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204 Appeals for guidance or intervention from beyond the Earth have been part of many human religions. Often, those appeals were directed to the skies where gods were believed to dwell. Advanced extraterrestrials, far more omniscient and omnipotent than we are, could have many of the characteristics now attributed to the super- natural God of monotheistic religions. Carl Jung, attempting to define the psychological structure of the religious experience that “saves, heals, and makes whole,” concluded that in religious experience Man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.'° A prominent physicist came to a similar conclusion. God is what mind becomes, proposed Dyson, when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. MacGowan and Ordway extended this concept to superintelligent automata. Being relatively omnipotent, they would be remarkably similar to familiar concepts and attributes of a supreme being." We could carry this further, to a being that created our universe. Such an intelligence might have fine-tuned the physical constants, Dick pro- posed, thus explaining the anthropic principle. It could even intervene in human history, the touchstone principle of the Christian faith—and of UFO and alien abduction advocates. One group explicitly linked the Bible with UFOs.” Mind-Stretcher. Could the existence of God be an objective question? As science fiction author Robert Sawyer put it, what if messages from aliens contain proof of God’s existence? What if they prove that we live in a created universe?’ If the cosmos has any lord at all, warned Stapledon, he is not a fatherly spirit but one whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds is alien, inhuman, dark. Others find that Nature does not exhibit the slightest trace of the beneficence that one might expect of the handcrafted product of a loving, caring Creator."* We may be expecting too much. Extraterrestrials might have abilities so far superior to ours that many humans would liken them to gods. Yet, they, too, will be products of biological and cultural evolution in particular environments. They may not have all those qualities and powers that we associate with a Creator. Instead of resembling gods, intelligent aliens might seem more like angels—spiritual beings superior to humans in power and intelligence. Some Catholic intellectuals have speculated that extraterrestrials might have characteristics that theologians attribute to angels, such as immortal- ity or innate knowledge. Jung suggested that the aliens of the 1950s were “technological angels” in the vehicles appropriate to a scientific age but having the power and mission of earlier mythic saviors. In a scientific age, asked Sagan, what is a more reasonable and acceptable disguise for the classic religious mythos SETI and Religion