Religion and the Aliens

Rating: 5/10 (31 October 2017)

Long before the movie "Contact" was produced, I had known people who made some sort of connection between intelligent life on other planets and the existence of God. Maybe that is not quite right. It's hard to say exactly, because no one ever presented the connection as a valid argument, consisting of premises about extraterrestrial beings and ending with the conclusion that God exists. No such argument was ever forthcoming, because it would have been palpably absurd on its face, even to them. Instead, they just seemed to feel that the existence of aliens had religious significance, but they could never quite to bring themselves to spell it out.
Apparently, it was people just like that who made "Contact." The movie is mainly about making contact with extraterrestrials through the transmission of signals through space, but religious stuff keeps showing up, not because there is any logical connection between the two, but simply because some people seem to feel that connection, even though that feeling never seems to rise to the level of coherent thought. Mostly what we get is the association of ideas.
For example, Jodie Foster plays Dr. Ellie Arroway, an astronomer. When Ellie was a young girl, she had a ham radio. At one point, she asks her father if she can contact her deceased mother through her radio. And after her father dies, she tries to contact him through her radio. So an association is made between radio transmissions and life after death. We regard this as merely a child's desperate hope of finding her parents again, which would be just fine as a stand-alone scene. But further such childlike associations recur throughout the movie.
While listening for signals from outer space in Puerto Rico, she meets Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who is an almost-priest whose spirituality expresses itself as a concern for human values that he believes are being jeopardized by technology. Ellie and Palmer have sex, and in the afterglow, during a little pillow talk, he says: "So I was lying there, just looking at the sky. And then I felt something. I don't know. All I know is that I wasn't alone. For the first time in my life, I wasn't scared of nothing, not even dying. It was God."
There it is in a nutshell: He looks up at the sky; he has a feeling of the sublime; so there must be a God.
By this time in her life, Ellie has become an atheist. She says, "And there's no chance that you had this experience because some part of you needed to have it?"
As a way of forestalling such rational objections, Palmer says, "I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but this. My intellect couldn't even touch this."
And that's the end of that. His epiphany transcended such things as reason and common sense, so it cannot be questioned.
Ellie and Palmer get into a debate about the existence of God. She appeals to the principle of Occam's razor: "Occam's Razor is a basic scientific principle which says: Things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be right. So what's more likely? An all-powerful God created the universe, then decided not to give any proof of his existence? Or that he doesn't exist at all, and that we created him so we wouldn't feel so small and alone."
Palmer says he would not want to live in a world where God does not exist. Ellie, in turn, says she would need proof. Palmer asks her if she can prove that her father loved her. She is stumped.
Anyway, Ellie gets to visit the aliens. She zips through a wormhole and ends up in a world based on what is in her mind, memories of a beach in Pensacola and of her father. The alien who has taken on the image of her father explains everything to her, how lots of civilizations from different planets have interacted this way. Ellie wants to know why more people from Earth can't see what she's seen. The alien answers, "This is the way it's been done for billions of years." Sound familiar? Just as we are not supposed to question the ways of God, we are not supposed to question the ways of the aliens.
When Ellie gets back, a lot people don't believe her story about what happened. In particular, Michael Kitz (James Woods), who is sort of the villain of the piece, calls her story into question. He says she just hallucinated it, that the whole thing is a hoax. He demands that Ellie produce proof, and she cannot. He indignantly asks if we are supposed to accept her story on faith.
Now Ellie is in the position of someone who believes in God but cannot prove it. And now we know why the aliens demanded that just one person go on that trip to Vega instead of the Vegans coming to Earth. In that case, everyone would have seen the aliens on television. There would have been no doubt as to their existence. But this way, the aliens recapitulate the objection that Ellie had earlier, that God did not leave proof of his existence. So all the objections earlier enunciated by Ellie about God are turned against her with respect to the aliens. Ellie's response to these objections harks back to the mystical experience Palmer had while stargazing, almost a beatific vision.
For those of you who are inclined to infuse the existence aliens from other planets with religious significance, this movie is for you. For those of you who have no need of religion, this movie will make you feel like an alien from another planet