Curiosity, Discovery, Relationship

A couple years ago, I was asked to speak at the SXSW (South-by-Southwest) conference about astrobiology and theology. It’s a big topic and I chose to focus on the place of humanity in cosmos and the virtuous cycle of curiosity, discovery, and relationship that underlies both science and religion form me. A friend of mine asked me to distill that talk into a short essay, which I’ve posted here.

What does alien life have to do with theology? I’ve been given the somewhat challenging task of speaking about astrobiology and faith. We’re looking at the origin, extent, and future of life in the universe and, once we start asking about religious and theological aspects, we pretty much have “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

This can seem daunting. Perhaps because of the scope of the science, or the whole idea of religion and theology.

In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, let me say this: DON’T PANIC. I’m just going to talk about the straightforward question of how we relate to the universe around us, to our neighbors (whatever species they might be), and to God. This is all wrapped up in how we come to know things and how we come to know people, but it’s something you do every day. You relate. And you try to relate well.

Surveys show that many people are concerned about the discovery of alien life and how it will affect religious beliefs. A number of surveys have been conducted over the past few decades.[1] Curiously, almost no one thinks such a discovery would challenge their own beliefs. Rather, they think it would challenge the beliefs of others. This suggests that we don’t always communicate clearly about how we view the universe. Often, our own belief is not so much in opposition to the beliefs of others, but entirely different. We must move beyond simple statements of belief to a deeper understanding of why people believe what they do, and how their beliefs shape their lives. If they thought just as we do, they would have our beliefs. Astrobiology can help us find the true differences between us.

The Place of Humans

The search for alien life, and the potential discovery of aliens, allows us to look more closely at our own place in the cosmos, how we fit into the scheme of history, and where we are in the expanse of space. If we are truly alone, it’s hard to have perspective on our role in the story. Aliens, even potential or imaginary aliens, give us that perspective.

Theologians have been talking about cosmic history and the possibility of alien life for as long as there have been theologians. And they’ve been using the best science available for that whole time. Jewish and Christian theologians as early as the first century used cutting edge science and medicine to interpret scripture (e.g., Philo and Tertullian). We see speculation on astronomy and alien life at least by the fourth century.

This is not a new endeavor. Nor should it be particularly threatening to “traditional” perspectives. The tradition has been in dialogue with science for thousands of years. Even on those rare occasions when there was controversy, it divided both scientific and religious communities. In the case of Galileo, astronomers were arguing about the best way to understand the heavens, while theologians were arguing about who had the authority to interpret scripture. This put theologians and scientists on both sides. Controversy arose precisely because the two fields were interacting.

This question of how we relate to the universe turns out to be terribly important.

We all have a stake in how it gets answered. Opinion has been divided for millennia between those who think that the human race is unique and tremendously important and those who think we should get over ourselves. The split runs straight through Jewish and Christian theology, with people on both sides. No doubt, similar controversies arise in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but I will focus on Christianity, which is my area of study.

Weird and Wonderful Life

I’m going to talk about two main areas, where scientific research and theology overlap. First, life in the universe stranger than we imagined. Second, life in the universe is wonderful: an opportunity to learn.

First, weird life. Over the last century we have begun to discover amazing diversity of life on Earth. Exploring hot springs and desserts, deep oceans and even the atmosphere, biologists have found a vast array of organisms, actively growing in an amazing array of environments. Life can succeed and grow in ice and in boiling water (-20 to 121 degrees Celsius. (-4 to 250 F). It can live in the driest deserts and the deepest oceans. It can even live floating in the atmosphere. The bacterium Deinoccus radiodurans survives high levels of radiation, constantly repairing its DNA.

In the 1990s, astronomers found the first evidence of planets orbiting other stars. Since then improvements in technique and technology have confirmed the existence of over 3,700 planets. 53 of them are the right size and temperature to host Earth-like life.[2]

We’re still debating about “biomarkers.” What would we consider good evidence that these planets are actually inhabited. In the next decade, NASA and ESA will be launching telescopes with the goal of resolving light from individual planets. By looking at light reflected by a planetary atmosphere – or absorbed as a planet blocks out a star – we can look for signs of life, including free oxygen, methane, and signs of photosynthesis.

Christians and Weird Life

Christians have a long history of speculation about weird life. The Book of Job, written between seven and four centuries before Christ, contains 3 chapters on exotic life. The account ranges from common animals to aurochs and ostriches and on to behemoth and leviathan. These chapters have been interpreted in various ways over the centuries, but there seems to be consensus about the key message: some life in the universe has nothing to do with humanity.

Looking at the Tanakh or Old Testament, Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 give a clear picture of human superiority, while Job and Ecclesiastes make humans seem almost inconsequential.[3] Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians speculated on a plurality of worlds, what might be thought of as parallel universes in modern language. Some theologians argued that God is so amazingly creative, that there must be other worlds and other life. Others felt that one world was sufficient. Some theologians argued that stars and planets are alien life forms, even alien intelligences, made of ethereal fire-like stuff. As soon as Copernicus changed the planets from Celestial spheres into physical spaces, still more theologians began to talk about whether the planets where inhabited and what the inhabitants might be like.

CS Lewis’ space trilogy, a series of books about humans traveling to Mars and Venus, captures both ideas: living planets and inhabited planets.[4] Such speculation is not merely fiction or myth making. It gives theologians a chance to talk about who we are, as mortal rational animals, in the context of a living universe. For Lewis, it was a chance to comment on our fundamental goodness and the errors we are prone to. By bringing us face to face with aliens, he could speak more clearly about who we are. By speaking of God’s relationship with them, he could speak more clearly about God’s relationship with us.

Modern theologians like Ted Peters and Bill Brown talk about astrobiology and the way it reminds us of God acting in a larger world, beyond our everyday experience. We can say that life in the universe is weird, beyond our current understanding. While Christians have long argued about the uniqueness and importance of humanity recent discoveries help us to understand our place in the universe better. We are one among many as animals, perhaps even as thinking animals, but we are also empowered and dignified by our curiosity, our ability to seek and to name.

Christians and Wonderful Life

Christians also have a long history of commenting on the wonder and majesty of nature, even beyond humanity. Augustine of Hippo, a fourth century bishop from North Africa and possibly the most influential theologian in Christianity, argues that the category of “human” extends to all mortal rational animals, no matter what they look like.[5] He even specifies cyclops, hermaphrodites, antipodes, skiopodes, pigmies, the mouthless, the headless, the short-lived, and those with dog-heads; so long as they are rational and mortal animals, they are children of Adam.

Elsewhere, Augustine rhapsodizes about the dignity of souls in the common house fly.[6] This is not to say that he values flies as much as humans, but he does have a much broader view of humanity and souls than most Christians have had in the past few centuries.

It is not a matter of imagining God and then thinking up a creation small enough that God could make it. We do not try to squeeze the cosmos into the hands of a God we already fully know. It was always a question of looking at the bounds of creation, and imagining a God big enough to be the order and meaning behind all of it – the logos of the cosmos.

Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth century theologian, had an even higher view of nature than did Augustine. He thought we could learn about God and ethics by looking at the world around us. We don’t need revelation to know about these things (though revelation helps immensely). Or, it might be more accurate to say that Aquinas saw every act of observation as a kind of revelation, God speaking through the creation.

This approach, which comes to be called natural theology, has been particularly influential in my own tradition, Anglican or Episcopalian Christianity. We do not reject revelation, but we do emphasize the value of our senses and what we learn through them. Francis Bacon, an Anglican and a key figure in the rise of natural science, thought God had granted us science as a way of fulfilling God’s will for us. We are meant to know God, the universe, and ourselves. Bacon had doubts about our ability to know these things in any other way. And so in natural science and natural theology we have a profound desire to understand our environment and a profound belief that we can and should explore.

Wilderness

In some ways, I think we suffered as a species during the 19^th and 20^th centuries because we began to believe that we really were the height of creation, that we knew the extent of the world. We conquered the wilderness on our planet, removed all of the species that competed with us – the wolves and bears and great cats.

We lost the wilderness. We lost the sense that there was more out there than we knew or imagined. We lived, believing we had control of the world, or at least the important parts of it. Space was only an abstract backdrop for the drama of humanity.

This domestication of the world, and belief in a triumphant humanity, was popular among Christians, but it was popular in the world at large. We thought that we had won the evolutionary race and conquered the planet.

As we discover more about the cosmos, the wider wild – and, as we discover more about the strange and wonderful diversity of life on Earth – we are once again faced with wilderness and aliens, things beyond our control, perhaps even beyond interaction with us. They have their own meaning and their own dignity. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, they have their own relationship with God, which does not depend on us. Astrobiology – the search for life in space – has this effect on Christian theology, but also on secular and popular ideas about humanity. It gives us context.

If I can convince you of one thing, I hope it is this. What we believe about the universe matters. It matters how we think about our relationships: with our neighbors (whatever species they might be), with the universe, and with God. The stories we tell are always stories about our encounter with the other, whether it be wonderful (as in the E.T., Arrival, and A Wrinkle in Time) or fearful (as in Aliens and War of the Worlds).

Curiosity, Discovery, Relationship

Our values and our stories determine whether and how we explore. There are philosophies that discourage exploration and there are philosophies that send us out asking and seeking. I want to suggest a three-part view of life that sends people out into the world, looking for understanding. It begins with a profound curiosity about the world. For me, that comes from Genesis: God made all things and found them good. Everything I find, therefore, and every person I meet, is an opportunity to find something wonderful. No matter how awful it might appear at first, there is a kernel of goodness to find. This encourages me to study everything. Nothing is worth ignoring. Others will find other reasons to be curious, but it matters whether you think everything warrants curiosity or only a few things. It matters to where you are willing to look and what you are willing to find out.

Madeline L’Engle, a fellow Episcopalian, and the author behind A Wrinkle in Time put it this way.[7] “Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.” “We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”

For me, both science and Christianity call me to continuously search and continuously seek a deeper understanding of the world. Astrobiology is a wonderful opportunity to push the boundaries of our knowledge. Curiosity leads to discovery. This is not a truism, but an observed fact. Curiosity is rewarded, something that increases my trust in God and my trust in science.

We live in a world where curiosity, aided by critical thinking, leads to knowledge. I think we underestimate the earth-shaking significance of that. Science works. It does not always provide the answers we wanted, but it regularly provides real, satisfying answers.

It’s worth asking whether we have the kind of curiosity that leads to discovery, and whether we have the kinds of discovery that lead to more curiosity.

For that to work, there needs to be one more piece: relationship. Our discoveries must support relationship: better interactions between neighbors (no matter what species) and better interactions with our environment. We must allow our discoveries to change the way we interact, so that a deeper knowledge leads to a more fruitful interaction. Because I believe in the goodness of all things, I can also believe that real relationships will always, inevitably lead us to more curiosity.

Another Anglican, CS Lewis, put it this way. “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” There is something revelatory about real knowledge. It binds us together. It gives us perspective.

Faith Hope and Love

For those of you looking for something a little more expressly Christian, let me say this. The Christian approach has always been the same, though we usually start with the relationship. Recall that faith can mean trust in a person, not just trust in an idea. We start with Jesus Christ and a relationship between God and humanity. That relationship leads to curiosity and hope for the future. Curiosity and hope lead us into a deeper knowledge of God. That love which is a true openness to the other, a discovery.

I might also say this in the words of I Corinthians 13:12. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

So, here is my theological reflection on astrobiology. For a century or two we lost our wilderness, our encounter with the wide wild, the world and the action of God beyond human understanding. We believed that we were rulers of the world. Astrobiology has begun to give us a deeper perspective, a breadth of time and space, in which humans represent only the tiniest sliver, but a sliver with the ability to explore.

Whether you think that exploration is a gift from God, or a random twitch of the universe, we have a great opportunity, for curiosity, discovery, and real relationship with a universe unimaginably weird and wonderful.

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[1] Dick, SJ. The Biological Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. p. 517

Peters, T. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. A 369(2011):644–655.

Peters, T. (2013). Would the discovery of ETI provoke a religious crisis? In Astrobiology, History, and Society, edited by DA Vakoch. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. pp. 341–355.

[2] Exoplanet Encyclopedia: http://exoplanet.eu; NASA Exoplanet Archive: https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/

[3] Mix, LJ (2016) Life-value narratives and the impact of astrobiology on Christian ethics. Zygon 51(2):520-535

[4] Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945)

[5] City of God XVI.8

[6] The Two Souls 4

[7] The movie is based on L’Engle’s book, the first in a series of five about encountering alien life: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), May Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).