UFOs: God's Chariots? by Ted Peters

Author:Ted Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CAN RELIGION BECOME FULLY SCIENTIZED?

What is startling about the claims of von Däniken and other would-be ancient alien theologians is that they actually humanize and trivialize God. They make natural what we believe to be supernatural. They make physical what we accept as spiritual. They say that what we once thought to be extraordinary is really ordinary.

In their view, the Ark of the Covenant was awesome not because of its spiritual power but because of its electrical power. Moses did not pray to a God who had created the entire universe and whose infinite being was present everywhere in it—von Däniken says Moses prayed instead to a single individual space visitor in a high-altitude flying saucer by means of a walkie-talkie radio. Electricity and radios we understand; spiritual power and prayer we do not. How great it is to have a Bible that is now believable because we have found the key for translating its mysteries into concepts we can understand!

Science and religion can now become friends, according to this particular UFO theology. In the past, scientists have accused religious people of simply making up the idea of a God in order to provide an emotionally soothing explanation for things we could not otherwise explain. The idea of a God who created our world and the belief that the angels are watching and caring for us was said to be the fabrication of an insecure unconscious. We were told that mystery leads people to superstition and religion, but now that science is explaining away many mysteries, we no longer have any need for superstition and religion. Science used to look down on religion as primitive and out of date. Now, however, followers of UFO theology can triumphantly claim that the idea of God is not a product of our unconscious wishes and imaginations; our idea of God was revealed to us by space beings. In fact, it was through a marriage of these superscientific visitors with prehuman beasts on Earth that we have the intelligence common to our species today. This is recorded in the Bible, in Genesis 6, albeit in a form difficult to interpret correctly. We are children, not of a supernatural God, but of space travelers who continue to watch over us with electronic surveillance from their flying saucers—something like the FBI and CIA. Religion was given to us; we did not make it up. And, further, religion has found a way to explain itself without resorting to miracles or anything else supernatural.

But if we adopt such an ancient alien theology, will all the distinctively religious questions be resolved? I suggest that UFO theology has kicked up a lot of dust, but when that dust settles we will see that it has simply pushed some religious questions about transcendent reality back another step.

Paul Tillich, the renowned Protestant theologian, said that when the 5-year-old child asks, “Where did the sky come from?” he or she is asking a religious question. It is religious because it questions the source of all reality, the ground of all being.

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