.-- Billy Grassie
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ernan McMullin, ³Life and Intelligence Far from Earth: Formulating
Theological Issues² in MANY WORLDS, edited by Steven Dick,
Philadelphia: Templeton Press, 2000 (pp. 151-175).
Chapter Excerpt:
Plurality of Worlds
In popular discussions of extraterrestrial intelligence, it tends to
be assumed that the discovery of such intelligence would pose new
problems, new challenges, for religious believers. But as historians
of science have recently reminded us, the notion that we should
expect to find such intelligence came, in significant part, from
Christian theologians in the first place.9 The revival of
Aristotelian natural philosophy in the Latin West in the thirteenth
century led to a rupture of serious proportions between Aristotelian
philosophers (many of them also theologians) and theologians of a
more traditional persuasion. One of the main issues that divided them
was the status of propositions in natural philosophy. According to
Aristotle, scientific demonstration should proceed deductively from
propositions perceived to be true, indeed necessarily true, in their
own right, after the manner of geometrical axioms. Theologians were
quick to point out that if Aristotle's cosmology be allowed this
status, it would imply that the general structure of the world could
not be other than it is, thus compromising the key Christian doctrine
of Divine freedom. The theology of creation deriving from Augustine
maintained that the Creator was in no way constrained in fashioning
the sort of universe in which we find ourselves.
One of the test cases between the two sides of this debate was
whether there could be a plurality of worlds. For the Aristotelians,
this was impossible. Were there to be another world, it would still
have to be of the same general sort as this one; a simple analysis of
natural motion would then show (as Aristotle argues in two dense
chapters of his De Caelo, I, 8-9) that it would reduce necessarily to
the world we already have. To many theologians of that day, this
seemed an implicit denial of Divine omnipotence. And so the
possibility of a plurality of worlds became a rallying point for
those who were alarmed at the necessitarian tendencies of the new
natural philosophy. Despite the efforts of Thomas Aquinas to mediate
the quarrel, the Aristotelian position was condemned in 1277 by a
council of the bishops of France, thus giving an official status to
the doctrine of the possible plurality of worlds.
What the defenders of this doctrine maintained was no more than the
possibility of other worlds, that is, God's freedom to create such
worlds if God desired to do so. They did not argue that God has, in
fact, done so; they would have seen no reason to suppose that a
plurality of worlds actually existed. But they had not only opened
the way to such a supposition, they had given it broad theological
sanction.
With the revival of Neoplatonic ideas in the Renaissance, a further
step was taken, the introduction of what later writers would call a
"principle of plenitude." The principle was of philosophical, rather
than of specifically biblical, origin. But it rested on a particular
view of the nature of God, one that had some resonance with the
traditional Augustinian doctrine of the omnipotence of the Creator,
so it might also be called theological in a somewhat broader sense.
The principle lays down that a Creator such as is envisioned in the
Christian tradition must bring to be all that is possible, out of the
fullness of the Divine power and goodness. It is the presumed nature
of God that leads to the expectation that a plurality of inhabited
worlds is not only possible, but in some sense necessary.10
Developments in astronomy in the seventeenth century gave fresh
impetus to these ideas, not only of an actual plurality of worlds,
but of worlds inhabited perhaps by living and even intelligent
agents. As historians have shown in some detail, the likelihood of
ETI became almost a commonplace in Western Europe in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.11 What is especially striking about this
development is the support that this idea of ETI received among
Christian thinkers of that time. They were aware of the difficult
questions that the reality of ETI would pose for Christians. But for
most of them, this potential negative was evidently overcome by their
conviction that the presence of ETI in many parts of the universe was
what one should expect from an omnipotent Creator, whose power and
goodness would in this way be made manifest. As telescopic evidence
for the vast scale of the universe mounted, it seemed more and more
likely (it was argued) that the Creator would not have left these
vast spaces empty of the only sort of life that could freely offer
homage to the One on whom this mighty frame depends for its very
being.
When Christians are asked today what response religious believers
ought to make to the growing conviction that the operations of
evolution on a cosmic scale would almost necessarily eventuate in
life and intelligence in a great number of locations, their first
answer might well be that such a plenitude is just what one should
have expected, given the premium that the Genesis account of origins
already sets on the gifts that allow human beings to be regarded as
somehow imaging their Creator. It is in these gifts and their
possessors that the story of the Creation in Genesis seems to find
its deepest meaning. Would it not seem, then, that as the dimensions
of the Creation prove incomparably greater than those of the central
Earth of early tradition, the bestowal of that image could hardly be
restricted to that single locus?
Not everyone saw it in that way. Indeed, some critics turned matters
around to make the plurality of worlds an argument against
Christianity. Notable among these was Thomas Paine who in The Age of
Reason (1793) argued that "the two beliefs cannot be held together in
the same mind; and he who thinks that he believes in both has thought
but little of either."12 Paine took for granted that the astronomical
science of his day had already established the plurality of worlds.
Telescopes showed a vast number of fixed stars; "the probability
therefore is that each of those fixed stars is also a sun, round
which another system of worlds or planets, though too remote from us
to discover, performs its revolutions. . . . "13 And so: "the
solitary idea of a solitary world . . . in the immense ocean of
space, gives place to the cheerful idea of a society of worlds, so
happily contrived as to administer, even by their motion, instruction
to man."14 And since the Creator has filled our own world with life
at every level of size and complexity, we should expect that the same
would be true of that vaster universe; the immensity of space cannot
simply be "a naked void lying in eternal waste."15 Although there are
overtones here of the principle of plenitude, Paine's argument hinges
not so much on the nature of God as on the belief that the Creator
"organized the structure of the universe in the most advantageous
manner for the benefit of man" as well as for the humanlike
inhabitants of the multitude of other words.16
Paine goes on to assail Christian belief, to a deist like himself a
lamentable aberration. Christians, he says, are faced with a dilemma:
they must either believe that "the Almighty, who had millions of
worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of
all the rest and come to die in our world because, they say, one man
and one woman had eaten an apple," or else suppose that "every world
in the boundless creation, had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a
Redeemer." In this latter case, "the person who is irreverently
called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing
else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless
succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life."17
Laying aside the element of conscious caricature in these passages,
one can easily enough discern the sort of challenge that Paine is
posing to believers in the Incarnation, that is, in God's taking on
human nature in a particular individual who grew up long ago in
Galilee. His objection is posed to Christians only, not to Jews or
Muslims who could, without much of a stretch it would seem, allow
that intelligent peoples elsewhere in our galaxy might be granted by
a magnanimous Creator their own Moses, their own Mohammed. How, Paine
asks, are believers in the Incarnation to adjust to a new cosmology
in which the created universe no longer centers on the Earth and in
which humanity is scattered across myriad planets? It was easier to
accept the idea of God's becoming man when humans and their abode
both held a unique place in the universe. But is it any longer
credible in the light of the new questions that the plurality of
inhabited worlds poses?
Paine's challenge has been repeated many times since his day,
recently again by Roland Puccetti in his Persons: A Study of Possible
Moral Agents in the Universe.18 Puccetti draws on P. F. Strawson's
influential analysis of the notion of a person19 to argue that
persons must be corporeal and hence cannot be in more than one place
at the same time; they must be capable of moral agency and hence must
be able to experience sensations and emotions as only corporeal
beings can. This, of course, would mean that the notion of a person
could not be applied to God, not at least in the traditional
understanding of God as a spiritual being. (This would be ironic in
light of the fact that the term "person" in its Latin version persona
was first used, in something of its modern sense, of God not of
corporeal beings, when theologians of the early Christian centuries
attempted to illuminate the difficult doctrine of the Trinity.)
In a final chapter, Puccetti asks (somewhat illogically it might
seem), But suppose we do apply the term "person" to Christ, what are
we to make of the doctrine of the Incarnation, given that we are now
certain on scientific grounds (according to him, at least) that
civilizations have developed frequently elsewhere in our galaxy? (He
even suggests that 1018 might be the best current estimate for the
number of ETI sites in the known galaxies.20) It would be impossible
even for God, he argues, to become incarnate in so many locations in
the time available, given that a person cannot be present in more
than one place at once. Alternatively, if defenders of Christian
faith were to hold that God became incarnate on Earth only, they
would be faced with the objection that the inhabitants of other
planets would be unlikely ever to learn of it. How, then, would they
be saved? Since the Incarnation is central to Christian belief,
Puccetti concludes that the discovery of this vast plurality of
inhabited worlds undermines the Christian religion decisively.
His argument rests on some shaky presuppositions.21 The sort of
linguistic fundamentalism that would prescribe necessary conditions
for an ordinary-language term like "person" has been effectively
challenged in recent philosophy, most notably by Wittgenstein. We
have not the least idea how many ETI sites there may be in our own
galaxy, let alone in the collection of all galaxies. The use of the
Drake equation, with its seven (more or less) unknown quantities, to
estimate, even very roughly, their actual number is inadmissible,
given the state of our knowledge of the processes underlying the
probabilities making up the equation.
Puccetti's argument rests on the assumption that the number of ETI
sites can be known to be very great. One has to be wary here of a
fallacy induced by the contemplation of large numbers. It goes like
this: out of a million planets (with conditions suitable for life,
where life has developed, . . .), it is surely a "conservative
estimate" to suppose that 1 percent, at least, of those will (go on
to develop life, will progress toward intelligent life . . .). And,
lo! that gives us 10,000 candidates right away. But without a fair
degree of knowledge of the necessary conditions involved in the
process whose probability is being estimated, this kind of argument
is logically treacherous. It is one thing to discover one or a small
number of ETI sites based on the interpretation of incoming
radiation. It is another thing entirely to establish, on the basis of
a theoretical analysis of the multiplicity of processes involved in
the appearance and survival of intelligent life, that the number of
centers of such life in the universe is of a certain order or even
that it is, in very general terms, extremely large. So I am making
the much simpler assumption that a single center of ETI is
discovered, not on the basis of a theoretical analysis of the
component genetic processes but directly, by interpretation of
radiation patterns. The consequences for Christian theology are less
drastic perhaps-Puccetti's "not enough time" argument cannot get
started, for example-but in essence they are quite similar.
When people speculate about the implications for Christian theology
of an ETI discovery, they tend to assume that Christian theology is a
sort of given, that the main outlines of Christian belief are more or
less agreed on. But of course this is not the case. Not only are
there significant differences in this regard between Christian
denominations, but even in a single denomination there are areas of
vigorous debate, and particular doctrines can evolve over time. I
turn briefly now to several interrelated Christian doctrines, each of
them relevant to the ETI discussion, in order to show that the
questions ETI would pose for Christian theology depend quite
sensitively on how these doctrines are themselves to be formulated.
notes
1. P. Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of
Life (London: Penguin, 1998).
2. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (London: Michael Joseph, 1983).
3. C. de Duve, Vital Dust (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
4. S. J. Gould, Wonderful Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
5. Favored by Hoyle in Intelligent Universe. See the chapter,
"Panspermia," in Davies' The Fifth Miracle.
6. For a fuller account, see E. McMullin, "Introduction" in
Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1985), 1-56.
7. A. Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the
Bible," Christian Scholar's Review, 21 (1991), 8-32; reprinted in
D.L. Hull and M. Ruse, eds., The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 674-697.
8. E. McMullin, "Evolution and Special Creation," Zygon, 28
(1993), 299-335; reprinted in The Philosophy of Biology, 698-733.
9. S.J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), chapter 2.
10. Reformation theologians, on the other hand, tended to
emphasize the uniqueness both of the Incarnation and of the Bible.
Philip Melanchthon explicitly rejected the possibility of a plurality
of inhabited worlds on these grounds. T.J. O'Meara, "Christian
Theology and Extraterrestrial Life," Theological Studies, 60 (1999),
3-30; 6.
11. M.J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
12. T. Paine, The Age of Reason, in E. Foner, ed., Thomas Paine:
Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 704.
13. Ibid., The Age of Reason, 708.
14. Ibid., 710.
15. Ibid., 705.
16. Ibid., 709.
17. Ibid., 710.
18. R. Puccetti, Persons: A Study of Possible Moral Agents in
the Universe (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).
19. P.F. Strawson, Individuals (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
20. Puccetti, Persons, 139.
21. For a detailed critique, see E. McMullin, "Persons in the
Universe," Zygon, 15 (1980), 69-89.
22. P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper, 1967),
232-278; S.J. Duffy, "Our Hearts of Darkness: Original Sin
Revisited," Theological Studies, 49 (1988), 597-622.
23. A few examples: G. Daly, "Theological Models in the Doctrine
of Original Sin," Heythrop Journal, 13 (1972), 121-152; C. Duquoc,
"New Approaches to Original Sin," Cross Currents, 28 (1978), 189-200.
E.L. Mascall remarks: "The fact of original sin is undeniable, but
its adequate formulation is the despair of theologians," Christian
Theology and Natural Science (London: Longmans, 1956), 43.
24. Once again, there is a large literature in this area. See
the bibliography appended in W.S. Brown, N. Murphy, and H.N. Malony,
eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul: Scientific and Theological
Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998).
25. N. Murphy, "Non-reductive Physicalism," in Whatever Happened
to the Soul, 127-148; E. McMullin, "Biology and the Theology of Human
Nature," in P. Sloan, ed., Controlling Our Destinies: Historical,
Philosophical, and Ethical Perspectives on the Human Genome Project
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 367-393;
Arthur Peacocke, Science and the Christian Experiment (London: Oxford
University Press, 1971), 148-154.
26. M. Luther, Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. and transl. John N.
Lenker (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1988), 8, 376-377; quoted in
James T. Burtchaell, Philemon's Problem (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1998), 75-76.
27. J.T. Burtchaell, "His Father's Son, Firstborn of Many
Children," op. cit., 59-84.
28. The view defended by J.J. Davis in "Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Christian Doctrine of
Redemption," Science and Christian Belief, 9 (1997), 21-34.
29. E.L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science, 36-45.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This publication is hosted by Metanexus Online http://www.metanexus.net. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors.
Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. Please send all inquiries and submissions to . Metanexus consists of a number of topically focused forums (Anthropos, Bios, Cogito, Cosmos, Salus, Sophia, and Techne) and periodic HTML enriched composite digests from each of the lists.Copyright notice: Except when otherwise noted, articles may be forwarded, quoted, or republished in full with attribution to the author of the column and "Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science ". Republication for commercial purposes in print or electronic format requires the permission of the author. Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Metanexus Institute.