In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which some scientists like discussing, they usually concentrate on the possibility that intelligent beings on other planets will transmit signals by radio that are mathematically meaningful, such as the sequence of prime numbers, and from these signals we will be able to infer the existence of intelligent beings wishing to communicate with us.4 But it may be that communication with other forms of intelligence could be far more direct. It may not rely on radio transmissions. It may not need spaceships. It may not depend on UFOs. Direct mental contact with these celestial intelligences maybe possible through a kind of telepathy.
Matthew: For me, there’s no doubt that previous civilizations that we call indigenous knew much more than we do about communicating over large distances without technology. It’s there too in the lore of some of our Western saints who were psychics.
Rupert: And technology may in any case be of very limited use in communicating with intelligences in other parts of the universe. The SETI program, intermittently funded by the U.S. government, shows up these limitations quite clearly. The standard assumption is that the inhabitants of a solitary planet would broadcast radio signals of a mathematically meaningful kind in the hope of finding another intelligent species somewhere in space. This is what astronomer Timothy Ferris calls the lonely-heart scenario: “Lonesome, technically proficient species seeks same. Object: Communication.”5
Even if we were to receive and recognize such messages from a planet around a nearby star, communication would be very slow. The nearest star is about 4.2 light-years away, so even if we reply immediately, it will take 8.4 years between their sending a message and receiving our reply. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, so it would take 100,000 years for radio messages to pass from one side of the galaxy to another, and 200,000 years before replies could be received. What civilization would have a life span and record-keeping system adequate to communicate over periods such as that? And as for communication with inhabitants of planets in other galaxies, forget it! The nearest regular galaxy to our own, the Andromeda galaxy, is 1.8 million light-years away, so replies will take 3.6 million years to arrive. For galaxies a billion light-years away, replies will take two billion years.
If the transfer of thoughts can happen faster than the speed of light, then the whole question of interstellar and intergalactic communication looks very different, as it does when we broaden our thinking about intelligences elsewhere in the cosmos. Instead of confining our attention to minds of biological organisms, such as ourselves, living in technological civilizations, we can explore the possibility that planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters also have a kind of consciousness. This is where the traditional understanding and experience of cosmic intelligences may be able to help us, and especially the angelology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thomas Aquinas.
Consider, for example, the possibility that the sun is conscious. This is not a very far-fetched idea, even in terms of the standard materialistic assumptions of orthodox science. Materialists believe that our own mental activity is associated with complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains. These patterns of electromagnetic activity are generally assumed to be the interface between consciousness and the physical activity of our brains. Consciousness is somehow supposed to emerge from these patterns. But the complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains are as nothing compared with the complexity of electromagnetic patterns in the sun.
The sun is a fireball of plasma assumed to be fuelled by nuclear fusion reactions. A plasma is an ionized gas, and it is highly sensitive to electrical and magnetic influences. The sun is the theater of extremely complex, rhythmic patterns of electromagnetic activity, with an underlying cycle about twenty-two years long. About every eleven years the magnetic polarity of the sun reverses: its north magnetic pole switches to the south, or vice versa; after another eleven years, the poles return to their previous positions. These reversals correspond with cycles of sunspot activity, great flares on the surface of the sun. This reversal of polarity is connected with complex harmonic cycles of vibration, swirling resonant patterns of electromagnetic activity.
If people are prepared to admit that our consciousness is associated with these complex electromagnetic patterns, then why shouldn’t the sun have a consciousness? The sun may think. Its mental activity may be associated with complex and measurable electromagnetic events both on its surface and deeper within. If there’s a connection between our consciousness and complex, dynamic electromagnetic patterns in our brains, there’s no reason that I can see for denying the possibility of this connection in other cases and especially on the sun.
If the sun is conscious, why not the other stars too? All the stars may have mental activity, life, and intelligence associated with them. And this is, of course, precisely what was believed in the past—that the stars are the seat of intelligences, and these intelligences are angels.
Matthew: I’m surprised to hear you say this. You are really sticking your neck out. I’ve never heard you speak of the sun and stars like this before. But ideas like these would have many implications for worship. We need to set our prayer circles in the context of this vast, alive, complex, and amazing universe, for example. Today we have the electronics to do this. To take worship out of the hands of little books and put it into a cosmology again. Then the angels will be present at worship once again.
The angel that has something to do with the incredible intelligence of the sun ought to be there. In our worship, we ought to be awakening the sense of awe—and awe includes terror—with reality. The universe is our home, and everything we’re talking about is our home. This is the temple of God, it’s God’s home.
Angels are so often depicted as light-beings reflecting the luminosity of the divine one. I know you were struck in reading Thomas Aquinas’s statement that angels move from one place to another with no time lapse. You said it reminded you of Einstein’s thinking about light. What about the idea of angels as photons, light-bearers?
Rupert: When Aquinas discusses how angels move from place to place, his reasoning has extraordinary parallels to both quantum and relativity theories. Angels are quantized; you get a whole angel or none at all; they move as units of action. The only way you can detect their presence is through action; they are quanta of action. And although when they act in one place and then in another, from our point of view time elapses while they are moving, from the point of view of the angel this movement is instantaneous; no time elapses. This is just like Einstein’s description of the movement of a photon of light. Although we as external observers can measure the speed of light, from the point of view of the light itself, no time elapses as it is traveling. It doesn’t get older. We still have light around from 14 billion years ago, from soon after the Big Bang, in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation. After all that time, it’s still around and still going strong.
So in modern physics there are remarkable parallels to the traditional doctrines about angels, and I think the parallels arise because the same problems are being considered. How does something without mass, without body, but capable of action, move? Angels, according to Aquinas, have no mass, they have no body. And the same goes for photons: they are massless, and you can detect them only by their action.
Matthew: Does that mean that photons are immortal?
Rupert: Yes, as long as they are moving at the speed of light from place to place. But when they act, they are extinguished through their action, so in that sense they come to an end; they pass on their energy as they act. This, I presume, makes them different from angels.
Although there are parallels between modern physics and medieval ideas about angels, the aspect of modern science that raises the most interesting questions is the theory of evolution. In the Middle Ages, nature was regarded as fixed: the cosmos, the earth, and the forms of life upon it were not seen as evolving. In biology, the idea of evolution was first proposed in a scientific form in 1858 by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. In physics, the notion of cosmic evolution became orthodox in the late 1960s as a consequence of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Now we see everything as evolutionary in nature. This means that there is a continuing creativity in all realms of nature. Is this all a matter of blind chance, as materialists believe? Or are there guiding intelligences at work in the evolutionary