Re: [asa] [ASA] Life on Mars

> Don't we have a reasonable response to extraterrestrial life in C. S.
> Lewis's space trilogy?

A more direct response is in one of his essays, unfortunately
appearing under multiple titles in various collections (if I recall
correctly, the first publication was in a magazine that gave it the
title "Onward Christian Spacemen", a title that Lewis disliked; I
think it was captioned "The Seeing Eye" in a collection of essays
titled "The Seeing Eye" and I know I've seen it in at least one other
collection).

He notes that atheists have claimed that humans being alone in the
universe poses a challenge for Christianity and that humans not being
alone poses a challenge for Christianity. Such mutually conflicting
claims tend to raise doubts about either argument. [The same might be
said about claims that a Laplacian deterministic universe removes God
from the picture and that quantum, evolutionary, or other randomness
removes God from the picture].

Lewis enumerates the possible spiritual scenarios for intelligent life
elsewhere:
unfallen, untemptable-cf. angels
unfallen, temptable-cf. Adam and Eve
fallen, irretrievable-cf. demons
fallen, convertable-cf. humans today

Thus, there's no major theological problem-Christianity already holds
that intelligent beings can be in any of those states.

He also notes the possibility that the last category might not know
anything about salvation and need missionary effort. This does not
require imply arrogance on our part-the Incarnation had to happen
somewhere, even if it has effects on inhabitants of multiple planets,
not to mention God's tendency to work with the most unpromising
material.

The analogy of historical decisions on the theological status of newly
discovered human populations comes up. In light of interactions
between human cultures newly coming into contact, Lewis is rather
pessimistic about the chances of positive interaction under most
scenarios and thinks the prohibitive distances of space are probably a
good thing.

On Mars being populated from Earth, in fact the much lower escape
velocity on Mars makes it rather easier for Martian microbes to get
here than Earth ones to get there. Also, Mars' earlier cooling (as a
smaller body, farther from the Sun) would probably have put it at
suitable temperature for life sooner. There's thus some
unsubstantiated speculation that we could all be Martians.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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