Interstellar Exploration and the God Who Motivates It

What makes us want to explore space? In a journal article entitled, “Motivations for space exploration,” sociologist William Sims Bainbridge outlines various justifications that might motivate people to invest in technology for space exploration (such as increasing the annual budget for NASA). When Bainbridge mentions the traditional justifications, such as advances in knowledge of physics, he writes that concerning questions such as the nature of matter, “it is not clear that most people in the world really care about such questions, being content with religious answers which they find more comforting.”

I find interesting this side-brush comment. It obviously confuses theological answers concerning the meaning of human events and ultimate metaphysical origins with scientific answers that address the nature of physical systems. But it isn’t only that. The comment reveals that Bainbridge does not even consider that religious answers to questions of meaning and metaphysics—such as the universe having been “exploded into being by divine love”—are able to provide a viable motivation for support of space exploration.

As has been pointed out before, the conflict thesis between science and theology is a relatively recent phenomenon. The science historian Peter Harrison remarks, “For much of the Middle Ages the “books” of nature and Scripture had been read together as part of a unified interpretive endeavour.” Also, “religious answers” have hardly in the past been a broker against space exploration. To give a couple space era examples, the Presbyterian Buzz Aldrin secretly had communion on the moon; and, on December 24, 1968, the entire crew of Apollo 8 read aloud Genesis 1:1-10 in turn on national television when they looked upon the Earth while upon the first manned spacecraft to leave our planet. Today, the astronomer and Jesuit Guy Consolmagno mentions excitement at the prospect of discovering extraterrestrial life in his book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?.

Bainbridge does note other possible motivations for human space exploration such as the Human spirit, Noble endeavor, Curiosity, the Final Frontier, Adventure, and Insight. All these motivations, Bainbridge notes, “were rather unpopular” in the Harvard study and sufficiently “vague” that it would not be clear “why space exploration is a particularly good way of satisfying them.” Never, however, is it ever considered that theological motivations for space exploration would complement these more vague ones and the more traditional ones as well.

Christianity before has been a spur of scientific discovery. As Harrison writes, “religious considerations provided vital sanctions for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and, arguably, it is these that account for the positive attitudes to science which have led to the high status of science in the modern West.” The current arena of technology is, however, aside from the production of more efficient communication devices, not advancing with the dreams of “Tomorrow Land” that dominated the 50s and 60s.

Technology writer Peter Thiel notes, “When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains.” He turns to, among several examples, the case of speed acceleration: We went from steam engines to bullet trains, horse carriages to race cars—yet improvements today pale to improvements from the past. As Thiel recounts, “A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.” He argues that the current state of affairs owes to a strong cultural shift that has left politics and the public much less interested in concrete technological progress:

Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years … Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

One can see a turning point at which we nationally do not dream of space as we used to. Consider films such as The Matrix and Avatar, which show technological innovation leading only to dystopia and interstellar imperialism.

Granted, uses of technology can of course become and often have been abuses, and it is all too often confused today that scientific progress equals moral progress. Yet as Aristotle pointed out, technology is an application of the practical intellect, and what is scientific discovery if not a reflection of the divine image in human beings? Aquinas writes, “Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature.” The human mind imitates the mind of God; in discovering knowledge about the cosmos, man honors God by studying the immanently intelligible creation. This theological vision sits uncomfortably with the secular cultural left. Yet it may rightfully sit as providing the collective civic motivation for why we are able to know the cosmos’s history and micro- and macro- structures, and to explore it as the ultimate frontier of divine creation.

Yet the question—why should we explore it?—is maybe lacking in current civic discourse. As Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper, a widowed astronaut exploring other habitable worlds in Christopher Nolan’s recent film Interstellar, puts it to his farmer father-in-law, “We used to look up … and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.” In the film, Cooper actually gets into his argument with his daughter’s teacher due to a revision in the school textbooks that in fact the 1969 moon landing was faked as propaganda to bankrupt the Soviet Union. This film, one of the few that actually celebrates human technological innovation, delivers a blistering critique of current American pessimism.

What motivated Dante to traverse all the 7 spheres of the cosmos? His love for the Love that moves the sun and other stars inspired Dante to move through the earth and up into the Ptolemaic cosmos—to traverse all of God’s creation, from the firmament showing His handiwork to the heavens declaring His glory. Having been in a recent conversation with Thiel and Douthat on Christianity and technology, the theologian N.T. Wright preaches, “The God in whom we believe is the creator of the world, and he … is not going to abolish the universe of space, time and matter; he is going to renew it, to restore it, to fill it with new joy and purpose and delight, to take from it all that has corrupted it.” Should not space travel be seen as part of our participation in God’s renewal of the world by baptizing all of creation with our presence?