From Brandon Ambrosino
here. A big taste, taking us back to the late 18th Century:
Thomas Paine famously tackled this question in his 1794 Age of
Reason, in a discussion of multiple worlds. A belief in an infinite
plurality of worlds, argued Paine, “renders the Christian system of
faith at once little and ridiculous and scatters it in the mind like
feathers in the air”. It isn’t possible to affirm both simultaneously,
he wrote, and “he who thinks that he believes in both has thought but
little of either.” Isn’t it preposterous to believe God “should quit the
care of all the rest” of the worlds he’s created, to come and die in
this one? On the other hand, “are we to suppose that every world in the
boundless creation” had their own similar visitations from this God? If
that’s true, Paine concludes, then that person would “have nothing else
to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of
deaths, with scarcely a momentary interval of life”.
In a
nutshell: if Christian salvation is only possible to creatures whose
worlds have experienced an Incarnation from God, then that means God’s
life is spent visiting the many worlds throughout the cosmos where he is
promptly crucified and resurrected. But this seems eminently absurd to
Paine, which is one of the reasons he rejects Christianity.
But
there’s another way of looking at the problem, which doesn’t occur to
Paine: maybe God’s incarnation within Earth’s history “works” for all
creatures throughout the Universe. This is the option George Coyne,
Jesuit priest and former director of the Vatican Observatory, explores
in his 2010 book Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life
and the Theological Implications.
“How could he be God and leave
extra-terrestrials in their sin? God chose a very specific way to redeem
human beings. He sent his only Son, Jesus, to them… Did God do this for
extra-terrestrials? There is deeply embedded in Christian theology… the
notion of the universality of God’s redemption and even the notion that
all creation, even the inanimate, participates in some way in his
redemption.”
There’s yet another possibility. Salvation itself
might be exclusively an Earth concept. Theology doesn’t require us to
believe that sin affects all intelligent life, everywhere in the
Universe. Maybe humans are uniquely bad. Or, to use religious language,
maybe Earth is the only place unfortunate enough to have an Adam and
Eve. Who is to say our star-siblings are morally compromised and in need
of spiritual redemption? Maybe they have attained a more perfect
spiritual existence than we have at this point in our development.
As Davies notes, spiritual thinking requires an animal to be both
self-conscious and “to have reached a level of intelligence where it can
assess the consequences of its actions”. On Earth, this kind of
cognition is at best a few million years old. If life exists elsewhere
in the Universe, then it’s very unlikely that it’s at the exact same
stage in its evolution as we are. And given the immense timeline of the
existence of the Universe, it’s likely that at least some of this life
is older, and therefore farther along in their evolution than we.
Therefore, he concludes, “we could expect to be among the least
spiritually advanced creatures in the Universe.”
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