God and Extra-Terrestrials

Kris forwards an article for MSNBC.com by Clara Moskowitz which raises an interesting question. The article is titled If Extraterrestrials Exist What About God?, and in it Moskowitz wonders how Christianity could reconcile the discovery with their doctrines of the incarnation and atonement:

The discovery of intelligent aliens would be mind-blowing in many respects, but it could present a special dilemma for the world's religions, theologians pondering interstellar travel concepts said Saturday.

Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.

In other words, "Did Jesus die for Klingons too?" as philosophy professor Christian Weidemann of Germany's Ruhr-University Bochum titled his talk at a panel on the philosophical and religious considerations of visiting other worlds.

According to Christianity, an historic event some 2,000 years ago was supposed to save the whole of creation," Weidemann said. "You can grasp the conflict."

Here's how the debate goes: If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God's creatures?

There are several things which might be said about this. First, despite the column's title the article itself has nothing to do with how the discovery of ETs would affect belief in the existence of God.

The article is really an attempt to show that the discovery of life, especially intelligent life, on other planets would be a serious problem not for theism but for Christian theism, but I don't know why it would.

Christians believe that God took on human flesh in order to save sinners on earth. What he chose to do about other beings in other worlds, or whether they even needed redemption, we have no way of knowing. All that matters to Christians is that he came to save us.

Perhaps, the New Testament image of the shepherd leaving the flock to seek out the one lost sheep has some significance here. It could be that the flock is comprised of beings throughout the universe (personally, I have my doubts about life forms elsewhere in the cosmos) and that mankind on earth is the one lost sheep. Who knows?

Weidemann doesn't think this very likely, however:

The principle of mediocrity — the idea that [our world] is most likely typical unless you have evidence to the contrary — casts doubt on this, he pointed out. "If there are extraterrestrial intelligent beings at all, it is safe to assume that most of them are sinners too," Weidemann said. "If so, did Jesus save them too? My position is no. If so, our position among intelligent beings in the universe would be very exceptional."

On what does he base his doubt? Apparently, he thinks it improbable that God would have done what He did on earth more than once:

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of Himself down to save each inhabited planet separately. However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, Weidemann calculated.

If God truly became corporeal and took human form when Jesus Christ was born, this wouldn't have been possible, Weidemann said.

I don't know why Weidemann thinks that an omnipresent, omnipotent Being, unbounded by space and time, couldn't manifest himself simultaneously in more than one place. If quantum particles can do it why couldn't the Creator of those particles do it?

Moreover, why could it not be, as Christians have traditionally believed, that the atonement of Christ in Jerusalem 2000 years ago redeemed the entire creation, not just earth?

If ETs are ever discovered, I don't think it would be a problem for Christianity, much less a dilemma. Rather it'd be a stunning revelation, one that would have great potential for helping us understand more about how the Creator acts in his creation.