Religion’s Cosmological Problem
Extraterrestrial revelation may be inconvenient for many religions but that is not a good reason to hide the truth.
“A question arises which has been carefully avoided by many traditional theologians... It is the problem of how to understand the meaning of the symbol ‘Christ’ in the light of the immensity of the universe, the heliocentric system of planets, the infinitely small part of the universe which man and his history constitute, and the possibility of other ‘worlds’ in which divine self-manifestations may appear and be received.” — Paul Tillich, Lutheran Minister
The Society of Catholic Scientists is holding a conference in early June on “Extraterrestrials, AI, and Minds Beyond the Human.” Among the discussion items are the potential implications of non-human intelligence for Catholic theology. With the federal report on UAP due in late June, the topic is very timely and they deserve credit for taking it on. If the report confirms or at least seriously raises the possibility of the existence of other civilizations, anthropocentric religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in particular, could have some hard questions to answer. Do those questions help explain government reluctance and silence on the ET topic?
On first blush, it seems that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) wouldn’t be a big deal for most religions. ETI just adds to God’s splendor. As modern Jewish scholar, Rabbi Norman Lamm, says, “God is in no way diminished by our learning that His creation far exceeds what had previously been imagined.” We may feel a bit smaller but the concept of God gets bigger. Not only did God create us, but potentially billions of other worlds, and in supreme multitasking, manages to keep an eye on us all. That is pretty impressive. And it is partly why many religious leaders have stated (albeit quietly) that religious faith and ET existence can coexist.
However, there are some religious ideas that could start to falter under the weight of logic and the wisdom the ETs may bring. The Christian religions are perhaps most vulnerable to these revelations. The challenge comes not so much from discovering we are not alone but an evolving understanding of the nature of God and the human condition.
The Problem and Solution of Religion
There is almost universal belief in a creative source or power that brought everything into existence. There is talk of the goodness of God, how loving “he” is, and how we honor that love when we love others. For the casual follower, religion often gets associated with just being a decent person. However, religious doctrines go much deeper than that and get much more prescriptive. Using Christianity as an example, it is not enough to love your neighbor or forgive your enemies. While denominations differ in the details, you cannot be a card-carrying Christian unless you accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. “Savior” is the key word here. The Christian religions teach that humanity has sinned and requires redemption and salvation to be reconciled with God.
Implicit in the idea of salvation is judgment. Who has earned their ticket to heaven and who hasn’t? Who gets to decide? According to Roman Catholic and Protestant scriptures, faith in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as humanity’s redemption is the difference between eternal bliss in heaven and eternal torture and damnation in a fiery hell. God is the ultimate judge of whether you are saved or suffer. Stories like this can be intimidating, as they were likely meant to be. Faced with the problem of our fall from grace and God’s judgment, the typical reaction (and exalted reaction) is fear. “How blessed is the man who fears the Lord,” says Psalms 112:1.
Fortunately for the forsaken, religions also supply the solution to the problem of sin and reaction of fear. The church (or synagogue or mosque) becomes a refuge and a salve for aching human hearts. All that is required is to do what the old books say and believe what the preachers preach. Filling that bowl with cash doesn’t hurt either. But the net effect of offering that perception of safety, security, and belonging is a predisposition to follow leaders, trust authority, relinquish personal power, and abdicate responsibility for our lives. Relying largely on fear and peer pressure, religion has been an incredibly effective tool for shaping culture and propagating social control. And it is adopted willingly because following rules and rituals and believing what we are told is easier than thinking and doing for ourselves. If religion survives in its current form, it will largely be because of our own unwillingness to truly be free.
ET contact puts that submission and social hierarchy at risk by calling into question the idea that we are perpetually being judged and at the mercy of a temperamental deity who is calling all the shots. I can hear the ETs now. In an infinitely expanding universe, with billions upon billions of life forms, you think the creator is sitting around judging and condemning what humans do with the free will lovingly bestowed upon them? You think there is a hell, real or metaphorical, where you can be tortured for eternity for believing the wrong things? You believe you are separate from the god that created you and whose energy sustains you? Sounds like you shouldn’t have eaten that apple.
Perhaps most importantly, it casts doubt on the necessity of fear, which is the foundation of control. When put in a more expansive and timeless perspective, coupled with greater scientific understanding, our human answers to the mysteries of the divine could seem rather ridiculous and self-serving for those in power.
The Christian Conundrum
For an institution trying to maintain power, disclosure could be a slippery slope. Accepting that ETI exists out in space somewhere, or even occasionally in our skies, is one thing, but the introduction of ET knowledge is another. The Christian religions that dominate the globe have every incentive to try to assimilate the existence of ETI into their belief systems in a way that keeps their doctrine intact. Whether they will be successful at that is an open question.
On the one hand, they have adapted and rolled with the punches before. Christianity survived the Copernican revolution and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Even when reports of rampant pedophilia and sexual abuse rocked the Catholic Church, there were many willing to overlook the torment of children for the plight of their own soul. They called it faith. And it may be that faith that allows the church to explain away any inconveniences resulting from ET revelations.
On the other hand, there are certain sticky issues that are not easily swept away. We can look back to the 1700s at Thomas Paine’s critique of the Catholic Church vis à vis the existence of ETs. Paine, and others before and after him, wrestled with the reconciliation of original sin and redemption with Christianity as a universal religion applicable to all creation, including possible ET races. As summarized by author David Weintraub in his book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, the argument is that one must either believe that ETs are not descended from Adam and Eve and thus not afflicted with humanity’s original sin and in need of redemption, or believe that ETs are also inherently sinful and in need of a savior.
Both have their complications. While Christian religions are founded on a belief in the specialness and centrality of humanity to God, tying our uniqueness to an unprecedented sinfulness doesn’t make us God’s crowning achievement. It makes us a colossal failure. On this point, Weintraub captures C.S. Lewis’ rationale that “humanity has been redeemed because humanity is uniquely and particularly demented and depraved.” But that idea is not likely to be very popular. Reasonable people may start to question and abandon a religion that teaches that we need it because we are literally the most awful beings in all of creation. Nor would believing this about ourselves set us up well for positive ET relations. How could we advocate for ourselves if we thought we were the universe’s garbage? We might just trade one set of gods for another in ET form. The church wouldn’t want that, nor should humanity.
In contrast, believing that sin is universal and ETs also require redemption raises problems. First off, the ETs may very well disagree. Religion could be a hallmark of an immature civilization that hasn’t come into awareness of its own inherent divinity and conflict with the understandings of a more advanced civilization. Second, the theory puts Jesus in a tough spot. Paine reasons it this way:
…are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, 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. But such is the strange construction of the Christian system of faith, that every evidence the heavens affords to man, either directly contradicts or renders it absurd.
If Jesus is not the path to salvation, there must be another way for ETs to redeem themselves, but that would contradict Christianity’s teaching that Jesus is the only true path. One could claim that Jesus’ death on Earth cleared the way for all life forms across the galaxies to repent, but the timing doesn’t really work on that, nor does logic support it. One might also say that Christianity is a human response to a human predicament on Earth, and thus not applicable to other civilizations, but that view depends on humanity continuing to see itself as separate from the rest of existence, which the presence of ETs undermines. This is particularly true if the first ETs we meet look more or less like us or otherwise share genetic links. In this scenario, humanity would not just be a separate case but also one seemingly gone awry, like we were God’s mistake. It is quite a pickle. We can start to see why religions were happy to keep the ET discussion at bay.
Fundamentally Evil
There have also been rumors that there are people of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian variety deep and high in the government who believe that ETs are fallen angels or demons under Satan’s command. Some believe these demons are already here, being the ones who abduct and harm people and mastermind our world. Part of the demons’ alleged agenda is to sow doubt in God and bring the end times. As written by Father Thomas Pulp in Flying Saucer Review, “There is not a single UFO incident on record that cannot be explained as demonic deception or apparition…the ultimate purpose of the UFO phenomenon is to help prepare the collective consciousness of the human race for the coming of Antichrist as foretold in the Bible.”
Related to this line of thinking is the idea that evil ETs spawned New Age teachings to pacify people to the alien threat and deceive people hungry for spiritual fulfillment into trusting that the ETs are here to help us and save us from our own errors. Kulp says, “Abductees are drawn away from the universal teachings of Orthodox Christianity and towards the demonic delusion that underlies modern New Age philosophies.” Thus, to engage in ufology is to dance with the occult. The irony is that it is humanity’s belief in our own sinfulness and unworthiness, as propagated by western religion, that makes us vulnerable to those promising to uplift and redeem us. It is our own lazy preference for rules, processes, and norms to relieve us from thinking for ourselves that open the door for manipulation. For those who fear humanity may become prey to a massive ploy to deceive and enslave us, we partly have our own religions to blame. Those demons could not have asked for a better set-up.
While the demon idea may sound far-fetched to some, decades of reports do lend credence to the idea that there is a seedy ET underworld (or overworld) where people are abducted against their will. These reports are often accompanied by descriptions of Grey aliens and Reptilians, whose appearance loosely aligns with demonic portrayals. Could it be that some of those government insiders have come into contact with such ETs, witnessed their evil deeds, and interpreted them to be demons? It is possible. The problem is that it seems the ones holding these beliefs and perhaps in possession of direct knowledge of such malevolent ETs don’t want to share what they know. In fact, according to rumors, they want nothing to do with these ET demons and as such, are not assisting with disclosure.
Now, do the Greys and Reptilians represent the totality of ET contact on Earth? It is highly doubtful. That said, the stakes of disclosure get a lot higher when you believe that you may either anger these demons by revealing their presence or somehow pave the way for the Antichrist. So whether anyone else shares their beliefs, the fact that they believe it helps explain reluctance to speak more openly about UFOs and ETs. While one could argue it would be better to know, however horrifying that truth may be, we can understand someone not wanting to unleash the legions of doom.
What Does This Mean for Disclosure?
For better or worse, revelation of the ET presence is ultimately not up to the government or the religious institutions that undergird them. But that doesn’t mean religions can’t slow the process or muddy the waters once it happens. Perhaps the fact that we don’t yet have full disclosure is an indication of religious pressure. Religion has long exploited the great unknown for their own ends. We can anticipate that facing the reality of worlds upon worlds beyond our earthly borders will greatly expand and shift our perceptions of who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into infinite creation. Such contemplations can transcend the religious doctrines created and interpreted in the minds of men millennia ago, rendering them irrelevant over the long term. That probably makes religions a bit nervous.
But they may not have a choice. Many Christian institutions already accept that we are not alone, even if they don’t publicize that. For others, the evidence may someday be impossible to deny. General debate and inquiry on this topic is healthy. What we don’t want is for ETs to become yet another issue that divides us. It won’t help matters if a church stokes fear, painting all ETs as demons or false prophets here to seat Satan on the throne of God. Nor is it likely to benefit us to try to cram new realities into old religious stories that clearly didn’t contemplate them. It is all well and good to celebrate ET existence as further evidence of the glory of God and part of the divine will and plan. It’s another to somehow use this knowledge to reinforce division, fear, and control.
Hopefully we can also agree not to turn our newly discovered ETs into gods themselves or worship them as superior to us. Let’s also not make it our business to try to convert ETs to any earthly religions or vilify them for believing something different. That has never gone over very well. As religion morphs, perhaps it becomes more of what some have always intended it to be — a personal relationship with the divine. Perhaps the emphasis moves away from doctrine and discipline and more toward exploration of unity, infinity, and an alternative way of conceiving of God. Such an approach could elevate freedom not suppress it.
If I could pose one question to the Society of Catholic Scholars as they convene in our nation’s capital, it would be this: Are you willing to put your faith in the truth? Behind that question is an appeal to let things come to light and treat them fairly and objectively even if they complicate or conflict with what has been the order of the day. Yes, it may be disorienting and disturbing to their congregations, who may flock to them for answers, but if they truly exist to serve humanity, they will deal with this topic openly, honestly, and with integrity, free from agendas. They will support full disclosure.
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