The Martians are coming!

The newest reveal of the cryptocrats that rule over us is that UFO’s are real after all. The turnaround is dazzling for its rapidity. Five years ago, UFO believers were mocked by all quarters as tin-foil hatted loony-tunes. Now, it is the Pentagon solemnly “admitting” sightings, the jewish press is already fully on board, and the reactionary press can only wail, “why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

It behooves Christians to think through the origin and tendency of this emerging narrative so that we are not blindsided like we were with the Big C hoax. It is obvious that our rulers are pulling out all the stops, not worrying about credulity in the slightest, having already proven with the Big C that masses of people will believe literally anything.

Here I will try to lay out all the options for what the UFOs are, to aid the church in starting her reflection. Among other benefits, it turns out that some insights for our apologetics can be teased out if our reflection begins from calm, not panic.

First as to the what: the UFOs are either (1) nothing at all, or they are (2) terrestrial flying objects, or they are (3) extra-terrestrial. If extra-terrestrial, they are either (3a) natural (other creatures like us) or (3b) super-natural (e.g. angels or demons). I believe these options span all the logical possibilities.

1. I myself believe they are nothing at all, that is, any “sightings” that are not just (a) outright lies are (b) epiphenomena causes by ordinary causality of light refraction and atmospherics, that kind of thing. 

2. But it also can’t be ruled out that other nations, or ours, have secret aircraft that are not yet officially “identified” by us, hence “unidentified flying objects,” and the Pentagon could simply be doing a wink-wink nod-nod without actually lying, for some political agenda not yet revealed. 

3. It is the categories of extra-terrestrial reality that is of course the most interesting. 

a. Extra-terrestrial but natural. 

Let’s rule out things like space debris as belonging more properly under (1). The crux here is some kind of intentional, or intelligent phenomenon.

A couple decades ago I heard a pretty compelling argument against other intelligent life in the universe making contact with us. The nub of his argument was that the vast time-scales both needed and, on his assumption, available for such an occurrence, compared to the comparatively short history of our own intelligent existence, means the probably of aliens achieving the necessary technology just in time for contact during our small time slice is so small as to approach zero. In other words, if it could happen, it already would have happened. The idea that the contact would happen for the first time just when we have the sophistication needed to receive it is too coincidental to be credible. [note 1]

He was coming from an evolutionary standpoint. The popular secular imagination, the stuff of Star Trek and other fantasies, sees no problem with aliens, and envisages them to either be 

  • good — interfering with us to prevent us from killing ourselves
  • neutral — white-cloaked scientists pursuing knowledge for its own sake
  • evil — willing to wreak havoc on us for their own purposes.

Note that all of these options rest on a godless, anti-Christian assumption as to the nature of reality and ethics. It assumes that ethics are derived from reason, and thus we could reason with (or at least, about) the aliens, perhaps come to understand their “point of view,” understand what motivates them rationally in terms of their shared naturalistic ethic. But on the contrary, we know that if there are other creatures, they are creatures of the same living and true God as we, though He might have revealed himself with a different name of course.  Their Creator has the same attributes of justice, goodness, and truth as ours, being in fact the Same. Thus, they are either fallen or unfallen in respect to the fundamentally same Law, a law based not on reason but on the character of the Creator. Even though the law given in Eden was positive, the point is it was positively given by a Person, the same Person the aliens would have to deal with. So the aliens would be either fallen or unfallen with respect to the same personal law-giver we have to deal with. 

If unfallen, C. S. Lewis rightly frets that the damage of the encounter is likely entirely to be us inflicting damage on the aliens. Far from being like a conference of scientists, the contact with us could be more like Eve’s contact with the serpent, to their detriment.

If the redeemed on our side got in contact with the unfallen aliens, there might be some basis for fellowship. However, it seems like it would be a rather thin fellowship, because our stories are so different. Wittgenstein said if a lion could speak we still wouldn’t understand him. If the aliens were like hobbits, there would be overlap: but what reason should we have to expect that kind of thing? The probability is against it.

If the aliens are fallen and unredeemed, then they are basically like demons, though natural to our universe. In that case, they might easily be feigners of godlessness as the “reasonable” default position, even as our own new atheists make themselves out to be. Worst of all would be if they were not aggressive, but the nicest people you have ever met, yet utterly godless. I have relatives like that. They would furrow their brows and feign ignorance when the subject of God came up, and want to change the subject back to technology as soon as possible. It is actually this anti-climactic scenario that would cause the greatest distress to the church. However, we need to remember that it would be no more surprising to find such a posture in a fallen race of aliens than it is amongst the human reprobate. 

In discussions with them, there would be temptation to “witness” to them using Thomistic-style proofs. “Can’t you see that nothing comes from nothing, and yet you exist?” Note that the van-tillian revelational apologetic would not exactly apply. Indeed, this thought-experiment reveals that there is an empirical aspect to vantillianism, in that it is not merely the form of revelation that is necessary, but that revelation has actually been given; and the givenness of revelation is organically bound up with who we are and what our world is like. Since that does not apply to the aliens’ world, we are stuck, it seems, with the fallacious Thomistic arguments vis-a-vis the aliens. However, we need to remember that there is no promise and thus no objective hope that the fallen unredeemed aliens could be rescued. In other words, just when our apologetic falls short, it also has nothing to connect with anyhow.

(As a side-note, does not this thought experiment bring home with increased vividness the absurdity of a Christless, deistic type of apologetic and prolegomena? One can just picture Aquinas reasoning with an alien at the village pub, in order to persuade him to…. what?)

The least possible seems to be aliens that are fallen and redeemed. This is because of the hypothetical necessity of the atonement by the incarnation and death of the Son of God, which certainly seems like something that could not be repeated. I am, of course, presupposing Anselm here. We should, I believe, hold back from declaring it absolutely impossible, because of the mysterious nature of how the finite and infinite interact. We have glimpses of how they interact from our Revelation, but we must withhold final judgment as to whether this exhausts the interaction. Is it possible that the Son could re-enter the universe at a different space and time nexus and be incarnated there, and suffer and die, separately from our story? It makes me tremble to think about it. I don’t think this would be possible without Nestorianism being true, for the two Redeemers according to the flesh could (and indeed, would) meet, and what would this mean? What would the I-thou encounter consist of? From this consideration alone, it seems so unlikely that another race would be fallen and redeemed as to approach zero. If it were the case, we would at the very least have to correct our theology in a Nestorian direction.

So it seems like extra-terrestrial but non-supernatural aliens would either be natural demons that would von Haus aus be as hostile to the Church as ordinary demons, or would be Innocents that would be better off not having contact with our ungodly rulers.

The fact that our race is a mixture of the Redeemed and the Unredeemed is what makes it so both possibilities are fraught with danger.

b. Extra-terrestrial and supernatural

Imagine that the Pentagon announces they have established contact, and a spaceship is going to descend on the Fourth of July to a great reception and banquet to be organized by them. And sure enough, a shining spaceship descends on the appointed day, a ramp goes down, and a shiny apparition descends!

The Apparition announces (perhaps through a computer linguistics translator) a new world order of peace, and a new universal religion. Of course he does not say, “I am Satan.” His appeal has a great deal of plausibility, having elements to appeal to nominal religionists of all stripes. 

I actually think this option is the most likely of all the options, if (1) or (2) are not the case.

It’s all in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. It would make Lewis’ nightmare almost literally prophetic: the Microbes (Corona) and then the Macrobes (the UFOs).

Conclusion

If the official claims of UFOs are based on aircraft from other nations, or ours, or nothing all, in any case, it means our Rulers are up to no good. Whether the goal is additional funding, or submission to a world authority, or some other nefarious goal, we will find out soon enough I suppose.

Perhaps Christians feel anxiety about case (3) above all. But is there anything that an alien, whether natural or not, could tell us, that should make us deny even one point of our holy faith?  An examination of all the logical possibilities indicates that only the very unlikely case of fallen and redeemed natural aliens would provide any cause for modification, and even that correction would be comparatively small. Every other possibility would either be in the nature of a different, autonomous story, or intentional propaganda with malice aforethought, which should be resisted. Even an angel of light, Paul said.

If it is directly satanic, it raises the question of whether our rulers are consciously aware of this or if they have summoned something bigger than even they fully reckoned with. In Lewis, the oligarchs knew they were dabbling with “macrobes,” but their theory was less than the reality they unleashed. Filostrato was amazed that the Head kept on speaking after his tubing was removed.

We can already envisage the evangelicals working out an evangelism program, and the Two Kingdomites making the necessary additional compromises, and the pietists in our own pulpits bobbing and weaving to make the Christian life even more irrelevant. Contrary to all of them, let us be Christian men that assess the signs soberly, and prepare to act with courage, by God’s grace.

Notes

1. There is of course a literature claiming long-term extra-terrestrial intervention to explain things like the pyramids and such; hence, not “just in time” for our technology. However, I deem this hypothesis highly improbable, among other reasons, because of the paucity of such interventions, even though there have been many occasions when such interventions could have been very useful to us or them.

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