the only reasonable thing to do is worship Him.