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