Why Us? Part 1

This is another bit of my Creed book, this time addressing a question that has gained more prominence with the growth of our knowledge about the size of the universe and (just as much) with the imagination our culture branching out to wonder about Klingons and Vulcans and such like other critters:

The next difficulty with the Church’s proclamation that God has become man is that many post-modern people have a surprisingly physicalist view of our place in the cosmos.

One particularly crude argument is this: Man is infinitesimally small–indeed the entire solar system is infinitesimally small–compared to the size of the universe.  All kinds of illustrations of that infinitesimal smallness are produced and they make wonderful gee whiz graphics for popular science shows.  The camera pulls back until the earth shrinks (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) to a “pale blue dot”.[1]  The solar system becomes a pinpoint and vanishes into an arm of the Milky Way.  Then the Milky Way itself becomes a mere indistinct smudge of light disappearing among billions of other galaxies.  Finally, the Physicalist Creed is invoked: “How could God become man?  Man is utterly insignificant compared to the size of the Universe!  The supposition that specks of protein on a dust mote are special is the height of human arrogance!”

People set real store by such thinking.  But that’s not because they are hard-headed scientists looking at cold fact.  It’s because they are poets who think they are philosophers.  It’s because they can’t refrain from supposing they know that immense differences in physical size mean something.  They have never internalized the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who drily replied, “It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.”[2]

In short, size doesn’t matter.  In our sane hours, we realize this.  A tall man does not have greater spiritual worth than a short one.  Just because people are the size of ants compared to the Twin Towers does not mean the buildings were more important than the people killed in them.  But when size differences become vast, the poet in us awakens and we start to forget these obvious facts.

Another odd manifestation of physicalism focuses on location rather than size.  The argument goes, “We’re on a planet like billions of others, orbiting an average star about two-thirds of the way out on a spiral arm of an average galaxy.  Why would anybody suppose God admires us so much as to become one of us?”

But the reality is, just as humans have dignity because they are creatures made in the image and likeness of God and not because of their size, so they have dignity no matter where they happen to be physically located.  Such crude physicalism was put to bed three thousand years ago, when the king of Syria was rudely disabused of the notion that God was a God of the hills, but not of the plains (1 Kings 20:23).  Neither is he a God of the Andromeda Galaxy, but not of the earth.  Wherever we are physically, spiritually we are at the center of God’s love, because (as the medievals were fond of saying) God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Yet to say this still often reveals lingering doubts in the postmodern mind.  It can be summed up in the words, “What about the Vulcans?”  Surely, say many people, there is something terribly provincial about the Christian conviction that humans are “special” in a 14-billion-year-old, 156-billion-light-year-wide universe.  How dare the Church say we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that Jesus became man for us!

Prescinding from the fact already discussed in Chapter 2—that the Church has always acknowledged the existence of intelligent, non-corporeal creatures called “angels and demons”–corporeal, non-human, intelligent creatures called “extraterrestrials” would only pose a problem to the Faith if we know the answers to five questions:

1. Are there creatures on other planets?  Answer: We don’t know.  We don’t even know if we will ever know.
2. Do these entirely hypothetical creatures possess what we call “rational souls”: that is, the ability to know (and sin against) God? An oyster on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti cannot sin any more than ours do.
3. Assuming rational creatures exist on other worlds, are they fallen?  If not, there is no need for God’s salvific Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection.
4. Assuming the answer to all the previous questions is “yes”, do we know our mode of redemption is what such creatures require for salvation?  If not, then Christianity is not shown to be provincial.  It merely shows that the Great Physician prescribes a particular medicine for the particular illness of a particular species.
5. Finally, (assuming unknowable affirmatives to all the previous questions) do we know redemption will always be denied to these fallen rational creatures?  A visit to earth ten thousand years ago would not have yielded much information to the outside observer about what God was up to in preparing the way for the Incarnation of the Son of God.  Likewise, it would probably be extraordinarily difficult for human observers to tell what God has done, is doing, and will do toward the salvation of what are, after all, entirely hypothetical creatures.

That said, I want to return to two assumptions that tend to underlie this whole line of criticism.

[1] Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011)

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy.