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. [1]
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.
More tomorrow.
[1] St. Augustine, The City of God XVI.8. (Available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120116.htm as of June 27, 2018.)
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9 Responses
Correct on all counts, I believe. It reminds me of an account I once read that may very well be apocryphal, but it illustrates your point. During the Middle Ages, someone once asked a learned priest, “Could a satyr be baptized and therefore enter the bliss of Heaven?”
The priest rightly replied, “Show me a satyr. Then we’ll talk.”
Which is the correct answer. Myself? I think the odds of life beyond Earth are pretty good. Our Creator being a creator, I suspect that not only is there life in the cosmos, I suspect it is rather abundant. Is any of that life visiting us? I have never seen any confirming evidence. But who knows? If there is intelligent spiritual life out there, it would not surprise me at all if one of their commandments is: “Avoid Earth at all costs. Those people are trouble.”
We don’t know if there’s life elsewhere, and if it’s life as we know it. For what we know of physics, life needs a certain set of environmental qualities and a sufficient amount of time to arise.
Too much radiation and basic chemical compounds break down, so life is impossible in the galactic core or anywhere in a large/significant galaxy, or anywhere in an active radiation zone. But sparse resources mean that there’s no chemistry for life to arise, so very old star systems won’t contain higher atomic numbered elements, so they’re likewise excluded.
If a star’s life is too short, planets may not have time to form around it, and if they do, there may not be enough time for life to arise before the star’s life ends, and even then, its variability will make it impossible for life to adapt to the changing environment. If it’s too long, the low activity means there may not be enough energy for life, especially higher forms of life, to be sustained.
And these are just two examples of the required match for life to just work.
It’s not a coincidence that we’re located in a remote arm of a galaxy and orbiting a yellow dwarf star.
As for the other point, science fiction authors love to dabble in extraterrestrial life which is sufficiently intelligent to grasp and judge* all our concepts and sufficiently remote that they haven’t been exposed to them, so their judgment of those is completely and objectively impartial. Especially if those races are older and wiser (or at least accumulated more knowledge). Oh, or if there’s a progenitor race that *actually* created life in the universe.
*) This is the important thing: It gives the author an air of impartiality and allows him to impartially judge humanity and call our concepts (and especially religion) outdated, obsolete, silly, tribal, etc. To the reader, it’s not the author, but those more advanced aliens meting out judgment.
There are hardly any stories where aliens found humans to be wiser than them and where humans were scholars who would teach other races our values, morals, culture, art and so on. They’d be ridiculed for trying to turn humans into Mary Sues. (Although there’s a fairly popular recent branch of sci-fi that can be summed up as “humans are space orcs” and thus very different from the higher enlightened races, but it’s only our physical attributes and sometimes the tribality which sets us apart from the aliens, but humans aren’t shown to be morally superior to other races even where one of those distinguishing values is self-sacrifice).
“Humans are space Orcs”
Hahahahaha –Nah, not in general. Yes for Nazis and Zionists and Epstein-ish perverts.
We just watched the first two LOTR movies on my husband’s astounding Black Friday acquisition. I can’t unsee those life sized Orcs.
@tacoanybody: I know what you mean.
But look up the trope. But those are the *friendly* orcs that the people are referring to. After fantasy grew to be more inclusive and tabletop RPG rules followed with “no default alignment/no «always-XY» alignment”, the world got filled with renegade Drows, orcs, trolls, werewolves, vampires, and on the flip side, anti-paladins and the like.
It’s part of the postmodern practice of lampshading everything and forcing everything away from the extremes of a black and white duality and into a grey grade between them.
It does get tedious. At least a vampire used to be sentient, but forced to drink blood or perish, so there was an opportunity for a moral dilemma.
But authors are sidestepping the question of morality by allowing vampires to partake in the blood of any warm-blooded creature, other authors gave vampires ethical choices for obtaining blood, still others used a scenario akin to “Dexter” where a vampire only ever kills and feeds on evil people.
Where a vampire is sentient, werewolves are only semi-sentient and used to be completely feral when changed, with some having a vague recollection of what happened in their wild form and others being completely oblivious to the change.
But the new_and_improved werewolves are cool now. They’re super strong, they’re more like fully domesticated dogs with intelligence and sentience. Plus, they have great hair.
That gets even more tedious. There’s a diatribe comparing LGBT people in society to “werewolves in our midst” where the person presenting the narrative only uses this to open the conversation: “There’s a werewolf in town!”
People are supposed to respond to it. The only correct answer is: “So what, let them be.” A slightly less correct answer is: “Let’s find out who that is and let’s help them live with it.”
The incorrect answers are: “Let’s look for a cure for it” and “Let’s find out who that is to banish them or put them out of their misery.”
You’re supposed to forget all you know about werewolves from literature and pretend that everyone and everything is good by default and incapable of harming others.
I tried to engage, genuinely thinking they’re misguided when giving that as an example, pointing out that werewolves in literature aren’t necessarily evil, but they can’t control themselves when transformed. Their response: “These werewolves are different and you’re supposed to either be in the club where everybody knows that or you’re supposed to be curious and find that out.”
To which I replied that if that’s the case, then don’t use a well-known example from fantasy whose properties are well-known and it’s dangerous to have it around. Find one that’s neutral or invent another creature,
To which they replied that it’s supposed to be a creature that everyone assumes to be evil/dangerous and they need to change people’s opinions of them.
I replied that they’re doing a disservice to their own community and that they should rethink using an example from fantasy that has no historical analogue and used to be presented as a tragic being that can’t control itself. If they used an example from history, they could demonstrate that everyone was wrong about it and it’s clear that the attitude needed to change to adapt to the example, not the example to the attitude.
To which there was a flurry of supposedly commonly-known examples from fantasy literature, of which I’m only familiar with Angua from the Discworld series, but I argued that Discworld is specifically a parody rather than “serious” or “high” fantasy which ponders real philosophical or ethical questions in a fictional setting.
I convinced exactly zero people and got downvoted to oblivion.
Circling back to orcs: They’re sympathetic now. And humans as space orcs are not the murderous and vile kind.
Given the vastness of the universe, it’s likely that there is life out there. Intelligent life? Well, given human behavior in the 20th century (WW1, WW2, nuclear weapons, Holocaust, etc), we should be careful about classifying other life forms as not intelligent.
Mark, you need to read James White’s “Genocidal Healer” of the Sector General Hospital series. (I wonder if he’s read St. Augustine.) His aliens and humans have one thing in common – caring for the sick of all intelligent beings in the known Galaxy. This particular one in the series – I think Augustine would be very pleased with it. James White was a Catholic born in Belfast.
@A Guy, That is fascinating. I really dislike how the people who present a different idea about interesting topics often are ganged up on by people who behave like pack animals. You might have actually convinced some but they are too timid to break from the mob.
I think the “misunderstood monster” reveals a deep need in humans to forgive themselves and be forgiven. This is good to a point I suppose–but there comes a point when it is enabling of bad behavior.
I have found that ideas can be dangerous or loathsome on paper, but the people who embody those ideas who have *good qualities* have helped me to see the world in shades of gray. In particular, a trans kid and a friend from the projects helped me to see things differently–and neither was an upstanding citizen. On the other hand, living a sheltered life enabled me to be unkind even while embodying what a lot of people would have called an amazing Catholic life.
Now I see things almost reversed–some of the people in my world of privilege quite possibly are (nearly) monsters. They say and do monstrous things but cloak themselves in piety. When they indulge in what they would call mortal sin in others, they always have an excuse for it–it is always the fault of the other. Unconfessed sin can’t be forgiven. This worries me. Pride blinds us.
I get your need to be more of a purist. It makes things too messy, and in uncharted territory otherwise. Also, it might be a defect in my formation that makes me want someone as loathsome as Hitler to be saved some day. Maybe it’s because nothing overtly diabolical has happened to the people I love. I read this article about Epstein threatening this woman and her unborn twins with a witch doctor curse, and another one about him threatening to hurt the little brother of Virginia Giuffre. That just makes my blood boil. Who but a complete monster hurts children?–Needless to say, I can’t say I’m hoping for his salvation. Sigh.
Hitler wasn’t even as vile as he’s made out to be. He’s just fairly recent and World War II history is very well-documented. But people in Africa are already calling their children Adolph Hitler, and not unknowingly — they know that Europeans feared him, so in their eyes, he’s a hero. I wish I was kidding.
When you look at it this way, it becomes much clearer that we’re romanticizing villains from the past and even the worst ones get a chance to be rehabilitated even when they don’t deserve it through the eyes of history. Genghis Khan is an excellent example. Historians are pointing out how he carved out a great empire and how his empire was more efficient than northern China which he conquered. And so on, completely forgetting the small detail of killing, raping and pillaging and mass genocide of civilizations, nations and communities which we’re not even fully aware of. And he’s called controversial with redeeming features.
It’s difficult to tell whether Hitler will get exonerated by historians and if people won’t protest because all the good he did was still oriented towards the goal of war and making a pure society by excluding all alien element.
And people forget the much worse Nazis by focusing on Hitler. Same goes for all other villains. This is an excellent account:
https://pl.quora.com/Jaki-fakt-historyczny-zaszokowałoby-większość-ludzi/answer/Vincent-Guźniczak
It’s in Polish, but it should be easy to machine translate to English and not lose much in translation. It shows how people running unchecked can commit great evils which then gets pinned on one or two names.
And I’m hoping for the salvation of all people because no matter how vile for a simple reason: Jesus suffered for them and every condemned soul is a droplet of Blood, a second of suffering that is wasted. That is reason enough. If you’re not convinced yet, every condemned soul makes the Devil happy. I don’t want him to be happy.
I almost clicked “Reply”, but wanted to address one more thing:
> I think the “misunderstood monster” reveals a deep need in humans to forgive themselves and be forgiven. This is good to a point I suppose–but there comes a point when it is enabling of bad behavior.
And yet disturbingly many people are unable to forgive others, as exemplified by “Once a cheater, always a cheater”, so wayward spouses do not deserve forgiveness. I realize a lot of people were hurt by their significant others and carry a heavy burden. But then these same people will readily excuse an ex-spouse who said: “I want a divorce” before proceeding to immediately cheat, because the second the “D-word” was said, the marriage was over and it doesn’t need to be justified, mended or made official. It’s no wonder that “taking a break” from a relationship (no matter whether the break lasted a year, a month or two hours and no matter if the other person was blindsided by this) means that cheating cannot occur.
And I wish I was kidding and this was just cheap rage bait content.
These are the people who are actually the most in danger of being condemned. Not the Hitlers or Stalins or even Epsteins, no matter how vile, but those who are not ready to even consider forgiveness.
And about Epstein, what he did is vile, of course. And it would be vile whether he made it to a child or an adult. But I feel like this has to be said: age of consent varies widely over the world. It even varies within the United States.
People in some states will consider a 17 year 11 month old teenager a child and her boyfriend who’s two months older will be called a pedophile. Whereas people in other states will consider a 16 year 1 month old person an adult who is able to consent to sex with a 40 year old while fully comprehending the consequences. (Still others will say that 21 year olds are still children who should be protected and if they are dating a “much older” person, they are a victim of a predator; the “much older” person could be a 26 year old.) And that doesn’t even begin to address *developed* *western* countries where age of consent is 14, or as low as 13 (Argentina is still considered developed, right?).
Yes, I will fall back on the idea that we should *will the good of the other* that “all might be saved” but that might mean that someone needs to stay in purgatory for a really. long. time. until they have made up for the horror imposed upon anyone and everyone as all sins are communal in nature.
This brings up something that I have read, and am not sure about, given the source was a Catholic website that I can no longer remember the name of, but was supposedly well documented. The Jesuits performed the rite. It took place somewhere in the midwest, and required I think a month, if not longer. An an entire covent was involved as they had to take turns attending, pray, fast etc. Supposedly the person was possessed by a very high level demon/other devils and *humans* as well. This implies that the demons and humans were actively seeking respite from the state that they deserved. Remember when Jesus talked about souls that he’d exorcised needing to be careful about amending their ways, lest the devils come back with companions? Remember the devils in the demoniac that begged to be sent into the pigs? There were so many of them! (For we are legion–*thousands* of them..)
This leads me to believe that many people who do evil things have parasitic beings in them who are entirely unrepentant. This doesn’t excuse the host for what they do, but it does show that the displaced beings that inhabit them are clearly unrepentant and don’t care if they add sin to their own sin that condemned them to such a state.
I don’t know how mortal sin like adultery is dealt with by God, but I believe that it is truly very evil as it defaces what is supposed to be very holy, and the image of the Trinity. I also realize that some poor individuals are so broken by their upbringing they are incapable of contracting a true and authentic marriage. But I have also seen people humbled by such things that were able to amend themselves and form a holy bond. Two of my siblings, with many Catholic children are embroiled in ugly divorces right now. In both cases, money and power are playing significant roles. Their children are traumatized. I can only pray for all of them –embrace some/avoid others. It’s very. ugly.