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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2932 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 9, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If we find alien life, create AGI, and can scan a human brain and make a copy, would that be proof for you that God doesn't exist?

Pretty much, yeah.

you've stated that you consider a lack of aliens, a lack of AGI, and a lack of Read/Write Consciousness upload ability to be proof that humans are divine and that God exists.

You have misunderstood the argument. Any of those three existing means that I'm wrong. Any or even all of those three not existing isn't proof that I'm right, nor even evidence that I'm right.

Also, I have no idea what "humans are divine" is supposed to mean, or where you got it from.

Why would alien life be a problem?

As far as I understand it, the Catholic church is relatively agnostic about the possibility of alien life - it's not explicitly forbidden.

Also, would microbes be a problem, or only intelligent life?

Say we come across aliens in spaceships. Do the aliens have sin and desire salvation from it, isomorphic to Christianity? Any answer to that question would have profound implications, and either way you answer it doesn't fit into my model of God.

If they have their own copy of Christianity already, that would be pretty good proof that the Christian God exists. My understanding is that He is not interested in providing that proof.

If they have no copy of Christianity, but were sufficiently similar in psychological makeup that they could be converted, that would be merely extremely surprising. This version might not break my understanding, depending on how the implications play out. I suppose the argument would become that minds necessarily converge to a specific structure due to physical constraints, etc, etc, and maybe it could be papered over, but predicting in advance it would still be deeply weird, and seems like it would converge on proof of God.

If they're different enough that conversion is impossible, then you have a group of beings apparently outside the Christian God's described order, and that breaks all sorts of theological assumptions.

The above isn't thought out in detail, but... if you think of faith as bets, which I do, and if you think that betting intelligently is possible, which I also do, then your bets shouldn't be contradictory. I'm betting that God exists, and betting that aliens exist would be contradictory, so I bet that they don't.

Maybe not the best way to describe it, but hopefully that gets across something of the thought process.

In his essay “Religion and Rocketry” C.S. Lewis laid out 5 criteria for the discovery of aliens to be a problem for Christianity:

  1. Do alien animals exist? (Plants or microbes are no issue)
  2. Are they rational? (Squirrels or trout are no issue, we discover new non-rational species all the time)
  3. Are they fallen? (Unfallen aliens are no problem, that’s basically what angels are)
  4. If they are fallen, have they been denied salvation through Jesus Christ? (Christian aliens are no problem, we’re used to being missionaries to strange new peoples)
  5. If we know 1-4 and the answer is yes, are we sure that Jesus dying on the cross the only mode of Redemption possible? (Maybe God has a different way for alien being then he does for humans)

What's the Lewis theodicy for pre-Christian-contact humans? Jews (and people exposed to Jewish missionaries? but AFAIK they were never exactly an evangelical religion...) I assume get the "Redemption ... a different way" loophole in (5). Maybe you could also argue that e.g. the Tang dynasty might have had some kind of missionary contact, though the likely tiny ratio of hypothetical-missionary to local-established-belief-systems exposure seems pretty unfair to people required to pick the former. But the further you go from the Middle East in space or the further back you go in time, the more of a stretch it gets. In the most archetypal case of the problem, the Native Americans hit points (1) through (4) so hard that people invented entire religions to try to provide a solution.

But on the other hand, Christianity didn't collapse in 1493, so clearly there's some theodicies that make Christians happy enough. Even not knowing exactly what they are it feels like they ought to apply to extraterrestrial aliens as easily as extracontinental ones.

Lewis believed in the old Christian concept of the “Harrowing of Hell”. In summary, he did believe that Jesus saved even those who came before he was born.

As far as people who never realistically could have heard the Gospel, Lewis believed salvation through Christ was still possible.

Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

We can see this in his final Narnia book, The Last Battle, when a Calorman who worshipped Tash all his life get to go to heaven. When the man asks how this is possible Aslan replies

I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

Your flair fits.

Anyway, I would agree that 1-3 don't really matter that much. Less clear on 4-5. I don't think it's inherently wrong for them not to be saved, because I don't think God had to save us. But I am generally convinced that a propitiatory sacrifice was necessary, and that it was for this reason that Christ became incarnate. Would that require another incarnation?

His Chronicles of Narnia and Sci-Fi Trilogy also give hypothetical answers for the problem of the existence of nonhuman sapients in a God-created world, which is a variety of theodicy.

He portrays in Narnia a multiversal God the Son who may incarnate as a different representative of sapience in any universe created for sapients, in a multiverse where Jesus of Nazareth had already been wrongly crucified as an innocent as a sacrifice for the fallen and resurrected three days later.

In the SF Trilogy, he posits that Satan may be ruler of this world for a time, but that Adversary might be limited to one planet by divine fiat.

My own take is that each sapient species is given a prime metaphor for their relationship with God; for humans, it’s the husband/wife/offspring paradigm, thus how every sin against fruitfulness and multiplying is considered abominable. God may give aliens another prime metaphor entirely.

Thank you for the clear response and lines in the sand so to speak.

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