Not All Galaxians Are Created Equal--For Good Reason

Against too many writers of science fiction

Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies
If at the journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as well have been
The Bronx, Montmartre, or Bedinal Green?

Why should I leave this green-floored cell,
Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
Unless, outside its guarded gates,
Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits
Strangeness that moves us more than fear,
Beauty that stabs with tingling spear,
Or Wonder, laying on one's heart
That finger-tip at which we start
As if some thought too swift and shy
For reason's grasp had just gone by?

CS Lewis

Yes. Yes. Lewis, thank you for keeping me endlessly fascinated. After I read this, I got to thinking: Why should extra terrestrials be anything like us? As creatures from an alien world with vastly different environmental condition, is it even possible for them to be similar enough to us that we could relate to them? What exactly are humans? So with the real possibility of boring my audience, I’d like to explore my thoughts on these questions.

Let me start with the assumption that humans have two main parts, spirit and body. This is not a particularly obvious fact and doesn’t fit the materialist world view, but I am not a materialist.

These two parts, spirit (or mind) and body, produce different byproducts. The body is nourished with food and water and oxygen. It is a factory that consumes raw material and turns it into energy. Without energy our bodies eventually break down and die. The byproduct of the body then is energetic: mobility and sensory. The spirit likewise produces byproducts; mind states that are emotional in nature. The healthy spirit produces happiness and love; the unhealthy spirit dies in despair and hate. So these two substances, spirit and body, produce very different byproducts; byproducts of a fundamentally different nature. But they also work together. Healthy spirits produce healthy bodies and vis-versa.

So we have two substances, and they interact with each other, but what interacts with them? Is there anything else besides mind and body? The physical environment interacts with the body which in turn shapes the spirit. This is evolution--the physical part anyway--nature. But there is also nurture; the interaction between individual spirits, people talking, loving, voting, collaborating, etc. The most popular belief is that there is a little bit of nature and nurture mechanisms acting upon the spirit-body machine. As far as evolutionist and the materialist are concerned however, the environment, nature, natural selection is the main mechanism driving evolution on this planet.

If nature is the main mechanism then we can expect extraterrestrials from vastly different environments to look and behave very different from us. They may be larger or smaller, have more limbs or less limbs, a heart or no heart…a completely different physiology from our own. A creature living on a gas giant will evolve very different bodies from our own, having different demands for mobility and sensory perception. How then will those bodies shape the spirit if in fact aliens do have spirits.

For me, nature is important, but not the most important. Whether scientifically supported or not, the spirit is the more important of the dual substances. When our body dies our spirit lives. So, nurturing the spirit is the essential point of life. This isn’t that hard to believe really. Anyone who calls for world peace or for social awareness or more charity in the world is actually appealing for spiritual changes in the human creature. And spiritual change does effect how bodies interact with each other. Just look at how Christianity has changed human culture, human evolution; instead of survival of the fittest, the new creed became, love your neighbor as yourself. This allowed for all sorts of leaps in social evolution. We live in a better world because of it.

So what I propose is turning the materialist model upside down. That nurture is the driving force in evolution not nature. That ideas, concepts of the mind are what are really what is changing us. Howard Bloom calls these memes.

God (yes the G-word) has certain characteristics to his being such as Love. God is Love, we say. Love is a spiritual gene. While feeling a spiritual love, we experience physiological phenomena: lightness, tingling, heart fluttering, stomach aching. It’s as if God built us so that we may experience an aspect of Him. We are Loving Machines.

Now what if God is Love, but he is a bunch of other things too, like say, Evol (a word I just made up). So, God has this other great attribute that is just as great as love but we are built in such away physically that we can’t perceive this other thing. I guess what I’m getting at is, God may be like a spectrum, like the light spectrum. We can’t see Microwaves but we can see visible light. Now when humans try and wrap their mind around God they bump into a wall. He is just to big. We are only able to gather so much about God because our minds, our spirits, are built like our eyes are built: to see only a small part of the light spectrum.

Extraterrestrials perhaps have bodies that process different information all together and therefore have spirits that are shaped differently than ours. Perhaps their spirits are able to see the spiritual equivalent of microwaves, Evol. Two species experiencing different aspects of God. What would happen if we met such creatures? It might be much like a bat describing the world seen through his sonar to a man. We would have no frame of reference for such a thing because we do not have a sonar part of the brain.

So to wrap this dribble up let me restate what I’ve tried to say. Aliens and humans are probably built very differently from each other physically due to very different environmental conditions. But surely if you are a theist like myself, you would expect that even if extraterrestrials and humans could not talk about physiological phenomena such as the fluttering of butterflies in the stomach when experiencing love, that surely they would be able to understand universal spiritual truths such as God is Love. But no not so fast. How could they possibly know what love is when they are entirely different spirit-body machines? That is why I say that they might not grasp Love but would know Evol. If this is the case then God is a spectrum and not a point. And this is why it is difficult for us to understand the nature of God, we were built to enjoy a part of the spectrum. We are Love Machines and perhaps in the afterlife we’ll be given a gift: the ability to experience the full God spectrum in it’s completeness.

Ok, I’m going to publish this against my better judgment.