What <em>Disclosure Day</em> Misses About Aliens and Religion
· The Atlantic
Late in Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, a former nun-to-be calls the abbess of the convent she left behind. The world is about to learn that aliens have been living on Earth for decades. Although Jane, the onetime novitiate, is no longer religious, she still thinks that the idea of God is what “keeps whole civilizations together.” She’s worried that when people find out that humans aren’t the only intelligent beings in the universe, they’ll lose their faith, and society will crumble.
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“Genesis says we’re his supreme creation,” Jane begins, but Sister Maura interrupts her: “On Earth,” the nun clarifies. “It says we are God’s supreme creation on Earth.”
In other words, Jane shouldn’t be afraid. The existence of aliens does not necessarily conflict with belief in God. As Sister Maura says later in the conversation, “Why would he make such a vast universe yet save it only for us?” Jane seems not to have heard this perspective before, and it reassures her. But centuries of Catholic writing and thinking about the universe demonstrate that Sister Maura’s view on God and aliens is hardly novel.
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Although the Catholic Church takes no official position on the existence of extraterrestrial life, past and present Catholic figures have explored the possibility and not found it threatening. The 15th-century cardinal Nicholas of Cusa surmised that “none of the other regions of the stars are empty of inhabitants” and even that some said inhabitants might be “brilliant, illustrious, and intellectual.” In 1821, the Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre puzzled over the fact that some of his contemporaries regarded other planets as “mere globes, destitute of life and beauty, which the Almighty has launched into space, apparently like a tennis-player, for his amusement solely.” And in a 2010 interview, the former head of the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy Consolmagno, said that he would be “delighted” if humans were to discover intelligent life beyond our world.
Consolmagno’s reasoning helps explain why proof of extraterrestrial life hasn’t shaken the faith of many Catholic thinkers. “I love the physical universe, and I’m not embarrassed to be in love with the physical universe,” he said, adding: “Creation is the place where we find God.” This same conviction was part of what drove the Austrian priest Gregor Mendel to study garden peas and lay the foundation for modern genetics, and the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître to pioneer the Big Bang theory. If Earth and the heavens reflect the “creative freedom of God,” as another head of the Vatican Observatory put it, then exploring them is a way to witness that creativity.
This attitude also applies to considering the existence of aliens. Theologians have gone so far as to wonder how Catholic teaching would apply to hypothetical extraterrestrial life. Some of these thinkers have suggested that if aliens existed, they might not commit original sin, or if they did sin, they would be saved by Christ, or by a yet-to-come incarnation of God in their universe. These are speculative questions for Catholics, yet Christopher Baglow, the director of the Science & Religion Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, has written that they are useful because they can prompt the faithful to reflect on humanity’s relationship to divinity.
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In Disclosure Day, Jane’s worrying is curious, coming from someone who meant to become a nun. She shows little familiarity with Catholicism’s long history of comfort with the supernatural—with angels and demons, miracles and apparitions—that could make some believers especially prepared to accept the arrival of unfamiliar life from other worlds. The Catholic astronomer and Harvard professor Karin Öberg has proposed that the existence of aliens doesn’t affect God’s relationship with humanity any more than the size of humanity affects his relationship with a particular human. “If we end up having alien ‘siblings,’” Öberg said in a 2022 lecture, “that does not mean that God cares or loves us any less.”
In the lead-up to Disclosure Day’s release, Breitbart, The Babylon Bee, and a barrage of conspiracist anons accused Spielberg of making a film intent on having Christians “second-guessing their faith.” They’re wrong. Disclosure Day is a movie for believers: believers in empathy, transparency, aliens (of course), and, yes, religion—for its ability to help many people in their search for truth. It’s strange, then, that the film spends so much time treating alien life as a threat to believers’ trust in God. Just as Spielberg has in so many of his films, Catholics throughout the centuries have looked around at the cosmos not in fear, but in awe.