C.S. Lewis Already Answered Stephen Spielberg’s Question
Door Jam: June 16, 2026
Leading up to his return to the alien movie genre, Stephen Spielberg asked what he believed to be a fundamental question about the potential discovery of actual intelligent alien life:
“What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?”
Spielberg seemingly made Disclosure Day as part of his answer to that question. I hate to tell the acclaimed director, but C.S. Lewis already answered it.
Within a year of the U.S.S.R. sending Sputnik 1 orbiting around the Earth, Lewis wrote his essay “Religion and Rocketry,” reprinted in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays.
In short, Lewis’ answers would be “nothing,” “no,” and “yes.”
The discovery of alien life would do nothing to the fundamental beliefs of Christians. No, God is not limited to our planet.1 Yes, God is God for not only every system where there is any type of life, but He is God for all of creation, spanning every inch of the universe.
Lewis argued that every “new discovery, even every new theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences.”
But after serious thinkers have worked through the ramifications, everyone essentially remains where they were before. “So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical Criticism, with the new psychology,” Lewis writes. “So, I cannot help expecting it will be with the discovery of ‘life on other planets’ — if that discovery is ever made.”
In his essay, Lewis actually poses five questions that better cut to the heart of the theological issues at play with alien life.
Is there animal life somewhere other than Earth?
Do these creatures possess a rational soul?
Are aliens, like humanity, fallen?
If they are fallen, did Christ die for them?
Is the mode of redemption we know the only possible way for Christ to redeem them?
If we want a movie wrestling with those issues, we’ll need Spielberg or someone to adapt the Ransom trilogy.
Sources:
Not Safe But Good
C.S. Lewis quote of the week
The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality.
“Evil and God,” God in the Dock
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