How Can Little Green Men be made in the Image of God?

How Can Little Green Men be made in the Image of God?
Míceál Ledwith.

The new Director of the Vatican Observatory announced recently that it was all right to believe in extra-terrestrials, and that such a belief did not conflict with belief in God. I wasn't sure what to make of the statement since I couldn't figure out any way in which belief in aliens could ever be construed as counting against belief in God - quite the contrary. And while an interview with the Vatican Astronomer is a far cry indeed from an official Church statement, it was given some weight by the fact that it appeared in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

But a few days later the British Ministry of Defense announced a four-year program to release previously classified documents about UFOs into the National Archives. I wondered if it was just co-incidence. There is a time bomb ticking at the heart of all the main western religions and it has to do with the troubled subject of aliens. The vastness of even the visible universe can be realized by anybody nowadays by viewing the extraordinary images from the Hubble Telescope. And when you see that, it's very easy to realize the depth of arrogance needed to believe that the human race on this earth is the only intelligent form life in the entire universe, or that all life would have to occur in our form of it. To make matters worse we don't seem to be even living in prime real estate: we are situated in the very boondocks of what is itself a comparatively rural galaxy. Oh for the happy times of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, when the only issue that troubled the Church was whether the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa.

It's a public secret that reported sightings of UFOs and the dramatic quality of them has escalated over the past few years. From time to time rumors circulate that authoritative statements on the subject from major world governments is anticipated, not all of those rumors coming from conspiracy theorists. If this should ever happen it would pose enormous difficulties for all the main tenets of almost every major Christian belief system.

Most of the Christian churches and denominations have managed to turn their basic message into a proclamation that the creation as a whole is in a fallen state. From this condition it can be rescued only by God sending his only Son to suffer and die for our sins so as to appease God's anger against us. If the existence of aliens were ever to be undeniably proven the mind can only boggle at the extent of the enormous doctrinal updating the Churches would be faced with to accommodate that fact within their belief system's view of reality. Belief in aliens may not threaten belief in God, but it would certainly pose enormous difficulties for almost every other major belief held by the western religions. The matter of course would be made immeasurably more difficult for them since the main religions maintain their central doctrinal beliefs are perennially true and irreformable, and so cannot be updated.

However, let's take look at some of the main alterations that would have to be made to accommodate that fact that aliens exist and where they fit into the scheme of things, particularly into God's plan; what beliefs might have to be jettisoned or adapted, what new ones adopted?

If God is supposed to have "made man in his own image" then in whose image would the proverbial little green men from outer space be made? And what if we were to discover that our definition of life was hopelessly narrow and left no room for life forms so different from ours that they didn't need oxygen, hydrogen, or even a carbon base? And what if the claims of some scientists made earlier this month came true that within a decade, on the basis of some current research discoveries, they anticipate being able to artificially generate life, which would have no connection with any life form known on this earth? Maybe at that stage we would have to realize that the way we have couched the relationship of God to the origin of life is hopelessly dated and outmoded.

The western religions believe that life began as the result of a specific and personal divine intervention. Some minor groups even go so far as to maintain that this all happened during a particularly busy week for God about 6,000 years ago.

The Christian religions of the west believe that the fallen state of the race began on the fatal day a talking serpent cajoled that famous rib-woman into eating fruit from a magic tree.

It is equally believed that the only hope for the human race now is a rescue by Jesus, God's only Son incarnate. Jesus is seen as a savior, not just a savior but an universal savior, so that all access to God by rational and intelligent forms of life, and access to their destiny, is possible only through him, and through his agents here on earth whom he has sub-delegated.

But suppose for purposes of argument that one day aliens were proven beyond doubt to exist. Where would this scheme of things leave them? Or more to the point, where would it leave Jesus, or rather the Churches version of Jesus?

All of this imaginary scenario reminds of a situation five hundred years ago when a series of frenzied debates took place at the renowned University of Salamanca in Spain. The debates were provoked by the Conquistadores discovery of the many races of "Indians" in the New World of the Americas north and south. If every human being is supposed to have descended from our first parents, Adam and Eve, how did these people get there, since up to now at least Adam and Eve and their descendants had no means of crossing the great oceans? If they didn't descend from Adam and Eve how could they be human? And of course if they weren't human it was perfectly all right to plunder them of their vast treasures of gold and silver to swell the coffers of Europe. Fortunately the majority of the expert Spanish theologians eventually accepted that they were human. They left the historical problems of Adam's and Eve's transportation system to be solved by someone else at later date.

So how would extraterrestrials relate to the progenitors of the human race? If Adam and Eve had no boats capable of crossing the Atlantic most assuredly they had no interplanetary craft. Or how would they relate to Jesus, whom the entire Christian system wants us to accept came as a savior to rescue the human race from the worst effects of their ancestors' blunder?

In recent times many thinkers who contemplate qualities such as emotion, intelligence and memory in what we are pleased to term the sub-human forms of life on this earth, such as cats, dogs, horses, dolphins, whales, or birds, are willing to attribute to them something of spirit. It's often phrased: "They have a soul, but it's a lesser grade then the human soul." So, to use this terminology, if aliens did not descend from Adam and Eve, do they still have a soul, and is it a lesser, greater or equal grade of soul to that possessed by humans?

When the American "Indians" eventually became accepted as human, even though no one ever managed to explain how they had descended from Adam and Eve, it was in large part because Christian thinkers began to realize that the circumstances surrounding the origins of life and the origins of the race were far more complex than just what God supposedly did during that particularly busy week six thousand years ago.

Sophisticated literature that claims to have an alien origin is abundant these days. As in all other areas of life the fake is liable to outnumber the genuine by a hundred to one. But one thing is notable above all else in some of that literature, the high quality of its spirituality. The same of course is true in relation to much of the spiritual literature that forms the body of this earth's religious traditions. While in general subscribing to these exalted concepts what's remarkable about us is the degree to which we ignore them in practice. Indeed some of this allegedly alien literature assesses the human race as far more barbaric and less evolved than the aliens are. We have grown so unthinkingly accustomed to measuring everything from a human-centered standpoint that the bitterest pill of all would be having to accept that at least some extraterrestrials might turn out to be superior to us. That superiority to us of course should come as no surprise if they had a technology capable of taking them to this earth. At that point we should start to fervently hope that their spiritual development had kept pace with or surpassed their technological progress.

Where would all of this leave Jesus or indeed God, as they are envisaged in the Christian systems? Is Jesus now to be demoted from being the Universal Savior? Or did God separately also send him to those alien races in some appropriate local form, just as he came among us a human?

Maybe in pondering what would be the implications for our beliefs, if alien beings exist, we can manage to prune, refine and make those central everyday beliefs of ours more consonant with the facts. Maybe for far too long we have held them unquestioned within a system of knowledge about reality which was seriously deficient?

Maybe the truth is that Jesus did not come here to suffer and die for our sins to appease God's vengeance against us? Such an interpretation in any case doesn't do much for either Jesus or God. Indeed one might ask have we ever pondered the hugely negative impact such a picture has for how we imagine God to be, or Jesus to be? What kind of father would demand the suffering and death of his only son who was completely innocent? What kind of son would willingly comply with that sentence and at the same time never cease to speak of the profundity of God's love for us all, which is totally belied by that very picture?

The Greek tradition in Catholic theology has always maintained from the most ancient times that the work of Jesus had nothing to do with appeasement of God's anger and everything to do with the making divine of the human being. It's an insight of which most western theologians down the centuries have either been ignorant or have chosen to ignore.

What atrocities and suffering would have been avoided over the last thousand years if such a different view of Jesus and salvation had held more general sway?

Or perhaps the aliens' ancestors were more fortunate than ours and never had to ward off the unwelcome attentions of whatever their equivalent of that talking serpent would be. If that were so then they wouldn't need to be saved or redeemed.

If they did not need this, then by our theological standards they would have to be immortal or at least extremely long lived, since both the Old and the New Testaments regard death as the result of "the Fall," and not part of the original scheme of things at all.

The pictures of God and human destiny in western Christianity were eventually to become exclusively shaped within the context of sin and redemption, and now Christianity can no longer think outside that box it seems. As a result nowadays it seems almost impossible to think of Jesus, or indeed of Christianity itself, except in terms of the suffering and bloodied savior who struggled up the hill of Calvary to die for our sins. Consequently trying to envisage a race that would neither have "fallen" or be in need of redemption, actually smacks of the impious to us. Maybe part of the reason might be that we are beginning to suspect our own race might be in a similar position, and because we sense the catastrophic implications that would have for our major belief systems.

So if our picture of God and human destiny was totally shaped by the consciousness of sin and redemption how differently would an alien race, which had not "fallen," picture God? And would they worship such a God, or is worship just one other downside that comes from the context of our unfortunate history?

If God could and did create other worlds and beings to inhabit them, did he then also create another heaven for them, or do we have to share with them what we always thought was exclusively ours? Do they need their own Devil to test them, and do they have a private Purgatory, Limbo and Hell? And if they do not, why not?

But of course in this imaginative scenario which I put out here for the sake of pondering the ways in which some very deep matters have been formulated historically by the religions, the biggest question of all would have to be not whether there are other heavens, hells or saviors, or the lack of them, but why there is no mention at all, or even a hint, of any of this stuff in the Scriptures or in the doctrinal traditions? If aliens exist that is quite a problem.

Posing imaginative scenarios like this can often help us to prune and refine our beliefs and tell us where we have drifted off the mark in the ways in which we have responded to God knows what historical circumstances down through history. In many ways it's reminiscent of the bizarre and complicated system of cycles and epicycles which the Ptolemaic astronomers over time had to introduce into their theories to reconcile their belief in an earth-centered solar system with the actual rotation of the planets. When the Copernican theories came to be known, the entire paradigm changed and the complexity of the Ptolemaic system was seen to be useless and redundant. When too many qualifications, complications and mental gymnastics have to be introduced into any system its time to recognize that the real problem may well be that the original insights got the matter wrong. If that is the case no amount of subsequent modification of the original insights will ever rectify the matter.

It's only four hundred years since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for suggesting that God might have created other worlds on which intelligent beings would relate to God in their own way. If the reality of extraterrestrial life ever becomes impossible to deny then the Church will come to mourn bitterly the loss of that four hundred year head start which Bruno's invitation offered to it.

With all due respect to the new Vatican Astronomer the fact that belief in aliens doesn't threaten belief in God should be the least of his worries. Almost every other religious doctrine would be challenged to the very core by that fact. Furthermore, by interpreting the whole reality of God and Jesus so exclusively in terms of sin and redemption, the religions have maneuvered themselves into such a corner that effectively dealing with such a major doctrinal crisis would be almost impossible without jettisoning the majority of its system of beliefs. Maybe this semi-official interview in L'Osservatore, as well as the similar statements over several years past by the Vatican's official Exorcist, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, might well be the humble beginnings of an effort to avoid being too blindsided if the worst ever came to the worst.

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