Looking Up for a Savior: Extraterrestrials, the Substitute Mythology, and the Higher Mind Who Already Came Down

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 10, 2026

Many Ruminations on Extraterrestrials as Related to Religion

Occasion. Sidney Secular’s recent News With Views essay takes up a subject that the year’s Congressional hearings and the spring’s government disclosures have dragged out of the science-fiction aisle and into the evening news: the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and what it would mean for the faith. It is a careful and fair-minded survey — it walks through Aquinas and Rahner and Jaki and the Jesuit astronomers, it lays out the genuinely hard questions honestly, and it lands in exactly the right place, on the apostle’s instruction to test the spirits (1 John 4:1) and the conviction that whatever may or may not be out there, the truth never leads away from Christ. I want to engage it, not to correct it, but because buried two-thirds of the way down Secular’s essay is a single diagnosis that I think is the most important sentence in the piece — more important than the aliens — and it is the diagnosis that the Renaissance Ministries frame is built to answer. So I will affirm what the essay sees, add what I think the substrate view of reality contributes, walk carefully through the question Secular is most honest about — redemption across creation — and then come back to that buried sentence, because it is the whole point.

I. The cosmos was never empty: what the headline gets wrong about the faith

Begin with the thing Secular sees clearly and most commentators miss. The breathless headline — what if we are not alone? — was never a problem for the biblical worldview, because the Bible has never taught that we were alone. Judaism and Christianity have always confessed a cosmos densely populated with rational, powerful, non-human created minds. We call them angels and demons. Secular rightly reaches back to the strange passage behind Noah’s flood — the sons of God and the daughters of men and the Nephilim born of that union (Genesis 6) — and the fellowship has been working this same seam in the divine-council texts, where the nations are apportioned among the sons of God (Deuteronomy 32:8). The point is simple and steadying: a believer who has read his Bible is the last person who should be rattled by the suggestion that the universe contains minds other than ours. He has believed that all along. The shock that secular culture feels at the possibility of other intelligences is the shock of a worldview that had quietly assumed humanity was the only mind in a dead cosmos — and that is the materialist’s assumption, not the Christian’s.

So the genuinely new question is narrower than the headline. It is not are there other minds — Scripture says yes. It is: are there other embodied, physical, biological rational species, arising on other worlds, possibly fallen and possibly not; and if so, how does the redemption accomplished on this planet relate to them? That is a real and interesting question, and Secular is exactly right that the Bible issues no dogma on it. There is no settled doctrine, no pronouncement, not even an off-the-cuff speculation. Hold that fact; it governs the whole posture I will argue for.

II. The line that matters is not biological — it is spiritual

Here is what the substrate view of reality — Conscious Point Physics, and the theology that rides on it — contributes to the conversation, and it reframes the whole question. The materialist asks the ET question biologically: is there carbon-based life elsewhere; are we biologically unique; will we find a second genesis? But on the view that reality is, at bottom, conscious points sustained moment by moment by the mind of God — that this world is God’s mind we are walking in — the ontologically decisive line in the universe is not biological at all. It is not earthling versus alien, not carbon versus silicon, not human versus grey or nordic or mantis. The decisive line is Creator versus creature, and then, within the order of creatures, aligned with God versus fallen away from him.

Run any candidate being through that filter and watch what happens. A conscious mind that arose on a world we will never see is still, on this view, a creature of wholly derivative existence — it did not make itself, it cannot hold itself in being for one instant, it is sustained by the same divine consciousness that sustains us, and it is accountable to the same Author. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a statement about Earth. It is a statement about being as such. So the extraterrestrial, if he exists, does not stand outside the house of God’s creation looking in. He stands in a room of it we had not yet seen. The playground the fellowship has been describing — existence as the ground, infinity as the edge, and the Maker’s rules in between — is as wide as creation, and the rules are the same in every room because the Master is the same.

This is why the Christian, of all people, can meet the prospect of cosmic company with peace rather than vertigo. Discovering minds on other worlds would not unseat God any more than discovering a new continent of humans unseated him. It would not break the frame. It would enlarge the chorus. The God who is troubled by the discovery of more creatures was always too small to be God.

III. The honest hard question: redemption across creation

Secular is most honest, and most worth engaging, where he lays out the genuinely difficult question: if there are other fallen rational creatures, how does Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection relate to them? He gives the three live possibilities, and they are the right three — that such beings may never have fallen and so need no redemption; that Christ’s one earthly work carries a cosmic, universal significance; or that God relates to other rational creatures in saving ways we simply do not understand. And he notes the theologians honestly: Funes raising the possibility of unfallen species exempt from redemption; the strong Catholic insistence that the cross was definitive and once-for-all; Aquinas allowing that the infinite divine person could in principle assume more than one created nature; Rahner entertaining multiple incarnations while holding to the finality of the redemptive work.

I am not going to pretend to settle what the apostles did not address and the Church has never defined. But I will say where I think the weight of the revealed word leans, and then mark clearly the line past which we should not go.

What is revealed is that the second Person of the Trinity is the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together — by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth… all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist (Colossians 1:16–17); all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3). If that is true — and it is the most cosmic claim in Scripture — then there is no world, seen or unseen, whose existence is not already referred to Christ as its source and its sustainer. On that ground, the cosmic-significance reading is the natural one: the cross is not a local event on a minor planet but the hinge of the whole created order, because the One who hung on it is the One in whom every world, including any world of fallen strangers, already lives and moves and has its being. The blood that reconciles reconciles all things, whether things in earth, or things in heaven (Colossians 1:20). I lean there, and I lean there hard.

But I hold it open, on purpose, because here we are squarely in the territory the fellowship has learned to name with one verse: The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29). Whether God, in his freedom, has dealt with other fallen creatures through the Earth’s one cross, or through some incarnation we cannot imagine, or in a manner that has no analogy in our experience at all — that is a secret thing. Aquinas was right not to put limits on the divine power; the Word’s infinity cannot be fenced inside anything created. So the disciplined posture is the one Secular’s own sources model at their best: affirm without flinching what is revealed — that Christ is the cosmic center, the Word through whom all worlds were made — and decline, just as firmly, to manufacture a doctrine where God has given none. A Renaissance Ministries that respects its own grammar will have a robust Christology of creation and no “doctrine of aliens” whatsoever.

IV. Test the spirits — and notice the test cuts both ways

Secular’s governing principle is the right one, and it is the apostle’s: Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). And he fairly reports the exorcists — Martins, Ripperger, the Orthodox monk Seraphim Rose, and Msgr. Rossetti, whose removal occasions the essay’s post scriptum — who suspect that many alleged alien encounters are not visitations from other planets but spiritual deceptions. I want to grant immediately that this suspicion has serious biblical grounding. Scripture is not naive about non-human intelligences that lie: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and our wrestling is against principalities… powers… spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). A being that presents itself with superhuman capabilities and offers revelation, enlightenment, or salvation is precisely the sort of thing the New Testament tells us to scrutinize rather than to trust on sight. The deception thesis is not paranoia; it is apostolic caution.

But notice — and Secular himself flags this, gently, with his line about seeing the devil in everything one dislikes, as in the days of the witch hunts — that the test cuts both ways. Test the spirits is not only a license to suspect; it is also a discipline against over-claiming. The Notre Dame theologian quoted in the Times report puts his finger on the second error exactly: the danger of taking one’s private discernment and presenting it as something the faithful are bound to accept, as settled teaching, when the Church has defined nothing of the kind. That is the same error the fellowship has been naming all season under a different heading — the error of elevating a private revelation above the standard of the revealed word, the temptation Leonard and I went round and round about with the Book of Mormon. It is the Berean instinct that corrects it in both directions: the noble Bereans tested even an apostle against the Scriptures (Acts 17:11), and they tested in order neither to believe too quickly nor to dismiss too quickly.

So I will not adjudicate the dispute between the cardinal and the exorcist — that is an internal matter of Catholic governance, and there is a defensible instinct on each side. The exorcist’s instinct that real deception is afoot is biblically sound. The bishop’s and the theologian’s instinct that one must not bind consciences with private speculation dressed as doctrine is also biblically sound. Both are applications of test the spirits. What the episode illustrates, for our purposes, is that the discernment Scripture commands is a two-edged blade: test the phenomenon against Christ — does it lead toward him or away? — and test your own interpretation of the phenomenon against the revealed word, lest your zeal outrun what God has actually said. The standard in both directions is Christological. Anything, from the sky or from the pulpit, that draws the soul away from Christ and the word fails the test, whatever its costume.

V. The buried sentence: the substitute mythology

Now to the most important thing in Secular’s essay, which is not about aliens at all. He records Stanley Jaki’s warning — and Seraphim Rose’s, and his own — that the obsession with extraterrestrials functions, for a secular culture, as a substitute mythology: that a civilization estranged from revelation and transcendence will reach for the sky to fill the vacuum where God used to be, and that many dream of extraterrestrials because they are afraid to be alone. Secular says it plainly: for a culture devoid of a personal God and an objective moral order, aliens easily become a surrogate religion promising revelation, enlightenment, and salvation from some source.

That sentence is the whole game, and it is the same diagnosis the fellowship has been writing all week under the name of the sea change in meaning. It is the same shape as the attention economy strip-mining a culture whose attention is anchored to nothing; the same shape as a generation that will not labor to learn because the horizon has collapsed to the grave. A people does not stop being religious when it stops believing in God. It becomes religious about something else. The hunger does not die; it migrates. And so a civilization that has evicted the Creator finds itself scanning the heavens for a higher intelligence to descend and disclose the meaning of it all, to tell us we are not alone, to save us from ourselves — which is to say, it finds itself aching, in a secular disguise, for exactly the thing it threw out.

The hunger itself is not the error. The hunger is holy. He hath set the world — eternity — in their heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11); the heart is restless, as Augustine said, until it rests in God. The longing for transcendence, for ultimate meaning, for communion beyond ourselves is the truest thing about us, the God-shaped space that proves whose we are. The error is only in the aim. To take that holy hunger and point it at the created sky — to look up, at the cosmos, for the salvation that comes only from the cosmos’s Maker — is the oldest mistake in the book: they worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator (Romans 1:25). The UFO is not, at root, an astronomy story or even a demonology story. It is a theology story. It is what the God-shaped longing does when it has nowhere sanctioned to go.

And that reframes the entire question for a ministry. The point is not, finally, to win the argument about what is in the released footage. The point is to recognize the disclosure-seekers as people doing a religious thing badly, and to tell them the news they are actually starving for: the higher Mind they are scanning the heavens for has already broken in. He did not arrive as a craft in the sky. He arrived as a child in a manger. The disclosure the disclosure-hunters long for already happened, and its content is a Person. We were never alone — not because the greys are real, but because the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. They are looking up for a savior to come down. One already did.

VI. The honest accounting

Let me mark the guardrails, briefly, so the fellowship holds this rightly. First, no doctrine of aliens. Where Scripture is silent we stay silent; we hold the redemption-across-creation question with Deuteronomy 29:29 humility and refuse to do, in our direction, the very thing the Notre Dame theologian warned the exorcist against — turning speculation into a teaching. Second, no naïveté. The deception thesis is biblically serious; we test the spirits, and we do not hand our trust to any voice, from the sky or otherwise, that leads away from Christ. Third, no distraction. Because the phenomenon is, for our purposes, mostly a lens onto the meaning-crisis, we do not let the spectacle pull the ministry off mission into UFO apologetics; the real work is the same work it always was — to fill the vacuum the surrogate mythologies are rushing into. And fourth, keep the wonder. The instinct the new pope voiced, of a mysterious joy in studying the universe, is the right one: a larger cosmos is a larger occasion for awe at its Author, not a threat to him. The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1); when I consider thy heavens… what is man, that thou art mindful of him? (Psalm 8:3–4). Wonder, not fear. Discernment, not credulity. Humility, not dogma.

Closing

Secular ends exactly where he should, and I can only agree: whatever may or may not exist out there, authentic truth will never lead away from Christ; test the spirits. I would add only the turn that the substrate view and this season’s work make available. The men watching the released footage and the men reading the exorcist’s books are, underneath their very different conclusions, doing the same human thing — straining toward a higher Mind, afraid to be alone in a cosmos that science told them was empty. The gospel’s answer to both is not first a verdict on the footage. It is an announcement: the cosmos was never empty, the higher Mind is real, he is not far from any one of us, and he has already done the one thing the sky-watchers are waiting for — he came down. The line that matters in this universe was never the line between Earth and the stars. It is the line between the creature and the Creator who made every world there is, and holds them all, this moment, in the palm of his hand.

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible… and he is before all things, and by him all things consist. — Colossians 1:16–17

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38