The Pope, the Scientist, the Fundamentalist, and the Aliens

It was a bizarre trifold juxtaposition, even by the standards of bizarrity that mark our Bizarro species.  Three different inputs cranked through my consciousness, all in one week.

On the one hand, there was my first encounter with the statement on the part of Pope Francis that he was open to both welcoming an encounter with alien beings and potentially baptizing them, should they be up for it.  I must have missed it the first time around, but there it was, from the mouth of the Pope. Sure, God loves aliens.  "Who am I to close doors," he said.  Honestly, if anyone could pull off such an encounter successfully, I think Papa Frankie could.

On the other hand, there was the statement by Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who in a recent talk reiterated his deep fear that an encounter with alien life would be catastrophic for the human race.  Alien contact should be avoided, and humankind should be more careful as it shouts our presence into the void.

We must be wary, Stephen Hawking warns, for out there in the deep there may be beings whose intellects are so far beyond our own that they will make us significantly less impressed by Stephen Hawking.

And on the other hand, there was Ken Ham, the lumpenfundamentalist responsible for the Creation
Museum, who kinda sorta sides with Hawking on the "don't mess around with the aliens" thing.  I know, that's three hands, but bilateral symmetry is such a terrestrial chordate conceit.  Ken Ham believes the search for alien life is a waste of time, because, well, the universe is only 6,000 years old and change, and was made only for humans.

If there are aliens, they're all going to hell anyway, because Jesus only came to save humans.  That Ken Ham's "God" would create a universe filled with doomed, hell-bound creatures is perhaps not surprising, given that his theology does that to pretty much all of us human beings, too.  

So the fundamentalist and the avowedly atheistic cosmologist worry about alien contact.  Why?

Perhaps because it would shatter the ground of their ethos.  Both fundamentalism and atheistic self-understanding are creatures of the modern era.  Both place human beings and empirical human forms of self-understanding as foundational.  We can grasp everything.  We are what matters.  Being creatures of high modernity, neither Ken Ham nor Stephen Hawking have room for self-shattering mystery.

Neither would hold up well in the face of an encounter with higher forms of being, which would shatter our humanity--and our particular history as a species--as a meaningful basis for a belief system.

But a more ancient form of faith, which hails back deep into the preindustrial memory of humankind?  The one that's rooted in a long tradition of exploring our encounter with the unknowable Numinous, and yet somehow manages to integrate and embrace science?

It sees no threat, and would approach more advanced beings with open arms.

Not a surprise, I suppose.  If you've come to terms with our encounter with an infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent being that transcends time and space, why would aliens bother you?

The Gods and Angels of Atheism

Having steeped myself in the writings and worldviews of the first century CE for much of the last week, an odd fragment that stuck in my head, one that came from the peculiarity of dipping my consciousness into a radically polytheistic pre-modern context.

Ancient Rome was a great heaping smorgasbord of gods and godlings, of peculiar beliefs from far off lands and odd mystery cults whose initiation rituals made joining the Masons look like applying for a library card.  It's worldview was a riot of magical beings and angelic influences, of spirits of the wood and stone and sky.  The world was rich with mystery.

Because my brain is peculiarly wired, I found myself taking that and playing it off of the secular assumptions of twentieth-century atheism about the nature of our cosmos.  There is no God, and there are no gods, and there are no spiritual beings, atheism asserts, with the certainty of empirical knowledge.

And yet, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson were to sit down with Cicero to describe what is known and expected about the nature of things, I wonder how that ancient would hear what he had to say.  Particularly when it comes to the heavens, and the gods.

Because in the heavens, most likely, there are living beings strange to us.  The cosmos is simply too vast to deny this as a probability.  Some may be simpler creatures, barely recognizable as life.  But some may have powers and capacities so beyond our own as to invoke Clarke's Third Law.  In fact, given the scope and scale of our time and space, the existence of such beings is not just possible, but likely.

This is why folks like Stephen Hawking would like us to maybe stop announcing our presence quite so loudly.  Who knows what beings lurk in the endless fastness?

Explaining what science knows and believes about existence to Cicero would just get a nod of agreement.  Oh, sure, he'd be a bit stunned at the size of things, but human beings adapt quickly.  I'm not sure the scientific view of the nature of existence would be quite as different from his worldview as one might like to think.  Beings more advanced than we?  Creatures inhabiting the heavens, with powers so beyond our own as to be indistinguishable from magic? 

Well, of course, the ancients would have thought.  You're describing the gods.

Funny, how little we humans have changed.