If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in one of the following directions.
A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.
B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.
C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.
D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.
But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination.
“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”
“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.
“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.
But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"
“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”
Why should life evolve at all?
Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.)
“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“
But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?
The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:
“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”
Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.
When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.
“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”
But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:
“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”
Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.
A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.
B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.
C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.
D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.
But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination.
“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”
“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.
“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.
But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"
“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”
Why should life evolve at all?
Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.)
“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“
But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?
The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:
“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”
Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.
When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.
“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”
But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:
“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”
Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.
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