C. S. Lewis and ETs

Remember this guy from Spielberg's 1982 movie?

I just finished a review of Olli-Pekka Vainio's Cosmology in Theological Perspective: Understanding Our Place in the Universe (which I quite liked) for the Journal of Inkling Studies, and I thought it might be worth adapting a slice of the review for this blog.

Vainio's book adapts C.S. Lewis's ideas-particularly his work in intellectual history (such as his brilliant posthumous 1964 The Discarded Image)--as he reflects on the theological implications of contemporary cosmology, especially the implications of extraterrestrial life, or ETs. 

Lewis and exoplanets? Why not? Even if, we've discovered over 4000 planets outside our solar system since CSL died in 1962.

Lewis offers to Vainio’s project a serious critique of “chronological snobbery," namely,

what is newest is best and the past essentially is always surpassed by what's most recent. Instead Lewis demonstrates that past thinkers, despite what they didn't know about exoplanets, have a great deal to teach us. In fact, I learned from Vanio that the existence of ETs isn’t something that just happened since the somewhat recent explosion of exoplanets discoveries. Medieval thinkers, who used other names for intelligent life in addition to angels and human beings. (Lewis employed the term longaevi, for example.) As a result, the medieval writers and thought leaders pondered other worlds. Even more, Enlightenment commentators assumed their existence. 

“From the early eighteenth century on, it became widely accepted that life on other planets was at least possible.” Theologian Olli-Pekka Vainio

Lewis made it clear that, when human beings look at the cosmos, they "are standing at the steps of a magnificent cathedral, which welcomes them inside." "The heavens," as it were, "declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1). This becomes, in the best sense of the word, a religious experience. And here I imagine CSL at the Kilns, pondering the night sky through the telescope he set on his bedroom's balcony, perhaps reciting the Psalter. 

Or as Vainio phrases it, 

“A proper Christian attitude toward the cosmos is one of awe and wonder—and the desire to understand it more deeply." Theologian Olli-Pekka Vainio