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:<\/p>\n
The next difficulty with the Church\u2019s proclamation that God has become man is that many post-modern people have a surprisingly physicalist view of our place in the cosmos.<\/p>\n
One particularly crude argument is this: Man is infinitesimally small\u2013indeed the entire solar system is infinitesimally small\u2013compared to the size of the universe.\u00a0 All kinds of illustrations of that infinitesimal smallness are produced and they make wonderful gee whiz graphics for popular science shows.\u00a0 The camera pulls back until the earth shrinks (in Carl Sagan\u2019s phrase) to a \u201cpale blue dot\u201d.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 The solar system becomes a pinpoint and vanishes into an arm of the Milky Way.\u00a0 Then the Milky Way itself becomes a mere indistinct smudge of light disappearing among billions of other galaxies.\u00a0 Finally, the Physicalist Creed is invoked: \u201cHow could God become man?\u00a0 Man is utterly insignificant compared to the size of the Universe!\u00a0 The supposition that specks of protein on a dust mote are special is the height of human arrogance!\u201d<\/p>\n
People set real store by such thinking.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not because they are hard-headed scientists looking at cold fact.\u00a0 It\u2019s because they are poets who think they are philosophers.\u00a0 It\u2019s because they can\u2019t refrain from supposing they know that immense differences in physical size\u00a0mean<\/em>\u00a0something.\u00a0 They have never internalized the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who drily replied, \u201cIt is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n
In short, size doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 In our sane hours, we realize this.\u00a0 A tall man does not have greater spiritual worth than a short one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But when size differences become vast, the poet in us awakens and we start to forget these obvious facts.<\/p>\n
Another odd manifestation of physicalism focuses on location<\/em> rather than size<\/em>.\u00a0 The argument goes, \u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u00a0 Why would anybody suppose God admires us so much as to become one of us?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Neither is he a God of the Andromeda Galaxy, but not of the earth.\u00a0 Wherever we are physically, spiritually we are at the center of God\u2019s love, because (as the medievals were fond of saying) God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.<\/p>\n
Yet to say this still often reveals lingering doubts in the postmodern mind.\u00a0 It can be summed up in the words, \u201cWhat about the Vulcans?\u201d\u00a0 Surely, say many people, there is something terribly provincial about the Christian conviction that humans are \u201cspecial\u201d in a 14-billion-year-old, 156-billion-light-year-wide universe.\u00a0 How dare the Church say we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that Jesus became man for us!<\/p>\n
Prescinding from the fact already discussed in Chapter 2\u2014that the Church has always acknowledged the existence of intelligent, non-corporeal creatures called \u201cangels and demons\u201d\u2013corporeal, non-human, intelligent creatures called \u201cextraterrestrials\u201d would only pose a problem to the Faith if we know the answers to five questions:<\/p>\n
\n
- Are there creatures on other planets?\u00a0 Answer: We don\u2019t know.\u00a0 We don\u2019t even know if we will ever know.<\/li>\n
- Do these entirely hypothetical creatures possess what we call \u201crational souls\u201d: 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.<\/li>\n
- Assuming rational creatures exist on other worlds, are they fallen?\u00a0 If not, there is no need for God\u2019s salvific Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection.<\/li>\n
- Assuming the answer to all the previous questions is \u201cyes\u201d, do we know our<\/em> mode of redemption is what such creatures require for salvation?\u00a0 If not, then Christianity is not shown to be provincial.\u00a0 It merely shows that the Great Physician prescribes a particular medicine for the particular illness of a particular species.<\/li>\n
- Finally, (assuming unknowable affirmatives to all the previous questions) do we know redemption will always<\/em> be denied to these fallen rational creatures?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
That said, I want to return to two assumptions that tend to underlie this whole line of criticism.<\/p>\n
[1]<\/a> Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space<\/em><\/a> (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011)<\/p>\n
[2]<\/a> Chesterton, Orthodoxy<\/em><\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1089],"class_list":["post-112737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-the-creed"],"yoast_head":"\n
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