The Spirituality of Aliens

Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Brad East consider what Christian theology actually has to say about aliens — from the populated Christian cosmos to the angelic fall, demonic deception, and the Christological anthropocentrism that runs through Lewis, Edwards, and Aquinas. Are UFO encounters spiritual phenomena in disguise? And does any of this unsettle orthodox faith?

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Chapters

00:00 Aliens Are In The Air
06:38 What Counts As Alien?
12:22 The Nature of Alien Phenomena
19:08 Close Encounters of the Heavenly Kind
25:40 Lewis vs. L'Engle
32:52 Testimony
39:37 The Uniqueness of the Incarnation
45:30 Angels, Humanity, and Salvation
50:48 Christological Considerations
53:07 Be Fruitful and Explore Space!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexem Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our March book of the month is Keeping Kids Christian Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship by Cameron Schaefer. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com, backslash pages, backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off our book of the month from Lexum Press. Hello and welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, a podcast by Mere Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Rishmaui, and I'll be your host for today. I'm joined by regular cast and crew members Alistair Roberts and Brad East. Good to see you guys.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Good to see you. To be back again.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Well, yeah, we're we're sad to not have uh Joe Minick on the show with us. He was supposed to join us and then he got taken out by a flu or something like that. And so um we hope he's recovered by the time this airs. In the meantime, what we want to talk about today, though, is obviously aliens, right? About a week ago or so, uh there was there was some chatter. I think President Obama just said in an interview that, oh yeah, aliens are real, kind of walked that back. He doesn't know that. And then and then Trump decided to declassify everything, uh, whether just because of the general interest or the fact that, I don't know, we're having a war uh or something like that. Well, again, we'll see if we get that. Uh for whatever reason, it's in the air again. And I don't think what ever since about 2007, you know, 2017-2018, there was declassifications. UFO chatter has been around and is not going away. And so part of what we wanted to talk about this morning is really just the issue of aliens, of astrobiology, of life on other planets, uh, areas of the cosmos, and what resources traditional Christian theology and orthodoxy has to even deal with the concepts, right? Because this is one of those weird things I think I've I've maybe spoken of before. I think for some of us, there are areas of thought or realities that if they were to assert themselves, if it turned out X was real, it would just feel like it would just feel like the universe is a different place, and perhaps everything that I've ever thought is is a different kind of thing. And in fact, what if Christianity isn't true? Because I don't know, the Bible does it mention aliens, does it not? Are we in ancient aliens territory? But there can be this dizzying effect upon our reason where something enters the picture that doesn't seem to scale, that wasn't in our picture before. And it's not that it rationally overturns the Christian faith, but it just irrationally makes us dizzy. And so what I want us to do is actually just kind of wrestle with some of those categories so that we can uh, in a sense, know that we don't have to be dizzy. We don't we actually have firm uh ground to stand on. And also aliens are fun to talk about. So with that said, Brad Alistair, I I want- I'm curious if you guys had a lead-in on this. Uh Brad, I know you've written about this before. Alistair, uh odds are you've you've thought about like 10 different steps on this. So Brad, why don't you lead in on this? Because you had a piece over at Hedgehog Review about a year ago. We'll probably put it in the show notes. Uh but launch us.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Yeah. Yeah. For me, a nice entree is a piece. I I actually can't believe it's been five full years that Ezra Klein wrote for the New York Times. Uh and what I appreciated about it is that 99 times out of 100, when you see mainstream media or journalists talking about aliens, when they're not making fun or teasing or making people sound like crackpots, what they then always say, it's a kind of template and they just fill in the the, you know, it's a it's an ad-lib kind, mad lib kind of thing. And they always say that this would change organized religion forever, that that organized religion will would never be the same. And uh Klein, to his great credit, quoted um the director of the Vatican Observatory who said that if there were definitive proof or just public encounter with aliens and we learned that we were not alone in the universe, his line was what many, maybe most people in the world would say is, of course. Uh religious people uh have been the ones holding the ground that we're not alone from the beginning. We're the ones for whom this would not upset our metaphysics or our worldview. Uh Christians already believe in something far spookier and weirder than creatures like us a few planets away. We believe in angels. And if if Aquinas is right, it's not that angels are a species of which each individual, you know, is a is a member. They're each a genus of their own, right? Each is a genus unto itself, right? Like the the heavens are populated by celestial beings that we that that we cannot fathom, and only a few of us have ever encountered face to face, so to speak. So the first thing I always want to say, leading in here, uh, because this comes up with students, either directly because they ask about aliens or indirectly because they have questions about spooky stuff, um, charismatic stuff, spiritual warfare stuff. And I just always want to lead with the Christian cosmos has been populated from the beginning. It's been populated since Genesis 1. It was pop. I mean, I'm reading the Gospel of Mark right now. Like Jesus is the exorcist in chief. And these unclean spirits are very chatty. Like, like it's it's real trouble getting them to shut up. Like, that's the world that Christians and Jews have always taken for granted. And if there is created, material, intelligent life that belongs to this universe, then we've already got the resources, metaphysical, philosophical, theological, biblical, to incorporate and to handle this. Not that it would not raise any questions for us. Yeah. Uh and I want to later in the conversation, we can go in the direction of novelists, Christian novelists who've done good work here. But like we've already got the scaffolding to place such creatures in the right spots. And of all the things that would present a challenge to the Christian faith, this is last on the list.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yeah. So even for myself, uh the just to prep for this, I picked up a book by Andrew Davison. He's kind of done a great work on particip participation in God, but it turns out he had an old book called Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine. And it's, you know, 350 pages on just the metaphysical and theological implications of aliens from like doctrine of creation to fall to redemption to incarnation, all that. And I don't go everywhere he goes, but one of the things that is just useful about the book is he canvasses a lot of uh pre-20th century discussions of where people have talked about this stuff. My favorite little tidbit was a bit by Richard Baxter. I'm not a Baxter guy, but there's this quote where he's waxing eloquent about the fact that, oh, well, you know, we we must know that there are inhabitants. So his he's he's responding to the objection uh uh about Calvinism and the fewness of the saved or whatever it is, like how could God create so many people uh who are unsaved and he knows he's just he's like, ah, but you you've you fail to consider that there are you know untold, perhaps billions of unfallen aliens who are dwell countlessly uh obviously dwelling on uh other planets who must be adoring the savior. And so his his his argument is like, actually, you haven't considered all of the aliens who are who are saved. So but I mean that was you know 400 years ago or so, and it's just utterly unfazed, and he thought it was a worshipful thing. I don't know if I buy that, but but he's far from alone for from Christians having speculative and uh even fairly happy um uh reflection on the existence of other rational creatures in the cosmos. Alistair.

SPEAKER_03 8:17

That's one thing that's more distinctive about our understanding uh our conversation about aliens in our culture is the degree to which we see them very much in technological and scientific terms. And so it's not the way that angels and other spiritual beings would have been perceived in the past. Um the categories tend to be more advanced technology rather than higher on the chain of being or something like that. And so the categories tend to be the moral dimension tends to be dampened. Um there's less of a sense of the moral features that you might have if you're thinking about let's say the interactions that are envisaged in various readings of Genesis six with the sons of God and the daughters of men, um that sort of thing which would be interaction with aliens um but in many paradigms, has more of a a moral sense to it. And then there's also the degree to which we think about this in terms of a very I suppose post-Copernican vision of the universe where they obviously come from other planets. We don't necessarily think about our planet and our order as having maybe interdimensional realities, and that is where I think a Christian account might be more inclined to lead us to interdimensional beings that we can have interactions with. And then I think more generally this leads into a host of other conversations about religion as the form within which people have interpreted such encounters before, and the degree to which those have been uh taken over by a more scientific framework. And yet there are still alien cults and things like that, and various forms of new age religion that have been informed by um notions of angelic visitation or some sort of revelation through a higher being. I do think though the the fundamental paradigm within which aliens operate is a rather different one from traditional Christian understandings.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

So w one thing is having a sh having uh a category to slot them in. If we're talking about aliens, aliens would be conceived of as creatures uh that are not angels, uh they're not purely spiritual beings, they are creatures in a sense parallel, maybe not like just like us, but parallel to us in other parts of the galaxy, other parts of you know how many other galaxies there are. I mean, the sheer scale of potentially habitable planets is is is wild when you start looking into it. Um so there are other there are other creaturely beings. So you could conceivably have all sorts of permutations of of different explanations for the phenomena that we're talking about. So for instance, you talk about UFO stuff, and obviously some of this stuff could be just governmental optical illusion, all those sorts of things. When you start thinking about the fact that angels are real, demons are real, uh in the ancient world, uh a good amount of you say pagan religion was, I think, encounters with spiritual beings who, using the thought forms and templates available, actually presented to themselves as deities, so on and so forth, deceiving the nations. You you could conceivably have a world where, hey, uh aliens exist and they're real. And also we're living in a world where there are demons who exist and are real and would use native frameworks of human thought to deceive, to um masquerade, uh maybe not as Anubis or Thoth, but as an interdimensional being who is leading you to enlightenment and a path and yada yada, and it's just like a demon messing with you. Um so there's there's there's different permutations as to like, do we have a space for the concept of aliens? Does that unseed it? But the question is, okay, the phenomenon that we've all been talking about, well, I still don't know that we're I don't know what we're dealing with. We don't actually know that, you know, if there is any government dealings or I sound like a I I know I know it sounds kind of crazy uh right now, but whatever phenomenon people have been encountering or not encountering or feeling like they've been encountering can range anywhere from delusion to um say extraterrestrial to say actually spiritual encounter with a deceptive being who uh wills your wills your harm. Uh and that's just a good old-fashioned this is a good old-fashioned demon uh who is uh working for Satan and that that sort of thing. And so th this is the this is where some of this stuff gets extra complicated when you're dealing with the actual world where we we have. We have all sorts of theological categories for the potential for it. But having a category for a potential for it doesn't mean that that's definitely what's happening when people are encountering realities or spiritual realities here. Brad Alistair?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Yeah, I think that's right. Uh so in in the piece that you referenced in the Hedgehog Review, it's called Lexicon of the Phenomenon. And the phenomenon is sort of like insider ufologist speak to describe like the singular experience of encountering something like this and then sort of being reduced to silence by it. And uh Alistair, you were you were bringing to mind the work of Diana Posulka, um, who has written a couple books on this. Uh, I believe she's a practicing Catholic. She used to, she was a she was a scholar of um like medieval Marian apparitions, and this led her in the direction of more contemporary study of these things. She went on Ross Dalton's podcast a year or two ago. I've I've read one of her books and part of another one. And what she what she I got me to think about was disaggregating what the phenomena could be. So one, as you've already said, is theological, category, like a category we already have, like angels and demons, for example. Another is technological. It's it's our stuff, um, but nobody's claiming it. Uh it could be epistemic in the sense that like it's a fail, it's a it it is a real experience, but it it is purely psychological. It's a kind of failure. Another is some kind of other non-angelic life. Uh it could be interdimensional and still another universe, or it could be our universe and a fellow creature like us. And the other category I give is mythical. And in my view, mythical is the one, like if we want to sort of taxonomize the ones to be maximally wary of, uh, the mythical is the one where I see you uh you see people going down the rabbit hole where they're trying to like tell alternative histories of the world with the Nephilim and with Ezekiel chapter one and Atlantis and right, like it's like you're kind of like, you know, like the you're in the realm of fairy, F-A-E-R-I-E. Like you're in the realm of kind of like non-aligned, mischievous trickster spirits. And you're not quite in the Bible, and you're not quite in the Copernican universe, you're you're somewhere else. And for me, uh, you know, we're having this conversation, and I take this stuff very seriously. I I love, for example, the Dalfit is at the times actually taking this stuff seriously from a religious perspective. I don't think we need to say it's just for ten foil hat cranks and conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless, there is this overlap with the kind of person who thinks the number one most important question to ask about the Bible is was Ezekiel one aliens? Or what is going on? Like, what is going on with the Nephilim?

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Like that's Moses doing shrooms.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Like that's actually like quote unquote, what we need to get to the bottom of. And it's like, no, it's not. You know, like like Christians are in the business of obeying God, worshiping him, and following Christ. Like these questions are not unaskable, but they are not at the center of the concentric circles. And so, to give to give language to this, alien talk can participate in a kind of curiositas or curiosity in the vice sense, where we are focusing our limited finite epistemic attention on what ultimately does not matter relative to uh the things of God, relative to in Matthew 23, right? The weightier matters of the law. And that doesn't mean we can't talk about it. We're talking about it right now. We should, but we have to always be clear about its relative significance or insignificance, and that we're not actively contributing to that in our high sort of hyper-obsessive, extremely online alien talk obsessions.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean, there's there is stuff in you know the Timothy's about foolish myths and controversies and genealogies and you know, what kind of genealogies? Well, we're talking about Enoch and uh and you know, is it was it angels? Was it was it something else? Uh, you know, who are the sons of God? Genesis 6, all that sort of thing. Um, that was part of the literature of the day.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

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SPEAKER_00 19:08

This is where maybe it's an interesting question to think about. Epistemologically, one of the arguments that people will make is uh I've seen is look, the Bible doesn't talk about aliens, it doesn't have a category for aliens, so obviously they wouldn't be there. Uh so obviously they're not real. Um, because if they were, God would have told us. And so what we must do is find something that is explicitly talked about and then coordinate it within it. And th there's a line, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a line of argument there that's not totally wrong, but there's a lot of stuff that's not talked about in the Bible, right? Uh the Bible doesn't give us uh, you know, key mapped-out coordinates for all sorts of areas of physics and literature and uh chemistry and all those sorts of things. And so um having a doctrine of scripture, the the epistemological issues are are interesting that like scripture both tells doesn't tell us everything there is to know, but it tells us only really what we need to know with regard to our faith. Uh it tells us more than that, but but but in terms of its central, its central focus, um, there is a sense in which you could argue, hey, there's a category for it, um, we can deal with it, but you you might still at the same time say, if the Bible didn't tell us about it, like is there an argument for saying, hey, have a category for it, but then don't really worry about it because it's probably not gonna impinge on your life at some point? Is that is that too far? Is there a sense of, is there like an epistemological argument saying, like, hey, if God didn't tell us about it in there, it's probably not gonna have such significant impact on your walk with the Lord or your life and times that, you know, it's not that you can think about it, but you shouldn't waste much time on it. Or is that even that too strong?

SPEAKER_02 20:55

I think that's too strong, Derek, because you just to give a uh a very disanalogous analogy.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

I'm trying to throw it out there as some argument.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Is like it doesn't tell us about social media or AI, but these are affecting our lives. And in the same way, for me, it it's it's it's you know, there's a balance to be struck between curiosity on the one hand and a s and a kind of like principled ignorance or studied ignorance on the other. And I like the way that Davison and others look to pre-modern sources, and what I like to joke with my students because it actually helps them see an important point. Like the multiverse that's supposed to be like a new idea is something Christians have been thinking for about for a long time in all possible universes, right? God is free to make however many universes in whatever ways he pleases because he's God. Like the fundamental doctrine of creation is this capacious, extraordinary intellectual tool that gives us an ability to handle and incorporate new ideas. And so for me, the alien talk stuff raises questions, but what it should elicit from guys like us in the classroom. Or working with uh working with folks in church is an a non-anxious posture where it's like, man, for all I know, in the 21st century, aliens will impinge on our lives, right? Like C.S. Lewis considers this, Mary Doria Russell considers this, my my guy Robert Jensen considers this, right? Like it raises questions like should you like the question is, should you preach the gospel to them, right? Like that is an interesting pastoral practical question. Are they fallen like us? Or as in Lewis's fiction, are they unfallen? Like we're the ones who needed help and they already, they already are good with God. Like these are these are wanna come back to that one.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Yeah. Because that's what that's what I that's what I think about.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

So all that to say for me, I don't want to say we know in advance and won't impinge on us, merely that because precisely because the gospel is enough and because scripture is sufficient for faith and morals, we don't have to be nervous, even if the 23rd or 27th century ends up being defined by encountering intelligent life. Christians are not going to be, their faith will not be nuked from orbit by that revelation because we've had all the revelation we need. That's that's for me the the balanced middle point.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

One thing I'd say is I think there's more than just a matter of curiosity here. There's whatever we understand the sort of encounters that people describe are. And so it seems to me that there are great inconsistencies between many accounts of aliens. Some of them just seem incredibly weird to us, particularly ones in the past, which describe uh heavenly vehicles that are very much analogies to their earthly or um sea vessels, which are completely weird to us, but at the same time provide a channel through which religious influence can be exerted. And so I wonder whether we should be not just seeing this not just as a matter of curiosity about some weird thing that might be in our world, but being open to the possibility that there are forces of deception in the world, which we already believe, and that many of these alien visitations, however we understand it, have a spiritual have a spiritual agenda. And their spiritual their spiritual agenda may be far more important than the other things that we tend to focus upon. I mean, when you consider all the visitations that people have recorded, it doesn't seem like just getting information about humanity, doing research. It doesn't seem like the preparation for an invasion. It seems more like that there's something about humanity itself that uh is worthy of influence. And so I'm I I would be a lot uh warier of just treating it as a spiritually neutral phenomenon within our world and not considering the fact the possibility that these might be attempts to uh influence religious understanding.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

So this is where you know all the different kind of uh permutations exert themselves of like you you might have aliens in some far-fallen galaxy, and that's true, but everything we've encountered is actually not an alien, it's probably a demon of some sort who is trying to influence religiously in the same way they influence the god, you know, presentations of the gods, whatever it is. One of the freakiest movies on this, and and obviously it it's it's hard to not appeal to literature, and we'll get to some literature in a minute, but Stargate, right? You have you have the classic, you have the classic presentation of people, ancient aliens. It's the guy from the History Channel meme, um, where Ra is this old alien who you know shows up and you know influences uh the people who believe he's a deity, so on and so forth. Um, but you know, the other argument was is actually no, it's a demon who's presented himself as a god. And perhaps what you're dealing with with these encounters is just demonic encounters that are embodied in weird ways, that are presented, uh pr currently presenting themselves in alien forms to our uh to our culture and society that has that category uh and that sort of thing, which raises the question of the fallenness, the potential fallenness of alien races or not. Because you start to look at the taxonomy of, you know, people always mention C. S. Lewis's space trilogy, and that's real, right? In the space trilogy, we've got one fallen race. You've got humanity, and then you've got other races that might, other species that might fall. The other, the other possibility that always asserts itself, though, and people don't talk about it as much, is Madeline Lingle, right? You've got um you've got a wrinkle in time, and in the wrinkle in time, you've got a vision of a cosmos at war where there are aligned, there are fallen planets and there are unfallen planets. You've got aligned species and unaligned species or whatever it is. And I don't know which one I buy more if there are aliens and this is whatever. Again, I don't I don't know that I actually believe in aliens, but I'm saying if there were, pure speculation here, um when you start thinking about something that we do actually believe in, which is a prehistoric angelic fall, some deep angelic fall, and this is actually a book we're going to talk about in a in a couple of weeks here, Philip Porter's Unnatural Death, he talks about the angelic fall. Um the odds that the the odds that that fall, the odds that that fall only had impacts on our planet, on our with our species, whatever it is, um raises the possibility that you're you're not necessarily always going to deal with like a a m uh uh uh an unfallen um kind of so the the the I'm saying the possibilities are endless here. This is why it's partially fun to talk about. Um so guys, what are your what are your odds? If there are aliens, fallen, unfallen, mixed, some mix, some fallen, some not fallen.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

I'm glad you um Derek, I'm glad you took it there because I I had not I had not anticipated it, and then I I was about five seconds ahead of you saying Angelic Fallen. I was like, oh yeah, that is it. If you know, and and Porter to some extent, I believe, is following his Duke teacher, uh Paul Griffiths, whose book Decreation, in my view, is very good on this. And he actually takes a minority view on angels uh there, which actually could play into the alien conversation, which is he's not he's not a Thomist, so he doesn't think that um angels are immaterial, incorporeal, purely spiritual beings. He he I believe he calls them material that they have discontinuous bodies but do belong to our cosmos, which which is not representative of the tradition, but does raise certain kinds of questions for us. Um I do think, Derek, your point to take this met with metaphysical seriousness, if with the tradition and with the fathers, we believe that the angelic fall touches this creation at the source, so that the pr that fall isn't a s is primordial uh in a way that antecedes our fall, then I think you're right that that that's not something we're gonna be dogmatic about, but it's a good, it's a good hunch. Um what I you know what you the second thing you made me think of, both of you, is because I think you're right, Alistair, to point out that, you know, to uh on one hand, we don't know, we we don't know what's going on, right? We have to emphasize our ignorance and we have to emphasize the array of options. On the other hand, you're right, and Pasuko is very good on this, that like even so-called modern people from the last 75 years, basically after World War II with quote unquote modern technology, even when they interpret aliens through a technological lens or through a sort of Copernican scientific lens, their encounters always, without exception, end up being spiritual in nature. They they affect their personalities, they affect the rest of their lives, they affect their psyches, they all of their language is dripping in religious and spiritual content. It is an ineffable encounter. It that they they either feel enlightened or they feel um damaged, right? It's not always like I had this great experience. Sometimes they they have been profoundly harmed for the worse. They're not so much evangelists as they are. They want people to know this exists because it's so scary. Yes, and it except and it's overlap, which I think overlaps, yeah. The overlap.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

I took psychedelics and I met them. I met the beings. They're there, they're horrifying. Or they showed me everything.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

Well, and yeah, well, I was gonna go down. Well, maybe we'll come back to the other.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

There's a tool song. Sorry. Anyways, we're not gonna go there.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

I I know that song. I I was a tool fan in my teens. Uh uh I came back I came back to the like anyway. So what I would say is like if we want to talk about adjacent conversations, psychedelics is one. You know, epistemically, I think the phenomenon is adjacent to miracles. And uh spiritually, it's adjacent to witchcraft. So again, witchcraft is something that is both uh eye roll-inducing for a scientific age, and on the other hand, it is all the rage uh in our time. It has made this sort of roaring comeback. Um, and Christians, in my view, have a very nuanced, balanced, and unanxious approach to all such things, including so-called magic. It's and it's what you say, Alistair, that there are more things in heaven or on earth uh than our philosophy has imma has imagined or can handle. And much of it is dark and scary. Um, Christians come pre-equipped, uh, knowing that there are agencies beyond plural, beyond our own, and that not all of them are bad, but often they wish us harm, and we need to be wary of them.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Getting into one aspect that you opened up there, um you talked about the relationship between this phenomenon and miracles. We have a faith that's largely based upon eyewitness testimony. How do we handle the eyewitness testimony that is very much at the heart of the um alien phenomenon, however we understand it? It depends upon, for the most part, accounts that people give of experiences that are not replicable, but there are multiple uh accounts from different people.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Um I mean, for me, I don't have a great answer. Part of it is uh our accounts left a Bible. Um our accounts left uh weirdly consistent documents across, you know, single, multiple, dozens, hundreds of eyewitnesses at the same time about the same event with roughly the same judgment about its significant significance and transformed lives, so on and so forth, repeated and not entirely unrepeated uh realities of the same consistent claims about the miracle working power of Jesus via the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. Um, that continued in various ways and forms, such that the encounter, you know, that the eyewitnesses had generated a had uh generated a whole form of life, a community, a society that was self-sustaining or at least spirit-sustained, in a way that none of these other accounts seem to generate the same kind of thing. Uh random one-off. At least I'm not I'm I haven't gone deep on this stuff, so you know, forgive me, you might have some data point here and there that it's parallel. Um, so that said, um, I don't put them in the same range at all. That said, uh if you've got miracle accounts that you believe, you know, you got the Carlos Ayre They Flew book. Um, and and if you have a category of people encountering demons and people encountering angels just in your tool, in your toolkit, ruling it out as, oh, that definitely didn't happen because weird, freaky stuff doesn't happen is not an answer I'm giving. The question is, do I have do I have reason to think that that particular weird freaky thing that you're telling me happened definitely happened and I'm gonna stake my my the weight of my soul on it? Um I I'm I'm gonna need more than what what what we've been given so far. Um you know, in any case, it's not the kind you thing you you know stake your soul on. So that's my initial uh uh stab at it. I don't know if that's good enough, but Brad.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

Yeah, I I mean I think that those are good grounds for Christians broadly speaking, just being agnostic about these things. Um that uh any given experience of the so-called phenomenon uh might have happened as reported, might has might have happened but been a different or uh more comprehensive event that the person could realize at the time or or in their retrospective interpretation, or didn't happen. Yeah, right. Wasn't it was an illusion or a a purely psychic uh phenom phenomenon, uh a phenomenon of the psyche. But uh Alistair, you know, I I I like your question because what you're saying, I take you to be saying for all Christians, we believe both in the numinous or the miraculous um one-time occurrences that are not that are not in uh that do not fit inside the mechanistic science of the Enlightenment and of modern, you know, modern science, et cetera, scientism. Uh and moreover, it's a kind of non-rep replicable knowledge based on per testimony that we believe uh even though we did not see it or experience it ourselves. To me, philosophically speaking, it does put us together with cranks and with um alien true believers and with conspiracy theorists. You know, a a year ago for Christianity Today, I wrote a piece called Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists. And the idea being there that like it is just not good enough for Christians to join in the sort of like anti-disinformation campaign against so-called conspiracy theorists that we all, that all of us always already know are wrong because they are conspiracy theories, which is of course circular reasoning. And it's like, hey, listen, guys, like we believe there is an invisible in insidious force and set of forces at work in the world. We believe in things you can't see. We believe in miraculous encounters uh based on eyewitness testimony. We believe in a kind of conspiracy, both a good one and a bad one. Like these are things we believe. We have, I think we have good reasons for doing so. What it means is we're actually all in the same epistemic bucket. And uh we don't get to look down our noses on uh using the so-called, you know, like cr canons or criteria of public knowledge, because that would rule out the kinds of things we, as Derek said, stake our souls on. Um I think it's uh crucial to accept that on the front end rather than to resist it.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Ironically enough, for us, we we actually have stuff in our texts, in our sacred texts, talking about the principalities and the powers that conspire against the knowledge of God, that actually set themselves up, that need to be pulled down. And so there's there's a weird sense of we we already know that that the regime of public knowledge, to use whatever the term, um is a disenchanting one in a lot of ways, is one that wants to a priori, ahead of the game, screen out what we know to be Christian truths. Now, again, I don't think that that obviously translates to, and therefore, you know, the earth is flat, and it turns out that the you know, every every single theory we've seen out there. Um but there is something about that that that starts to to alter a little bit of your epistemological stance. Not totally, right? This this is not just opening the door to everything. Um, but it it means that when you close it, you're closing it differently than just pure, like, well, obviously, nothing other than you know, whatever David Hume said is possible is possible. So we just know stuff can't happen. Um so that's that's one that's one um thing I'd say there. To to turn the corner a little bit, um it's interesting to think about potential, just just to go speculative again, going back to the fallen versus unfallen races, going back to the uh relationship of these things. In in in like Lewis's framework, and I think even Langles, from what I can recall, um the incarnation is unique. The incarnation is a is a singular one-time event that impacts everybody, um but in different ways. So fallen races are impacted one way, unfallen races are impacted another way. But it's interesting to think about how Christ can be redeemer and savior of the cosmos when you think about the analogy of the angels. So it is not for the angels' sake that Christ becomes incarnate, is what it says in in Hebrews. Like he does it's not for for their sake to help them in that particular way. And yet the angels are blessed and benefit from a cosmos that is redeemed, right? So he's only Christ is only the federal head or the covenant head of Adam's race. He's the second Adam, right? He's not united with an angel. Uh the sun is not hypostatically united with an angel. Um I g I'm curious to hear to see what you think about in terms of, you know, the book, the Davison book, considers the potential for multiple incarnations and what would that look like. I I lean against it. You might say something's possible uh without it being fitting. Um I think there is a there is a certain Christological anthropocentrism that is warranted in the sense of thinking this is the one, this is we're we're the one race to whom God, our Savior, has united himself in redemption, and that if there is going to be blessings to the cosmos, it's coming from that one singular one-off event of life, death, resurrection, etc. That's how Lewis seems to picture it and so forth. And all we can really do here is literary depictions and theological speculations because, you know, for all we know, this is pure speculation because they're not even there. But I I'm curious to hear what you guys think, your leanings here. This is just pure we're just we're just having fun here. So Alistair, Brad.

SPEAKER_03 42:05

Well, um, I would be very wary of holding open the possibility of multiple incarnations. Um and yet we do have, for instance, the angel of the Lord within the Old Testament that suggests that although Christ is not incarnate, or however we would say it, as an angel, he is he is associated with the angels in some ways in the Old Testament dispensation. And he is not one of them in the way that he is one of us. But yet there is something there that I think we should consider.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

I'm good with the speculation, you know, and and Thomas does this in the Summa less regarding aliens than regarding sort of like each person of the Trinity. Could the whole Trinity be in one per like there's all this stuff? And and I never want to be I never want to be afraid of these speculative questions as out of bounds, uh, because if they occur to us, then they're questions that we're actually wondering about. But with you, Derek, I would say something like I'm open to Davison's argument, Thomas's argument, anybody's argument, that it is in principle conceivable that God could, in his omnipotence, become incarnate uh more than once in the same universe. I think it's a separate question, incarnate in different universes, right? That do not overlap. That would be a separate question to me. That that it could, in principle, be possible by the power of God, but that it on its face it seems maximally unfitting in convenience. And I would say that uh I I with you, I like Lewis's depiction. For for listeners who don't know what Lewis does with this, his line is the unfallen creatures on a planet in our solar solar system don't look like us at all, and they're not like. Us at all. They're not even like each other. He tries to really imagine like different creatures that are not angelic. But then he says there's this new, uh, right, there's a, there's a, there's a new beginning on another planet that hasn't had life or rational life before now in the 20th century. And the explanation that the protagonist is given is that once God does become a particular creature, once he assumes human nature to himself, all future rational creatures on any planet in any solar system will be humanoid because God has sort of adorned or blessed this particular species with the hypostatic union. And so, like, they're green, but they're basically us. It's a green Eve, but she looks like a human being for all intents and purposes. And I think that is not a literal claim, but it is a theologically stimulating speculation because what it tells us, and you're again to use that language, Derek, that there's a Christological anthropocentric anthropocentrism that is proper to the biblical narrative, flows out of it organically, so that um like and it and it and it's right, it's riffing on Psalm 8 that there is something about these weird creatures where we are both the lowest and the highest, and and God Himself has elevated us to the highest, not just through our natural dominion, but through the incarnation.

SPEAKER_03 45:30

Yeah, I don't think was has interesting stuff on this. His stuff on the angels.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

One of the things that actually shows up in Porter's book a little bit on the angels. Keep going though, sorry.

SPEAKER_03 45:40

One of the things that is interesting is the degree to which angels desire to look into the things concerning our salvation. It seems that our salvation has broader ramifications for the cosmos. And I would take a reading of um Genesis six that sees the sons of God as the angels. There is a sort of rebellion in the cosmos that we see in Genesis three with the deception of Adam and Eve. And then we see this extension of that, I think, later on, and a more catastrophic turning of the creation against its creator. And we can see within Scripture the degree to which the the world is held enthralled by demonic and other beings, but also these have a sort of tutelary purpose. The guardianship of humanity before the advent of Christ is one of the reasons the angels are operative. It's through angels that the law is given, Paul argues. And then we have this more general situation where perhaps division of humanity among the um the angelic um the angels. We might think of the descriptions in places like Daniel of the Prince of Persia and these sorts of angelic conflicts behind the scene, but and then later on, of course, in Revelation. And so it seems to me that angels are intimately uh concerned with human destiny and salvation. They are involved in the story as ministering spirits, as Hebrews 1 argues. And so my understanding of most alien phenomena would be in terms of that, that there's something about the drama of salvation that extends beyond humanity, but it also is something that focuses upon humanity. And there's also something here that that if I'm going to get really speculative, there is a reason why it's the sons of God and the daughters of men. There's something unique about humanity that humanity is the bride. Humanity is raised up as the bride. And I think it's um Edwards who gives this illustration of a king with great many nobles and authorities in his court. And the king takes a bride from someone of a lowly status within his kingdom, and they are raised up as a result of that. And there's something, I think, of that dynamic in our relationship with the angels. And I think this is also one of the things that is behind alien phenomena, things like that, that there is something of a concern about humanity in itself. Humanity is the place where the drama of salvation and the cosmos is playing out. And so it matters that our religious perceptions, our um whatever it is, that these seemingly higher be beings, whether they are seen as more technologically advanced or holier, um, as they would have been more in the past, that that matters for the direction of human perception of what the universe is, what our place within it is, what God's purpose is for us. And so I would see it very much within that larger framework of God's purpose of salvation, focusing upon humanity, but having broader ramifications.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

One analogy there is um uh Israel and the nations, right? You might think of humanity as the Israel among if if there are alien nations, th there there might still be that sort of relationship with other rational embodied whatever creatures. But it's interesting on the on the on the angels thing, um, we'll have to come back to this with Porter, but Adam Johnson has uh an article. Johnson's just so fun. He does everything that could be done about atonement, but he's got one on the atonement for unfallen angels and the significance of Christ's death, where demons fear to tread. But he talks about four or five different angles on what the atonement does, the unique atonement does for Christ for the unfallen angels, even though he doesn't die for their sins. And one of the things he does, you know, he appeals to Augustine's original kind of uh speculation around, you know, the restoration of the number of the heavenly city of the unfallen angel, of the fallen angels, of the of humanity actually making up the number and the the completeness of the city of God. You've got the fact that the atonement confirms the the unfallen angels in goodness, partially through the revelation of the glory of God and causing them to worship in more purified ways. And so even atonement as revelation, so to speak, in the in the broad sense of atonement, not in the narrow sense of paying for sin, but but in the salvific sense of like witnessing in an unfallen way the completeness of Christ's victory over sin and death, confirming you in holiness and thereby leading you into greater beatitude and exploring, you know, feeling the glory of God. And so that he's got a whole bunch of other things there, too.

SPEAKER_03 50:47

Aaron Powell You've also got Revelation 12, where there's a great battle in heaven and the angels are successful precisely because of the blood of Christ.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

So with this idea, I do like the christological concentration. And again, we'll we can get into more of this when Porter, when when Philip comes on the show, because he gets into the Edwards line and actually apparently Edwards gets this from Suarez. Suarez has exp has christological um speculations here. It's really fun stuff. You when you guys get there. Um But I do think, I mean, these kinds of considerations is partially why um I do think we again have warrant of just focusing it on Christ. The scripture did tell us the central things, and I don't think it's vain or unduly uh unduly human-centered to think that the main action has happened here, so to speak, in the union of God with man. This is the only time we know about it, and and and and it seems uh, you know, you might talk about fittingness for other other creatures, but it's it seems unfitting for uh it to have happened more than once in more than one way. Especially I have weird questions about the weirdness of the Son, even if it's possible, right? You do you have Jesus meeting other in other union, other other species that you know, the the Redeemer of other species. When you have the man Christ uh who is ascended, seated at the right hand of the Father, there's just weird stuff happening there. Where is he? Where is he and then like his parallels and then it starts to get into you know kind of weird avatar uh land of many manifestations. I, you know, Davison has a metaphysics worked out for it, and it's it's Thomas, but I just don't know.

SPEAKER_02 52:35

I mean it does I mean I want to implicate. I don't like it. I want to say one thing about that, and then I have a question for Alistair, and it might be a good question for us to kind of uh land the plane on. The the comment is I still think that the multiverse uh doesn't have those problems. And really, again, Lewis does this with Aslan, right? Like Narnia is just another world. So it's the question is not sort of like it's not like at this moment in our world where is Jesus, it's that in that world he's doing something different and those don't line up temporally or spatially. But Alistair, I uh I so I I hear, you can correct me, I hear a pretty deep note of skepticism in your voice, not about these experiences or their reality, but about the notion that they might be alien in the literal sense rather than alien as our culture's term for what we ought to be calling numinous or spiritual or angelic or demonic uh experiences or encounters. And I suppose the practical question raised by that, and even if that's not quite the right reading of you, uh, it raises for me the practical question of like, what should Christians think about deep space exploration and colonization and the kind of like vogue for that right now? Um, like, do we, you know, like, and I and I think I can argue myself strongly in either direction. I can argue myself with, and and this doesn't really map right-left. Like, if you get out of our moment and look at the last hundred years, this is not really a right-left thing. Um, you know, the question becomes, you know, I can make the sort of like agrarian Paul King's Northwindleberry argument that like we have screwed up this planet. Why are we itching to screw up some more? Like, let's try to actually solve our problems. And then I can also understand not just the tech guru line, um, but the kind of like adventurous dominion of Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 that like we are meant to do this. Like the anthropological and Christological centrism is that like we metaphorically speaking, we are the center of the universe. Um and we ought to expand that reach even in our fallen state. And and the the quenching of that spirit of adventure and exploration is decadent and ought to be conquered and mastered. And like depending on the day or even the hour, or the person I'm talking to or reading at the moment, is where I land on that. And I wonder if that conversation rides on the back of this one or whether they're actually totally distinct because the split space exploration and colonization doesn't depend either way on whether there is intelligent life in the universe besides us. And it doesn't per se have anything to do with angelic or dem or demonic encounters. It's just about the continuing expanse of human civilization and culture. So do you, Alistair, or do you, Derek, have a kind of take on this from a theological perspective?

SPEAKER_00 55:45

My dad worked on the space shuttle for 30-something years. He developed some of the electrical boxes. So I I'm not about conquest, but there is a part of my childhood imagination that is like, yeah, dog, it's good to go to space. Let's go, baby. It's it's our space. This is our use. This is like I'm not gonna say it's it's it's so it's it's it's it's not just um, oh gosh, the Monroe Doctrine, but just at the at a human level. But it's not not that.

SPEAKER_02 56:15

Our it's our cosmic.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

It's the dominion mandate. Uh, but but I do think that there's this level of, you know, part of what I've always thought of the the one thing I'll I'll give the Mormons for like two seconds um is the idea of new creation. You think about what we're doing for a billion years, we're worshiping the heavenlies, we're worshiping God, all these sorts of things, but but you I don't know, it's not weird to me that part of what we might be doing is exploring the literally billions of stars that God has made and the billions of planets and you know how how many thousands of planets that are inhabitable that the Lord God has made. And he is currently enjoying, and he is currently delighting in because he's delighting at the works of his hands. Isn't that weird to think that part of what we're supposed to do eventually as we like reign with Christ in the heavenlies, and the heavenlies are actually, you know, the the union of heaven and earth might include, might include, you know, uh the the the I don't know, ex exploration and and enjoyment of of the vast cosmos that we inhabit um in in its in an unfallen form.

SPEAKER_02 57:30

And therefore that we ought to anticipate that.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

Well, you know what? That would be eschatological, you know? Do I think we need to do it? No. Do I think it is totally bad? No. Like maybe there should be other uses of our money. That that's that's totally a plausible argument. Like, I don't know that we need I don't know that uh what's his name? Amazon? Amazon dude? Bezos, yeah. Bezos needs to be replicating whatever Elon's doing with just I'm a billionaire, I need to do space trap.

SPEAKER_03 57:58

I mean, Elon's whole vision seems to be organized around getting to Mars and doing all the things.

SPEAKER_00 58:03

He actually just he downgraded to the moon.

SPEAKER_03 58:06

Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

SPEAKER_00 58:07

He downgraded to the moon recently.

SPEAKER_03 58:09

But um but so the the other thing too that kind of gives me pause on this is just the degree to which many of these visions have been connected with the occult as well. And think of Jack Parsons. Yeah, there's that. Jack Parsons and some of his um his whatever you call Alistair Crowley stuff um in rocket engine pioneer work. It just seems there are weird things going on with these visions, these visions for getting outside of our beyond our planet. I think the impulses not the material ones of the but the spiritual impulses that drive this can often be uh profoundly suspect to me. Even though I think in general it's great to um advance the reaches of science, exploration. I think the space race was a very good thing to draw our attention.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

Be the commies.

SPEAKER_03 59:13

Yes, but but also to to give us a sense of uh progress and frontier beyond our planet, um, and to give us a sense of the maybe the fragility of the planet and our place within it. And many of these other sorts of developments I think have been important in human understanding. But I do have this again element of concern and skepticism about some of the impulses that are driving someone like Elon.

SPEAKER_00 59:46

Sure, sure. I mean again, this is the you know, abuse and and proper use and so on and so forth. There's there's a lot of different reasons to do all the things that we do. Some are bad, some are good. Uh I I don't think that one is just strike it just strikes me as not an inherently licit, right? The people doing it, you might not want to do it. So I I would prefer a Presbyterian in charge of all these things. But um, you know, and hey, hey, you know, uh Buzz and and the crew up there, you know, uh I can't remember. Communion has been celebrated by a Presbyterian in space. He got and he got permission from his presbytery. Um so it was it was in it was in due order. Uh uh but but um there is this level of like if there's space travel up there, you know the papists are gonna send a priest up there eventually. And I'm just saying the Protestants should get there at least first.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Oh, come on, how did we get there? No, come on. We always get there. No, we just get there.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

Totally Protestant supremacy across the cosmos.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:45

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, I can't believe it. Can't believe it.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

We got there from aliens. Um, look, there's there's so much more that we could say. I really do think, I do think the spiritually discerning aspect of this, this is the kind of thing that if if we get weird photos and whatever gets revealed, people will get like one-shotted and and and and just start having spiritual experiences with with the concept of aliens. So it's it's good to have and be aware and be discerning, as Alistair is talking about. But also just not be not be scared that Christianity doesn't have the have the theological capacities for uh, in a sense, um digesting these new developments should they should they arise. Uh there's nothing about this that is a threat to the um to the uh to the to the Lord God and his supremacy and the supremacy of Christ. So um anyways, with that said, uh that we come to the close of our uh very, very speculative episode of Mere Fidelity. Uh I wish I had good works to recommend on this. I do think that Astrobiology and uh the Davison book is is pretty good as a general overview. Besides that, see the works of C.S. Lewis uh space trilogy. You should just read that anyways, because it's got everything in it. Uh but for now, this has been Mere Fidelity. Thanks for listening.