I recently read astronomer David Weintraub’s book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? He spends the first section of the book discussing the recent discovery of thousands of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars). He points out that it may not be long before astronomers’ more sensitive and sophisticated tools allow them to also detect evidence of life on some of those planets, particularly through measuring things like atmospheric makeup that are unlikely to arise through inorganic processes. This section is just motivation for the second, larger section where he reviews what leaders and theologians in various religions have said about extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligence and what these statements might mean for how churches and believers would respond to discoveries like these. I was fascinated to find that there’s such a rich tradition of discussing this possibility among some Catholic thinkers, for example, and also unsurprised to find that American evangelicals are likely to think of aliens as demons, and of the universe as having been created only for humans.
Of course I was most interested in Weintraub had to say about Mormons. First, he clearly considers us interesting, as he devotes an entire chapter to us, in contrast with Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, all of whom he lumps together in a single chapter. In discussing Mormon theology, he gets into the idea of pre-existent materials being organized rather than created ex nihilo, and, leaning heavily on the King Follett discourse, God as once-man and humans as future gods. (I think he clearly overstates how important this text is for rank-and-file members today, but I know this can be a difficult fact to suss out as an outsider.) As you’d expect, he also quotes passages from Moses—”and worlds without number have I created”—and Abraham. He also quotes some D&C verses on multiplicity of worlds, and of inhabited worlds, like 76:24: “That by him [Jesus], and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.”
Weintraub also points out that our scripture has humanity being the most wicked of all of God’s creation, from Moses 7:36, “and among all the workmanship of mine hands there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren.” This relates to a question that he raised with several other Christian religions, which is whether Original Sin would apply to aliens, and whether they’d therefore need to be saved by Jesus or not. I can’t find a reference to support this, but I’m quite sure I’ve heard the idea taught that the statement in 2 Nephi 10:3 that “there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God” could be generalized to say that there’s no other planet than Earth that has inhabitants bad enough to do this.
Weintraub even pulls out some 20th-century statements from Joseph Fielding Smith—”We are not the only people that the Lord has created. We have brothers and sisters on other earths.”— and Neal A. Maxwell—”We do not know how many inhabited worlds there are. But certainly we are not alone.” Weintraub concludes, “We can assume that Mormons would embrace, without any concerns, any future announcement made by astronomers regarding the discovery of extraterrestrial life.” But in a little subsequent discussion of the possibility of intelligent life, especially life that’s clearly not human, he qualifies, “While Mormonism appears to be ready to fully embrace extraterrestrial life, whether those extraterrestrials are in human form or are easily labeled as lesser beings, Mormonism nevertheless will have some theological issues with which to wrestle.”
I think Weintraub has a pretty good take overall on where the Church stands on the idea of extraterrestrials. I do think, though, that in this chapter (and throughout the book), he often elides differences between different kinds of evidence of extraterrestrials we might find. I can think of at least five levels of contact that might yield different responses from Mormons (and from people in general):
- Evidence of extraterrestrial life. This could be just finding bacteria on Mars or noticing that the concentration of various gasses in some extrasolar planet is more consistent with life than inorganic processes alone.
- Evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. I’m thinking here of finding an alien artifact, like maybe something really big and far away, or perhaps just a monolith on the Moon.
- Communication from extraterrestrials. We receive a signal that seems to clearly be evidence of intelligence.
- Translated communication from extraterrestrials. We receive a signal and we can decode it.
- Two-way communication with extraterrestrials. We can send and receive.
I’m thinking #1-3 would provide no difficulty whatsoever. GAs would issue statements about the greatness of God and the vastness of the universe. They would also pull out the same Joseph Fielding Smith and Neal A. Maxwell statements that Weintraub did, and would be clear that they always knew this day would come. Needless to say, they will not bring up Brigham Young’s ideas about the Moon and the Sun being inhabited. (Weintraub actually brings these up and points out that these were common beliefs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but by the time Young made his statements, they were falling out of fashion.)
#4 and #5 would provide far more difficulty for the Church and for individual members, I think. Our theology sure seems to think that aliens should look like us and be like us in fundamental ways, and if we get hard evidence that they don’t and aren’t, it seems like it could be seriously challenging to a lot of testimonies, no matter how many GAs claimed that they had always known the universe would be like this.
I’m curious to hear what you think, though. How do you think GAs and rank-and-file members would react to extraterrestrial contact at various levels? (Or if you don’t like my list, what characteristics of evidence or contact do you think would be important?) Also, if you’ve been a member of a different church, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how they would respond too.
I think a lot of them would be like 16th century Europeans dealing with the fallout of Copernicus. It’s hard to find out you’re not as central as you once assumed and for some it would be too much dissonance to manage.
I will give my opinion as to why aliens not looking like us, perhaps even radically different from us i.e silicon based life forms or beings without so much as radial or symmetric form (i.e a sponge) does not need to entail a theological crisis for Mormonism despite God being corporeally embodied, and this way “worlds without number” seriously without parochialism. Picture, if you will a sphere passing through Flatland: to the 2D inhabitants it appears first as a point, then a growing circle, then shrinks back to a point ,not because the sphere is changing shape, but because they can only ever perceive a cross-section of something that exceeds their dimensional category entirely. Stick a finger through that plane and one would get whatever odd slice the knuckle or nail happens to produce at that instant, which would look totally arbitrary to a 2D observer with no access to the whole. If God’s glorified body is something like a higher-dimensional reality of which our human anatomy is one finite cross-section, then a reptilian or an octopoid or whatever else intelligence elsewhere in the universe could be another true cross-section of that same body, being no more “really” God’s form than ours is, no less either. The image of God stops being a single anatomical template stamped out across the cosmos, which would lead us to wonder about the lack of creativity of God, and becomes something closer to infinite local instantiations of one reality that no single 3D shape could ever exhaust. Thus aliens on this view would not violate the claim that humans are made in His image, and this would also be compatible with evolution.
As an aside, I also like this quote from Paul Tilich: “Incarnation is unique for the special group in which it happens, but it is not unique in the sense that other singular incarnations for other unique worlds are excluded. … Man cannot claim to occupy the only possible place for Incarnation. … The manifestation of saving power in one place implies that saving power is operating in all places”
It makes me think of Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow” — the basic plot is that a signal is discovered from an alien planet, and of course it’s the Jesuits who are the first to send someone there, seeing it as the greatest opportunity to spread Christianity since Francis Xavier first headed East. I can easily imagine the LDS church doing the same.
Of course, things don’t go well for our spacefaring Jesuits. (No spoilers, but content warnings for, well, most things).
I hope the first LDS missionaries to other planets would at least be older than the typical twenty year old. Now I’m picturing silly things like “thanks to relativistic effects, you get a Dear John letter from someone who now has grandchildren.”
Vik: I certainly didn’t expect to be presented with the idea of humans as a 3-D projection of a higher dimensional God today, so congrats on giving me something new to think about. At first glance, this strikes me as an unfalsifiable idea, which, granted, much of religion is. It also opens questions about whether all of our theology is applicable to all of reality, or if it is just for our specific projection. Is adultery bad universally, or just for humans? Is murder bad universally? In the event we ever communicate extraterrestrials, we may find wildly different societies and moralities. Your idea could be viewed as a way to address them, or could be considered the ultimate shoulder shrug that our understanding of cosmic theology is completely orthogonal to other beings and the two can’t inform each other at all.
Fair enough Dave W, a great deal of religion and metaphysics cannot be falsified, and I make no claims to certainty here.. But you bring up another good question, but I don’t think this collapses into pure relativism. I am platonically inclined, so Plato’s framework helps form the backbone of my philosophy and cosmology. Picture it the way Plato pictured the Forms: particular triangles drawn in sand are all imperfect, distorted instances of one Triangle Itself that no drawn triangle ever fully captures, yet every drawn triangle is recognizably answerable to it. Run that same logic up a level, to something even more fundamental than any drawn shape or any particular conception of God which we can call it the Good itself, prior to and grounding all of it, and you get an answer to your worry rather than a “shrug”. In this framework the cross sections aren’t sealed off from each other. Rather, they’re all imperfect instances of one and the same reality, just refracted through radically different anatomies and societies. What carries across every instance isn’t the specific rule but whatever the rule is actually pointing at such as exploitation, betrayal of trust, cruelty for its own sake, domination without consent. What doesn’t carry across is the local form that takes. Adultery, for example already presupposes something like human marriage: a species that bonds or reproduces in some entirely different way might have no concept of adultery at all, while still having a real prohibition on betraying whatever trust-structure they do form. So my prediction for first contact isn’t that alien morality would mirror ours (per se, it could), and it isn’t that it’d be totally orthogonal either (black and white vs orange and blue) rather it’s that we’d find the same underlying Form wrapped in unfamiliar surface codes, the way human cultures already disagree sharply about marriage and kinship while still converging on a moral principle something like “don’t betray those who trust you.” Again, this is not falsifiable, but I don’t think its vacuous either, it tells us what to expect once the surface rules are stripped away, and it means our theology and theirs could still actually inform each other instead of talking past one another. Lastly, these forms are mind-independent, that is, they would hold true no matter the mind or if no minds existed, but that is really my platonism/moral non-naturalism coming out. This is just what works for me, I don’t expect everyone else to pick up my philosophical baggage.
Look up JS’ quotes on worlds filled with “strange beasts” that we have no conception of some divine as interpretation of the vision of John.
Seems to fit just fine.