Lewis, Science, Religion, and Aliens: Why Astrophysicists Should Read Lewis' Space Trilogy. Presented at the CS Lewis and Inklings Conference hosted by Oral Roberts University April 6-8, 2017.

1. LEWIS, SCIENCE, RELIGION,
AND ALIENS
Why astrophysicists should read Lewis' space trilogy
Andrew SID Lang, Professor of Mathematics, Oral Roberts University

2. “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone
in the Universe or we are not. Both are
equally terrifying.”
-Arthur C. Clarke

3. ACTIVE SETI
Pioneer 10 Plaque – Carl Sagan
Pioneer 10 (1972)
Will reach Aldebaran in ~2 Myrs

4. ACTIVE SETI
Arecibo message (1974)
Globular Cluster M13 – 25,100 lt yrs

5. ACTIVE SETI
Voyager I & II Records – Carl Sagan
Voyager 1 (1977)
Will reach Gliese 445 in ~40,000 yrs

6. ACTIVE SETITransmission to stars 17 - 69 lt yrs (1999-2016)
Project Name Year Sent
Cosmic Call 1 1999
Teen Age Message 2001
Cosmic Call 2 2003
Across the Universe 2008
A Message From Earth 2008
Hello From Earth 2009
RuBisCo Stars 2009
Wow! Reply 2012
Lone Signal 2013
A Simple Response to an Elemental Message 2016
The first message to reach its destination, RuBisCo Stars,
will reach Teegarden's star, a brown dwarf in 2021

7. ACTIVE SETIIS THIS A GOOD IDEA?
“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent
life might develop into something
we wouldn't want to meet.”
- Stephen Hawking
"That didn't turn out so well.“
- Hawking comparing meeting aliens to
Christopher Columbus meeting Native Americans

8. LEWIS’ CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the
sun has risen: not only because I see it, but
because by it I see everything else.”
- CS Lewis

9. ACTIVE SETIIS THIS A GOOD IDEA?
“We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every
species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage
man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are
individuals who don't. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our
pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and
greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind
has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves,
the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will
be, very properly, destroyed…God shield them from us.”
- CS Lewis (Religion & Rocketry)

10. EXOTHEOLOGY AND EXOMISSIOLOGY
“It is interesting to wonder how things would go if they met an unfallen race. At first,
to be sure, they'd have a grand time jeering at, duping, and exploiting its innocence;
but I doubt if our half-animal cunning would long be a match for godlike wisdom,
selfless valour, and perfect unanimity.
I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we
meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can,
commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human
but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will
become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable
guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.
Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt
to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries.”
- CS Lewis (Religion & Rocketry)

11. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
“God became man in Jesus in order to save us. So if there are also
other intelligent beings, it’s not a given that they need redemption.
They might have remained in full friendship with their creator.”
- José Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory (2008).

12. ALIENS AND RELIGION
“It's inevitable that if we discover life elsewhere in the
Universe, it will change for ever our perspective of our own
species and our own planet ... Those people who cling to
the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of creation, or that
somehow we were made in the image of God, would I
think receive a rude shock.”
- Paul Davies

13. ALIENS AND RELIGION
“If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the
odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting
Christianity. If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to
absurdity the Christian claim—or what is thought to be the Christian claim—
that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God
came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation. If, on the other
hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental
byproduct in the universe, and so again disproves our religion. Really, we are
hard to please.”
- CS Lewis (God in the Dock)

14. ALIENS ALREADY HERE?
“There is an alternate ‘gospel’ gaining in intensity in the world today.
L.A. Marzulli calls it the Alien Gospel. Through L.A. Marzulli’s research
he has found evidence of an ‘alien conspiracy’ dovetailed to the
philosophy of Darwinism.
One possible end-time scenario is that these ‘aliens’ will return
invoking the Great Deception, claiming they were the ones who
seeded life and that they are the alien messiah. They will offer two
things: free energy and a DNA ‘upgrade.’ Many will be deceived, but
the truth behind this lie is that there are no aliens. L.A. Marzulli is
convinced, as his research shows, that these “aliens” are the return of
the fallen angels that produced the Nephilim. The same Nephilim
that were destroyed during the Days of Noah.”
- Sid Roth (On the Trail of the Nephilim)

15. FALSE ELDILA
“After this story, Oyarsa, I may tell you that our world is very bent. The two that
brought me here knew noting of you…they thought you were a false eldila, I
think. There are false eldila in the wild parts of the world; men kill other men
before them-they think eldil drinks blood…The teller of tales in our world make
us think that if there is any life beyond our own air it is evil.”
- CS Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, pg.120)

16. ALIENS ALREADY HERE?
“If the angels (who I believe to be real beings in an actual
universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods that they are assumed
to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real
form as they did to Ransom.”
- CS Lewis (Collected Letters III)

17. ALIENS ALREADY HERE?
“We work with specific ETI from a contiguous universe…They are nonviolent
and in complete obedience to God. Our ETI’s connection to zero point energy
is obvious in that their purpose is to guide Edgar’s international Quantrek
science team to apply their zero point energy research for humanity, to move
away from the use of fossil fuels which are so deleterious to our fragile planet.”
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut (John Podesta – Collected Emails)

18. CS LEWIS AND ALIENS
“What did C.S. Lewis think of alien worlds? He had read about the same scientific
breakthroughs as Lovecraft did. Indeed, he probably understood their implications more
deeply. He certainly knew the past far better than Lovecraft; he was a professor of Medieval
and Renaissance literature. And he agreed that the universe was far larger than mankind had
assumed. But Lewis had quite different things to say about it all.
Although Lewis lived in a modern world, his Christianity was not the modern sort.
Paradoxically, this was why he was prepared to appreciate alien worlds. He had read about
many of them in old books.
Even superficial readings of the Narnia stories and the Space Trilogy reveal that Lewis was
preoccupied with the subject: Out of the Silent Planet is about a trip to Mars, and Perelandra
about a trip to Venus. Narnia itself is an alien world—even subject to different natural laws.
How else could time flow at a different rate there?”
- CR Wiley (Lost and Found in the Cosmos: Lovecraft, Lewis & Alien Worlds)

19. WHY ASTROPHYSICISTS SHOULD
READ LEWIS’ SPACE TRILOGY
“Concerning the Space Trilogy, today we have the hard facts that confirm what people already
knew when it was originally published: Lewis got the science all wrong. Arthur C. Clarke
famously upbraided him for it. But Clarke was like an obnoxious student who corrects a
venerable professor on what he assumes is a spelling error, only to be told that the spelling is
Old English. Lewis knew what he was doing. He was working in a different vernacular, for a
different purpose. He was telling the truth with literary license. Clarke preferred moral flatness
with a scientific gloss.
Science pursues the truth about ‘lowercase’ reality. It is intentionally narrow, limiting itself to
material and efficient causes. Materialists like Clarke, or Lovecraft, cheat when they imply that
science fully explains reality. Science cannot even explain why people like Clarke and Lovecraft
write the stories they do. Lewis honestly focused on ‘uppercase’ Reality, using fictional worlds
to do so.”
- CR Wiley (Lost and Found in the Cosmos: Lovecraft, Lewis & Alien Worlds)