This article on extra-terrestrials and religion (via Arts and Letters Daily) is hard to take seriously, since it doesn't even mention C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. The original sin and redemption of another planet might well take forms nigh-unimaginable to us; while the universe demonstrates a love of repetition ("It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon." --G. K. Chesterton), it also demonstrates a love of change. The two together are almost music. One need not imagine God planet-hopping, first in fur, then in ribbons of silicon polymers, and so forth, to redeem each species.

Moreover, "genetically eliminate evil behavior"?! Evil behavior is not something for which there is a single regulator ("Gentlemen, we've identified the Evil Gene. Also the gene responsible for devouring a whole bag of chips). And saints are not those who have had their genes modified, so they need never struggle with evil impulses. They are those who struggle and triumph.

I note also that the article likes Pantheism, which is always the first embrace of people in search of some philosophically palatable belief, the religious equivalent of pablum. At least Manichaeism admitted the existence of Evil. But nobody likes a god who might actually do things, and want us to behave in certain ways. So we devise a pleasant, rather absent-minded god, who set things in motion and now sits back, watching his creation, and perhaps issuing a few, rather vague commands through quantum processes (once more, ?!), like "love one another". A very convenient god, to be short.

I should add that the author of this article has a singularly lack of imagination. Imagining the forms of extra-terrestrial life we shall encounter, and their philosophies, and how their physical forms have shaped those philosophies (and how they haven't!) is a pleasant and engaging pasttime. To be unable to imagine both atheistic creatures, and, say, sidereal Mohammedans, shows an odd intellectual impotence.

At times I miss the attitude of Medieval scientists, who expected marvels of Nature, and were not disappointed. While they were often wrong in the details, no fair critic could claim that the world, and the universe, is not full of impossibly intricate surprises. Nowadays our vision seems weaker; it blurs and combines the objects we see into a over-general mush. It takes a Dillard or a Bodio to restore our sight of the specific. I'm currently reading Aloft, which I heartily recommend.