Is Jesus a particle or a wave?
Do computers have souls?
Would you baptise an alien?
What if crisps are sentient?
All of these questions popped up during yesterday evening's fascinating and bonkers (if somewhat niche and highly speculative) Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk. The curiously titled God and ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence):The Future of Human Religion with Dr Aaron Adair. The doc seems an interesting character and he seems to live a charmed life. Him and his wife, Janice, are currently working on a book about Godzilla and he's a research affiliate in physics education research at MIT (he lives in the Boston area) as well as authoring a couple of books with Jonathan MS Pearce, The Star of Bethlehem:A Skeptical View and Aliens and Religions:When Two Worlds Collide.
It was the latter book that formed the basis of yesterday's talk. The idea that in the not too distant future we may very well know for certain that we are not alone in the universe. An episode of Star Trek sets the date:- 5th April 2063 - incidentally a day on which a very close friend of mine will turn 88. What a gift for her.
Predictions of alien contact predate Star Trek by quite some way. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC) posited theories about the infinity of worlds that may be out there and the chances that at least one, or several, of them would host some form of life. A few hundred years later, the Syrian satirist and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata (c.125-180AD) anticipated modern science fiction by writing about voyages to the moon and to Venus as well as scores of aliens fighting intergalactic wars (specifically a war between the sun and the moon). The alien cabbage men and the giant spiders were both apparently lethal foes.
Thanks to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) we're finally catching up with the ancients when it comes to all things extraterrestrial. Copernicus, of course, is famous for his theory of heliocentrism, The belief that the Earth and and all the other planets revolve around the sun. As opposed to the prevailing belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe.
The first of the English speaking Copernicans was Thomas Digges (c.1546-1595) who took the idea a little bit further and had the sun not just as the centre of our own solar system but as the centre of an infinite universe. It was a neat idea but it was, as we now know, wrong. The sun is just one of billions of stars, each the centre of their own solar system.
This means that Earth is not special. There are billions, far too many to count, of stars out there which means, according to Dr Aaron Adair, we are just average. That, I'd contend, depends on absolute proof that life on other planets does actually exist. It it doesn't, I'd say that makes us quite special. Well, some of us!
But why would God create such a vast universe and then only create life on one relatively small planet (the third rock from the sun)? Dr Adair asked us to imagine three competing scenarios:-
(i) imagine a universe where every planet, every solar body, is teeming with life
(ii) imagine one where Earth is the only planet able to host life (aka the Goldilocks principle)
(iii) imagine something in the middle where life is rare but occasionally crops up
All (and none) of these theories are consistent with theistic ideas. But if there are aliens then where are they? Are they too lazy, or unable, to come and visit us? Are they hiding (either for their own safety or for more nefarious reasons)? Are they just extremely rare? Or are they very very very (millions of light years) away? Perhaps they're on their way but they won't get here until all of humanity has perished.
Do all civilisations have a built in self-destruct mechanism and automatically destroy themselves (perhaps with nuclear weapons or with climate change) before contact can be made? Would that be the sort of thing a universal God would factor in and programme?
What would these theoretical aliens be like? Not so much what would they look like (there's been more than enough debate about that - from little green men to the greys du jour) but would they have their own religious traditions? If science is able to prove we are not alone in the universe how would that affect religious practice on our planet?
Dr Adair focused primarily on Christianity (though he did touch briefly on Islam) and how aliens don't appear in the Bible (though, I believe every story in the Bible takes place within a few thousand miles of what's called the Holy Land, God - it seems - wasn't keen on the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, China, or Oceania). In fact there is no concept whatsoever of 'outer space' in the Bible.
Read literally, as some pretend to do - although that's not actually possible because so many stories contradict each other, the Earth in the Bible is a flat Earth and the stars are mere decorations attached to the dome that acts as a roof to the entire planet/entire universe. Beyond that there are no other stars or planets, just a 'heaven'. Or, for some, a 'hell'. Which means that, according to the Bible, aliens are an impossibility. There's simply nowhere for them to come from.
The God of the Bible, it seems, only loves earthlings (and, often it seems, only specific groups among them). If God created ALL THINGS then why is this tiny floating speck we live on so important to him or her (or they, get with the times)?
Or has God created alien Jesuses and if so how many? There would surely be trillions of intergalactic Jesuses out there? It's the biggest question, apparently, in astrotheology, a field I didn't even know existed twenty-four hours ago. Could there be amphibious Jesuses, reptilian Jesuses, Jesuses in forms that are beyond even our wildest imagings? A liquid Jesus? A gas Jesus? MC 900 Ft Jesus?
Some parts of the universe are accelerating away from us faster than the speed of light which means the universe is growing faster than we can explore it. That means that more and more planets keep appearing, meaning (possibly) more and more civilisations (or at least forms of life) could be appearing, meaning - if you're willing to join Dr Adair on his rollercoaster ride through astrotheology - that more and more Jesuses will be appearing. Appearing quicker than we can even count them.
In pre-modern Christian anti-alienism (and yes, that was the rather brilliant subtitle of the section of the talk), the plurality of worlds was considered a heresy by various popes as well as the Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and, much further back, the Berber theologian Augustine of Hippo.
Mainly because the Bible, and the concept of Creationism, posits that only one world was created. God didn't build other worlds, just our one. The belief in atomism (the idea that everything is created by atoms, pretty much randomly, smashing into each other) was seen as tantamount to atheism and even the one person who dared to speak out with a different point of view was careful not to go too far.
The German cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) believed that aliens COULD exist - but probably didn't. He went on to have it that if aliens did exist they would be, and could only be, inferior life forms because humans, who were created by God, were so noble and perfect that no other life form could possibly compete with our intelligence. That's the sort of confidence and certainty that idiots have always had throughout time and always will.
Nicholas of Cusa's ideas were conventional enough not to upset the religious authorities. A later Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) from the Kingdom of Naples was a heliocentric, a Copernican, and, for believing in the infinity of worlds and inhabitants of those worlds, was considered a heretic. He was burned alive on a stake, naked - why the hell not, in Rome and his ashes thrown in the Tiber.
Religious leaders, you may have observed, don't take kindly to having their beliefs questioned, tested, or refuted and, throughout history, Christian leaders have killed people for not toeing their line - usually with impunity. Dr Adair spoke about religious texts failing to match with scientific facts (which was perhaps not very necessary for an audience of Skeptics) and how religions fail to deal with the problem of evil (likewise).
If God, or a god, or gods, exist then why was the Holocaust allowed to happen? Why was slavery allowed to happen? Why do small children die of cancer? Why do the Red Hot Chili Peppers sell records and headline festivals? Surely no kind and loving God would allow any of this.
If our God, and our Jesus, allowed these things to happen on our planet then could one of the other trillion Jesuses have overseen even worse suffering in the some of the trillion worlds they operate in? What of the apocalypse? How does that fit when we discover aliens? Do an infinite number of Jesuses have to come back an infinite number of times to defeat an infinite number of Satans? That's not what it says in scripture.
The apocalypse seemed an appropriate place to end a fun, conjectural yet highly academic, talk. There were some digressions into UFO cults, doomsday events that didn't happen (but nevertheless strengthened the belief in those that foretold them), Captain Cook, Futurama, Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still, and the Prince Philip cargo cult in Vanuatu (Melanesia, not Micronesia as the doc had it, I'll let him off that one) and there were a couple of confusing graphs about the "probability density function".
A Q&A took in alien Buddhists, djinns, Ragnarok, CS Lewis, Planet of the Apes, and, of course, AI (the concept of AI creating its own religion, or various AIs creating various religions and then going to war over them) and by the end of it all I was so elated I wanted to read more about it and I was so bewildered that I was almost wishing one of England's boring Euro 2024 games was on TV so I could get to sleep.
Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Gerard Sorko for hosting (all the way from Cologne), and thanks to Dr Aaron Adair for making me think, in some depth, about a subject that had never really crossed my mind before. If aliens do make contact I hope they're nice, I hope they're friendly (maybe even a bit sexy), and I hope they're all atheists. One God is too many. Trillions sounds like a recipe for disaster.
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