This year’s York Festival of Ideas was, for the second year running but this time planned, all online, but as many festivals have discovered, leapt from regional to global reach as a result, without losing its great White Rose centre of gravity in York and Yorkshire. A partnership between the University of York and the City since 2011, the Festival combines all other festivals based on thinking, literature, music, arts, science, politics into one – two weeks of extraordinary energy and inspiration.
As, before, Faith and Wisdom in Science author organised a Festival Focus theme loosely connected to, and indeed funded by, the interests of the John Templeton Foundation. This year’s Focus was entitled Science, Imagination and the Big Questions, and comprised four events also connected with the ECLAS project, which supports and resources churches, their leaders and communities, to engage creatively and positively with science. The third event, to be reported on in a later post, explored one of the themes of research within the ECLAS project itself
But the first event took the ‘Big Questions’ right out of this world. Hosting Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University and Dr. Amanda Rees of our own University of York, we discussed together Avi’s recent hypothesis that the asteroid Oumuamua was an ancient, alien, spaceship. As you might imagine, this idea has attracted equal measures of intrigue and opprobrium. But Avi has a tough skin, and has enjoyed talking about the book he published this year on the idea, Extraterrestrial.
You can find the recording of Avi’s talk, the response by Amanda, and the ensuing discussion of questions raised by the online audience, on the Festival YouTube channel here. It was a fascinating hour, with a beautiful balance created by Avi’s injection of the extraordinary new phenomenon represented by Oumuamua, a long cigar-shaped asteroid on a hyperbolic trajectory through the solar-system that will ever only have one visit, and Mandy’s gift of historical context, reminding us that the idea of aliens, and of being visited by them, and contacting and visiting them, is by no means a new one. Even Avi’s call for a disciplinary of ‘astro-archaeology’ turns out to have precedence. It turns out that I actually know an astroarchaeologist.
One question that we did not thrash through very much was that about the theological consequences of alien life, and especially of intelligent alien life. What happens to the apparently special relationship of Homo sapiens on planet Earth, made ‘in the image of God’ according to the Bible, if the universe is replete with other equally self-aware species? How does the incarnation work if beings on other planets also need saving? These turns out, like the idea of alien life itself, to be by no means the novel issues that they are often presented as being. The history of other worlds and other inhabiting beings goes at least as far back as a medieval debate in which Christians actually opposed Aristotle’s Ancient Greek doctrine that God could only have created one world (expounded in his On the Heavens), as Everly narrow-minded and constricting of thought (as well as of God).
The essential balance of special love and relationship of humans, and the need to contemplate a much greater creation and an anthropological de-centering emerges from a complete reading of the Bible, especially (of course!) the Book of Job (chapter 41) where the great alien monster Leviathan is presented by God to Job has his favourite creature of all! This de-centering of humans and its consequence, is also discussed more fully in the book Faith and Wisdom in Science.
For those who would like to read further on the theology of alien life could do worse that read the excellent book by my ECLAS colleague Revd. Prof. David Wilkinson Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Covering the two issues above and many more, in detail and in historical overview, it is a great accompaniment to the discussion with Mandy and Avi, and to Avi’s book. And it might just prepare us for first contact….
Faith and Wisdom in Science 