Can Extraterrestrials Fit into the Christian Worldview?
C.S. Lewis’ five questions must be answered first.
In the 1950s, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay, “Religion and Rocketry,” regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life and how that might fit in with the Christian worldview. Lewis acknowledged that the idea of life outside the earth was a “supposed threat” that is “clearly directed against the doctrine of the Incarnation, the belief that God of God ‘for us men and our salvation came down from heaven and was… made man.’” A critic of Christianity may ask why God would so uniquely favor mankind by coming for “us men” and not for others in the universe? To address that challenge, Lewis then poses five questions that would probe the moral status of aliens. If each were answered definitively, he argued, we would know how aliens fit into the Christian worldview.
Lewis starts by pointing out that the possibilities of animal life outside of earth—either that there is no other extraterrestrial life, or that such life is in fact quite abundant in the universe—have both been used by critics in attempts to debunk Christian thought. On the one hand, certain critics would ask why would there be a Creator so “interested in living creatures” when we are alone “in an infinite desert.” Conversely, others would charge that if life is abundant in the universe, the Christian idea that Man could be important to God was also absurd.
In the same vein, Lewis also predicted that once all the “hubbub” had died down from discovery of extraterrestrial life, that, just like it did with scientific discoveries of Copernican astrometry and Darwinism, all those on the various sides of religion and irreligion would be back where they started from.
I cannot but agree. Whether you are a Christian or an equally devout atheist, this discovery will not likely shake your faith. Proof of alien life neither proves nor disproves either theism or atheism.
Lewis’ Five Questions (Summarized)
Lewis’ starting question was the obvious first one:
1. Are there animals anywhere except on earth?
His second question supposes that there are and asks:
2. Do these creatures have rational souls, or rather are they “spiritual” animals?
This means more than being able to use tools and to compute figures but rather having the ability to apprehend values, such as “what is good for my species.” If the answer is no, then it would make sense that God did not favor them by becoming one of them. After all, they would not even understand what was being given them. He points out that we give our sons books to read, but not to our dogs—they understand and prefer bones.
His third question is quite interesting to Lewis himself as it is part of an underlying theme for the first two of his space trilogy novels, “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra.” He asks:
3. If indeed there were rational, spiritual animals outside of earth, were “any or all of them, like us, fallen?”
He points out that most non-Christians forget this aspect, that they “seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity.” In fact, it is the reverse, Lewis explains. “No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed.” This diminishes the idea of a “favored status” of humanity among many other races. An unfallen race would not need a Christ to become one of them.
Question four is of interest to Lewis as well, he having explored the idea in “The Chronicles of Narnia.” He asks:
4. If any or all of the aliens have fallen, were they then denied redemption by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ?
For all we know, he says, Christ may “have been incarnate in other worlds other than earth and so saved other races than ours (like Lewis’ Aslan, the Christ of Narnia, for example).” Or perhaps, he suggests that “of all races we only fell.” (Again, he explores this idea in “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra.”)
And then, for question five, he asks:
5. If we know the answers to questions 1, 2, and 3, and that the answer to 4 was that the aliens had been denied redemption by the Incarnation and Passion, how do we know there are not other modes of redemption?
“Spiritual as well as physical conditions might differ widely in different worlds. There might be different sorts and degrees of fallenness,” he posits as to what God might account for. Or is it possible, he suggests, that aliens might get their redemption through ours? “This would no doubt give Man a pivotal position.” But, Lewis points out again, that this implies no superiority in us or any favoritism from God due to our fallen state.
Yet even so, I would submit, it is certainly within God’s purview to make special selections among the races of peoples. Even among all the peoples of the earth, whom God loves equally, he selected the Jews as his “Chosen People.”
Lewis summarizes his thoughts by saying that “the mere existence of these creatures would not raise a problem” for the Christian worldview. Once their existence is established, “we still need to know that they are fallen; then, that they have not been, or will not be, redeemed in the mode we know; and then, that no other mode is possible.” He ends his essay by doubting whether we will ever really know for sure if any of those suppositions are true.
He worries more about what we might do to aliens than what they might do to us, and has no illusions as to what our race does to strangers. “Our ambassadors to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind as always done.” As such, Lewis does not speculate in his essay about aliens coming to us and the danger that might pose. Yet, with the state of our current technology for space exploration, it is certainly more likely that aliens must come to us if we are ever to make contact. At least any time soon.
Where are We Today with this Analysis?
While we have no definitive public knowledge of alien visits, we have many private and individual accounts of contacts with supposed extraterrestrials. And, as I have learned from following “Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World,” there are many such accounts that are credible and cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Indeed, we only need one proven-true contact to determine if extraterrestrials exist. However, even if we can say that there are credible accounts, how can we say for certain that these contacts are in fact with extraterrestrials? For example, these alien-like people may still be from the earth—from deep inside the ocean or even time travelers from the future. Or they are possibly demons.
The point being, even taken as a collected whole, the “credible” so-called alien encounters are simply not enough to do a reliable analysis as Lewis suggests above. In reality, at the present moment, we cannot get past Lewis’ question 1.
Are we on the cusp of getting past this important first question? Let’s stay vigilant and see.