Good Sense On Space Aliens

Via ABC News:

A new Pentagon study that examined reported sightings of UFOs over nearly the last century has found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence, a conclusion consistent with past U.S. government efforts to assess the accuracy of claims that have captivated public attention for decades.

. . . The issue received fresh attention last summer when a retired Air Force intelligence officer testified to Congress that the U.S. was concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects. The Pentagon has denied his claims, and said in late 2022 that a new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects — the same one that released Friday's report — had received “several hundreds” of new reports but had found no evidence so far of alien life.

The authors of Friday's report said the purpose was to apply a rigorous scientific analysis to a subject that has long captured the American public's imagination.

Over the past ten years or so, I've begun to think we can approach this question from the rear. Let's say that in fact, whether they've visited us or not, there are creatures out there with advanced technology that can circumvent the laws of physics with warp drives and such and zip from galaxy to galaxy in hours or days. The inevitable conclusion must be that they're not just technologically advanced, but that they got there via skills that must closely resemble what we would call the scientific method involving math, physics, and reason.

But here we run up against contemporary neo-Aristotelian or neo-Thomist arguments for the existence of God from figures like the philosopher Edward Feser and Bp Robert Barron. Bp Barron asks, for instance, why nature can be interrogated using math, and why it can give us consistent answers. And if we can study nature using reason as a tool, why is there reason? Where does it come from? Neither reason nor math is part of the physical world, they can't have "evolved" as part of a physical process of natural selection.

(I was thrown out of an economist's blog comment section when, after an abstruse mathematical discussion, I asked how all that could have evolved from pond scum. I still say there's no good answer to that question.)

But if the putative space aliens can study and manipulate nature well enough to master warp drives, they must have reason, however advanced, except that reason itself isn't susceptible to physical processes like natural selection. It had to have come from somewhere else. The religious answer is that creatures capable of reason are made in God's image, and reason is something that comes from God. Materialists might answer that this path of inquiry is irrelevant, but it has to acknowledge that reason exists, and it has to acknowledge that it must have a cause.

Thus it's hard to avoid thinking putative space aliens, who must be capable of reason, are creatures made in God's image. A materialist might answer that postulating God as the cause is irrelevant, but he must still acknowledge there must be a cause, which we would have to label something like C, and the reason exercised by space aliens comes from C, whatever it is -- but it's definitely non-material and non-contingent.

But this brings me to the problem one of our archdiocese's vocation directors posed several years ago -- he said that, in a classs discussion with seminarians, he posed the question whether, if a contingent of space aliens were to arrive, we should offer them baptism. My original answer would have been "yes, because they're made in the image of God," but I've thought more on this, and my answer would now be more like, "Well, Satan's Fall was an event that took place before Adam": the serpent and the theological apple were there before Eden.

Satan’s fall from heaven is symbolically described in Isaiah 14:12–14 and Ezekiel 28:12–18. While these two passages are referring specifically to the kings of Babylon and Tyre, we believe they also reference the spiritual power behind those kings, namely, Satan. These passages describe why Satan fell, but they do not say when the fall occurred. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, witnessed Satan’s fall, and He mentions it in Luke 10:18: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” We know that the angels were created before the earth (Job 38:4–7). Satan fell before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3:1–14). Satan’s fall, therefore, must have occurred somewhere after the time the angels were created and before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Otherwordly creatures made in the image of God must have had a salvation history equivalent to humans on this planet, so it's hard to say, but the Fall that led to the state of nature we have precedes creation of either people or space aliens.

But if we're bringing up salvation history in that context, reason suggests we might cancel out the zeroes; if there was a single Fall before Adam, there must basically be a single salvation history, and to postulate a first mxtymmni on the planet grrfygrt who ate a vbrt5sw, we're multiplying entities without necessity. Were there two Kpstrycxs who were sacrificed on a cross? We're veering into absurdity.

This strongly suggests to me that there was just one salvation history of one set of creatures in God's image. No duplcates are out there.

But that's just me. On the other hand, the laws of physics are just one part of natural law. Natural law -- partly expressed in the laws of physics, which can be interrogated via reason, the scientific method, and mathematics, has a cause. When we start to reason from the cause, it's hard to avoid the rest.