THERE was some speculation recently about life on other planets, after scientists had studied the spectrum of light emitted from a distant planet and detected the presence of gases that, as far as we know, are produced only by living organisms. Of course, there is huge room for error, miscalculation, faulty observation, and so forth; but it was enough to engage the imagination, if not yet to satisfy the reason.
It always puzzles me, when these bouts of speculation occur, that the usual band of atheist pundits chime in to the effect that “This will put paid to religion and especially Christianity.” Really? Christian theology has, for centuries, painted a picture of a cosmos teeming with intelligent beings, with angels and archangels, cherubim, seraphim — indeed, nine distinct orders of super-celestial beings, who are, in fact, our moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiors, who have a deeper vision of God, a wider grasp of reality. They are those, as Milton famously put it in the opening of his masque Comus,
. . . immortal shapes
Of bright aerial Spirits [who] live ensphered
In Regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call Earth. . .
Far from being discombobulated by signs of alien life, or even by the possibility that God has filled his creation with conscious creatures capable of enjoying and contemplating him, Christians have rejoiced in the thought that we share rationality, freedom, and joy with countless others and, indeed, join in worship “with all who stand before thee in earth and heaven”.
It is simply a false gibe at Christianity that it is somehow so anthropocentric that it could not survive the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere. Indeed, it tends to be the secular humanists, as the term humanism implies, who are a little over-obsessed with the supposed uniqueness of human life on “this dim spot, Which men call Earth”.
This wider and more inclusive cosmic view of our modest place in the order of creation has been actively explored by Christian thinkers closer to our own times than Milton. C. S. Lewis was not only a great literary critic, theologian, and children’s writer: he was also one of the 20th-century pioneers of science fiction, or “scientifiction”, as it had been called.
His novel Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938, is about a voyage to Mars, and, in a riposte to Well’s The War of the Worlds, Lewis considers the possibility that, from an extraterrestrial point of view, it is we ourselves who might be the dangerous aliens. In fact, the novel is, among many other things, a satire and a criticism of Western imperialism.
The villain of the piece — called Weston, significantly — is a scientist of the imperial mould, who assumes that we, simply by virtue of being “enlightened” white men, have a right to conquer, a right to enslave or destroy, the “native” populations of other planets, and exploit and extract their natural resources. This is the aim of Weston and his accomplices, who feel that any crime can be justified in the name of “progress”. Happily, their schemes are foiled by the Martians themselves, with the help of a mild-mannered professor of philology named Ransom, whom Lewis modelled on Tolkien.
The “silent planet” of Lewis’s title is not Mars, but Earth, which has fallen silent because of its fall from grace, but which may, when redeemed, rejoin the chorus of cosmic praise. Perhaps, besides testing for gases on distant planets, we should also be listening for songs of praise.