Once we have started to think of ourselves as “saviours”, it is only a short step to reinventing heaven itself. Yet why? If we are no more than material beings moving through a godless, directionless, meaningless void of coruscating atoms, why do we not simply consign heaven in all its forms to the dustbin of pre-scientific mumbo-jumbo? Why reinvent it? Yet reinvent it we do, in one form or another!
First, with relation to the “saving” urge we discussed above, there are those whose equivalent of “heaven” is a saved environment. Heaven for some animal rights activists, for instance, might be our sharing the world – as the junior partners – with the animal and even the plant creation; where we transcend and somehow redeem the Genesis curse of mankind assuming control of nature by giving the world back to the wild things, and then living in eternal felicity with them. Oddly enough, I can see a deep sense of Christian love coming through this idealized and romanticized environmentalism, impracticable as I believe it to be.
We start to enter the realm of the bizarre, however, when we consider two further forms of reinvented heaven which are very big at the present time, and are richly fed by the science-fiction industry: alien-worship and futurology. In fact, this all derives from the never-never land “what if?” school of thinking. Let us start with aliens.
Dismissing belief in God, angels, spirits, saints, and the blessed dead “up there” as outdated, pre-scientific nonsense, “alienologists” (for want of a better word) have begun to populate the cosmos with all manner of wonderful material intelligences.
Ideas about such beings are by no means new, though; for in the immediate wake of the application of the newly invented telescope to astronomy after 1609, it was realized that the moon and planets were spherical worlds potentially possessing terrestrial features. The moon, for example, was discovered in 1609 to have continents, mountains, and probably seas. And in accordance with an impeccable Christian way of reasoning, theologians, scientists, and philosophers asked: “Surely, as God has made celestial habitations, He must also have made inhabitants to live on them?” In his Somnium (“Dream”), 1630, a story of a young Icelandic astronomer who made a journey to the moon and met its “Selenite” (from the Greek moon-goddess Selene) inhabitants, the devout Lutheran astronomer Johannes Kepler invented a new literary genre: space-travel science fiction.
Then in 1638, and in the light of the latest technology of the day, the Revd Dr John Wilkins, who was destined in a few years to become Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, the principal founder of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester, wrote a book about building a mechanical “flying chariot” which might carry men to the moon. So space travel, and the possibility of intelligent life in space, in fact, were being openly talked of by 1650. And what the theologians were asking was, were the “extraterrestrials” in a state of grace, or were they fallen like us; and if so, did, or did not, Christ’s earthly passion and resurrection redeem moon-men and Jupiterians as well as humans? Such ideas, moreover, continued to be discussed into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And needless to say, no one got arrested or burned at the stake, because as we saw in Chapter 6, contrary to secularist mythology no Christian denomination enforced any kind of “anti-science” agenda.
It was in the twentieth century, however, that “aliens” or “Martians” became big currency, fanned by H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) and then Hollywood. In the increasingly self-doubting late twentieth century, however, these fictional “aliens” became, for many people, an alternative reality, and an inspiration for many sinister and destructive cults. Such beings, moreover, rapidly evolved from the Martian killers of H. G. Wells into benign super-intelligences out to save us bloodthirsty humans from wrecking the universe. “ET”, the child-friendly super-intelligence in the 1982 film of that name, was a case in point.
Yet quite apart from the booming Hollywood and TV aliens industry, with their Dr Who, Star Wars, and so on – which have assumed cult proportions bordering (like football) on a secular religion – the deep-space vastness opened up by modern giant telescopes had numerous people asserting, “There really must be intelligent life out there!” Number-jugglers, such as the inventor of the so-called “Drake equation”, even confidently asserted that there must be numerous high civilizations out there – all, inevitably, in their superior capacity exceeding us silly little humans! Some of these benign galactic cultures, moreover, are actually claimed to be looking after us, as affirmed by people who have been “abducted” by them; while in 1960 in California was founded SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, whose purpose was to scan space in the radio and other energy bands for signals that might indicate the presence of intelligent life.
At a large astronomical meeting in 2010, when SETI was fifty years old and still had yet to find anything whatsoever, I suggested to one of its officials, before around 1,000 people, that the organization was really about a secular religion using radio telescopes, and not an impartial study of the heavens. It was searching for the secular equivalent of angels, spirits, and even God. And needless to say, where do we all search for superior intelligences? Why – “up there”, of course! Just as we have done since humans first worshipped the sun! My suggestion that SETI was reinventing heaven, and that its “mission statement”, exhorting us, in the words of the official, to “seek cosmic company”, was actually an exercise in blind faith, as opposed to science, did not go down well!
The growing “futurology” industry taps into a similar vein of “messianic” thinking. Of course, predictions of golden or ghastly futures go back to remote antiquity, but the advent of increasingly sophisticated computing power since 1950 has given a new string to the old divinatory bow. Surely, with the vast and growing power of super-computers to crunch numbers and generate virtual models, we can get a pretty good idea of what is likely to happen – can’t we? Well, actually, no! Irrespective of whatever computational power we can harness at any one time, the result can only be as good as the data currently available. And as data change constantly and unpredictably, we have no real way of being sure of anything beyond the immediate future. And certainly not in twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years’ time.
So whether one is in the business of predicting climate change, global economics, human life expectancies, or political and religious changes, it must never be forgotten that we only know what we know now; what we will know in ten years’ time, and how that will impact on what will happen in fifty years’ time – well, you might just as well bring out the crystal ball!
What remains, however, that is germane to my argument, is that humans are also what one might call “future state”-seeking creatures. And once we abandon a belief in a spiritual heaven, we don’t become more “rational”, as the New Atheists and the secularists like to tell us. Instead, we just reinvent heaven in a fashionable guise. We set it on earth at some time in the future, or we convince ourselves that there is intelligent life living on exo-planets or in distant galaxies. We imagine our earthly descendants as rather like the Greek immortals, or else look for “cosmic company” in the great vault of the sky.
But what I find fascinating is that even in an age that in key aspects of life has lost its spiritual nerve, we humans cannot escape “reverting to type”, as it were, when considering beginnings and endings. We cannot escape our spiritual ancestry and the great – to me – divine forces that drive us both as individuals and as a species. And when we abandon the heaven of God, we relocate it in some futuristic galactic fantasy which makes the eighteenth-century myth about medieval philosophers discussing angels pirouetting on a pinpoint sound as sane and as objective as tomorrow morning’s sunrise.