Men and their Gods
why doing theology is like searching for extraterrestrials
What can be said of god(s)? Even individual faith traditions, when providing an answer to this question, speak from a wide array of disharmonious voices. One Immanuel Kant, to use an example, might tell us that much of god’s character is “assured to us through reason” (Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 133), whereas the far earlier voice of a Pseudo-Dionysius would remind us that any formulation of language can speak nothing at all of god, including that it does or does not exist (The Mystical Theology, Chs. 3,5). And yet another voice within this same tradition will argue that speaking of god does nothing save for “develop the content of a concept” which has no bearing on reality at all (Kierkegaard, On Becoming a Christian). In other words, it’s an extremely complicated if not altogether impossible question to answer.
If we take a big step back, however, we may be able to connect some dots regarding what people groups have historically believed about deities. And when we do this I believe one thing about man’s theology becomes abundantly clear: even among geographically and chronologically separate cultures, god, or gods, tend to look and behave in ways strikingly similar to the ways people look and behave. And in light of our next question regarding the relation between human conceptions of extraterrestrial intelligence and that of deities, this tendency becomes even more clear.
Like man’s thoughts of god, the ideas spouted about aliens are equally manifold. Similarly to those that argue that god has come to earth, whether through the Quran or through the beings of Krishna or Jesus, so do many feel convicted that extraterrestrials have visited us, either as ancient astronauts of remarkable architectural capabilities or as tiny green men conducting science tests on defenseless human subjects or in any other imaginable form. Man posits such incredible hypotheses as these in an attempt to explain an otherwise inexplicable world.
For instance, when asked what can be said of extraterrestrial intelligences, journalist Leslie Kean would argue that not only is their existence an extremely likely probability due to astrobiological principles but also due to the supposedly unexplainable evidence of UFO activity over the history of our planet. Thus, as Kant said concerning god, she would argue that reason leads us to certain conclusions regarding the natures of extraterrestrial life forms. On the other hand, the voice of astronomer Paul Davies resonates with Pseudo-Dionysius’ claims about the radical otherness of god when he says that “thinking about SETI requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilization, technology and community destiny” (The Eerie Silence, 10). For Davies, it is a grave mistake to think about ETI in ordinary human terms — one that could easily prevent us from arriving upon truth in the future by assigning human characteristics to non-human life forms and acting according to those presuppositions.
In these examples of people talking about gods and non-earthly life forms we find that there is in humanity a certain preoccupation with non-human forms of intelligence as well as a concern with misrepresenting them. It seems to be the case, however, that this concern historically comes about only when the limitations of our assumptions about non-human life forms are made apparent through the application of reason. In such cases, theories concerning non-human life forms are usually revised rather than discarded.
For instance, if we take ancient Judaic thought about god into account we find that god not only sometimes looks like man, as does the Ancient of Days in Daniel chapter seven, with white hair and a body fit for a king’s throne, but he also has concerns and emotions characteristic of humans i.e., anger, jealousy, mercy. But later, as Judaism began integrating with Hellenistic philosophy and the pious were educated in Platonic thought, it made less sense for them to imagine their god as an old man bound by the changes of an aging body. Thus, by the time Christianity becomes an established religion, Jewish tradition is already questioning many of its anthropomorphic assumptions about the nature of god.
However, the act of personifying non-human life forms, forces of nature, and abstract concepts and then deifying them long precedes the Judaism we know from recorded history. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written long before the Jewish Torah is full of human-animal deities as well as gods and goddesses of various natural forces and sophisticated human crafts. These beings play an important role in the history of the world and the social and technological progression of mankind. But as western philosophy developed and spread, making god ever more celestial and transcendent, pantheistic notions of deities such as those found in the Epic that are primarily concerned with the doings of man fell largely into history.
In the same way, our conceptualizations about extraterrestrials have continued to evolve over time as we’ve come to realize in what ways our ideas about them are influenced by human traits that are themselves determined by both genetic makeup and millennia of inter-cultural interactions. Given, then, the frightful development of military technologies over the past 70 years, it should come as no surprise that the rise of extraterrestrial representation in fiction has largely painted them as beings to be feared due to their higher technological powers (The Eerie Silence, 171). As theological treatises and artworks of the late 14th Century, the time of the Black Plague, seem to have a deep concern with god’s judgment, death, and the desperate hope of salvation, so do science fiction works in the wake of WWII and the following “Communist threat” speak to our concerns of nuclear annihilation and enslavement by tyrannical forces. It only occurs to us through a process of thinking beyond our immediate context that the contemporary human experience might not have much in common with non-human beings.
Nevertheless, it is no mystery as to why humans have given hypothetical non-human life forms human traits by default and only hesitantly withdrawn these assumptions after the application of reason: without the ability to relate and communicate, any relationship between man and gods or extraterrestrials appears to be a futile effort. Arguably, the smartest life form man knows of besides itself is the dolphin with which man cannot communicate. It even appears to some scientists that dolphins have complex systems of communication that we’ve been unable to decode thus far, meaning that high intelligence and the development of symbolic language structures among species do not guarantee that species will be able to understand one another (George Dvorsky, Will We Ever Learn to speak Dolphin?). It seems to follow rather naturally, then, that if man is optimistically positing the existence of higher powers or intelligent life forms beyond our solar system then we would also carry this optimism into our beliefs about these beings so that we could wish for some sort of relationship between ourselves and them.
Thus, it is my argument that man is first of all and most of the time concerned with phenomena that directly impact his life, and only secondarily concerned with the truth about such phenomena. This is the reason why science can be defined as a “process of falsification of accepted ideas” — science plays a role of testing the hopes and suspicions of man, without which it would have neither direction nor applicability. In regards to hypothetical non-human life forms, science can help us address systematically any truths that might be behind such imagined beings. Gods and extraterrestrials, birthed in the minds of fearful, hopeful, and creative people, might possibly have a counterpart rooted in reality, but we will not be able to find such beings by looking for our creations of mind. We must look instead to what is out there, as best we can, and see what we can find.
