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

C. S. Lewis, Exoplanets, and the Gospel

I'm continuing to write on the upcoming book, tentatively entitled, Negotiating Science and Religion in America: Past, Present, and Future. Here's another excerpt.

The discovery of exoplanets (that is, planets beyond our own solar system) has substantially expanded in our time. Some assert that this means the sudden death of the Christian scheme of salvation since, according to the biblical texts, Jesus came to save this world or kosmos (such as in John 3:16) and since the cosmos, in the biblical view, was vanishingly small compared to our current understanding. 

In some ways, the logic is disastrously circular—the known world of the biblical times was small, and so why should we assume that the texts would address a gigantic universe of the 21^stcentury? 

Before this recent explosion of information about life outside our solar system, even as early as the 1950s, C. S. Lewis took on these claims in his 1958 essay, “Religion and Rocketry.” (Lewis himself was an avid amateur astronomer, who mounted a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom at his home near Oxford, The Kilns.) Lewis addressed Fred Hoyle’s claims in an essay, “The Seeing Eye,” from February 1963. 

Hoyle, along with several other thinkers, asserted that life must have originated in many times and places, given the vast size of the universe. Referring to a series of broadcast talks that Hoyle had given in 1950 (later published as The Nature of the Universe), Hoyle argued against a Christian view of origins and the uniqueness of the Christian faith, based on the size of the universe. I hear similar arguments almost seventy years later from my students.

      

Lewis recalled that, as a child, he heard an almost antiphonal view of the cosmos.

When we were boys all astronomers, so far as I know, impressed upon us the antecedent improbabilities of life in any part of the universe whatever. It was not thought unlikely that this earth was the solitary exception to a universal reign of the inorganic. Now Professor Hoyle, and many with him, say that in so vast a universe life must have occurred in times and places without number. The interesting thing is that have heard both these estimates used against Christianity. 

Lewis then addresses what the Christian message might mean to these “hypothetical rational species," who might be good and not need redemption (as the fallen human race does). They might also be “strictly diabolical." To Lewis, it seems most likely that this species would contain both good and bad. He concludes that, like any missionary work, the Christian duty is to preach the Gospel, and then ends with this question, 

Would this spreading of the Gospel from earth, through man, imply a pre-eminence for earth and man? Not in any real sense. If a thing is to begin at all, it must begin in some particular time and place; and any time and pace raises the question: “Why then and just then?" One can conceive an extraterrestrial development of Christianity so brilliant that earth’s place in the story might sink to that of a prologue.

How do we evaluate this proposal?

I find it stunning that Lewis, this still visionary thinker, was already looking at perceiving the threat to the veracity of the Gospel and responding. And the question of exoplanets, and his response, are still relevant. I'll have more to say, I hope, as my book progresses... But on the way, why not listen to one of the greats?