Astrobiology’s Intra-Active Aliens

This chapter lays a conceptual foundation by introducing how the intra-active quality of astrobiological phenomena provides a distinctive context for framing what constitutes meaningful human existence, because the scale of these phenomena is so vast. To think astrobiologically requires that we imagine significant ontological units beyond the human individual and her agency that accord with the more general theory of living-systems that astrobiology is beginning to articulate. It explores how the interdisciplinary discoveries of astrobiology proffer a particular transdisciplinary vision of the cosmos with significance for theological anthropology and environmental thinking about the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene as Planetarity in Deep Time

In light of contemporary accounts of the Anthropocene, this chapter re-figures the relationship between human being and nature, such that nature is not the dialectical antithesis to human being and our reflexivity with nature is not easily marginalized. It proposes a simple definition for this relationship: human beings are planetary creatures in deep time. This definition indicates how the Anthropocene disorients us both in terms of the spatial (i.e., planetary) and temporal (i.e., deep time) boundedness of our subjectivity. Building on supporting ideas—‘planetarity’ and a ‘Sapiezoic’ eon—that help us imagine the implications of the Anthropocene’s disorientation of our subjectivity, this chapter articulates the potential symbolic power of the Anthropocene to imagine human beings as intra-active agents.

An Artful Planet

This chapter offers a constructive account of interpreting the Anthropocene and the imago Dei as corroborative symbols interpreted in an astrobiological context of engagement by weaving the crucial themes of intra-action, refraction, planetarity, and deep time together. It proposes that to be the imago Dei is not a property of individuals or even a species but describes a categorical shift in planetary flows of energy and matter. This is a shift from biogeochemical cycles to technobiogeochemical cycles. If human beings live into our shared responsibility for being the imago Dei, then the Earth should be understood as not only a living planet, but an artful one.

Living-Into Presence, Wonder, and Play

This chapter develops three pivotal themes for affecting others such that they become more attentive to participating in a non-individualistic account of the imago Dei understood as being an ‘artful planet’: presence, wonder, and play. These themes are equiprimordial existential structures that aid us in ordering human experiences. Presence, broadly speaking, is a disposition or orientation; it names an existential commitment to being aware of the intra-active, non-separable difference that subtends our lived experiences. Wonder is a mood or an attitude that allows the world to appear to us with an openness or ‘making proximate’ of those desires that are askew to our predominant, norming orientations: an attentiveness to disorientations. Finally, play is an expression of freedom. It allows us to explore and construct worlds of other possibilities that are engrossing; with these acts of imagination we act ‘as if’ this possible world is, which then imparts meaning to our ordinary living in the world.

The imago Dei as a Refractive Symbol

This chapter focuses on two key themes constructive accounts of the imago Dei must address: the continuing relevance of the image/likeness distinction beyond its original exegetical framing and how what we mean by ‘image’ might be better theologically rendered as ‘symbol.’ Situating the doctrine in the wider biblical cosmogony from which it arises, while focusing on three historical theologians—Irenaeus, Augustine, and Schleiermacher—the chapter builds a case for what constitute inescapable elements of this symbol. Building on this historical recapitulation, it is argued that to be the image of God is to be a symbol of God: one who refracts the creative power of God evidenced in cosmogonies to facilitate the flourishing intra-action of living systems with the habitable environment. The consequence of this approach is that to be the imago Dei is not something properly ascribed to any individual organism as a marker of distinctiveness, but it describes a particular type of astrobiological intra-action that extends the creative power of the divine as a refraction, not merely a reflection.

Being a Living-System

If astrobiology provides a credible way of thinking about what it means to ‘live’ on and with the wider habitats of any cosmic body, then existing sets of symbols must be reinterpreted in order to develop a meaningful way of being-in-the-world and belonging-together-with-the-world in light of the astrobiological concern for intra-action that counters tendencies to human exceptionalism. This chapter makes overlapping arguments that deal with the nature of such symbols. It first examines the relationship between Christian doctrine and symbols to make a case for why doctrines might be reclaimed as symbols in constructive theological reflection if they are not used primarily for apologetic purposes but to facilitate the meaningful re-orientation of our existence in the world. It then considers the Imago Dei as such a doctrinal symbol. Resisting the tendency to turn the doctrine into a freestanding account of biblical anthropology, the chapter draws out resonances between astrobiology’s account of intra-action and the harmonious ordering of creation in cosmogonies that can ground subsequent interpretation of the symbol.

Introduction: Being in Outer Space

This work represents a transdisciplinary theological project. It is committed to fostering mutual understanding that stretches transversally across disciplinary boundaries by thinking through how tenets of astrobiology intersect with various reflections on human ways of being in the world and belonging to the world. The structure of the book is broadly inductive. The chapters provide a series of specific examples drawn from astrobiology, doctrinal reflection on the imago Dei, and reflections on the Anthropocene, to suggest an alternative approach to framing how human beings meaningfully are in the world and belong to it. Braiding together these diverse traditions, I suggest the Earth is not only a living planet but an artful one. To be an artful planet requires we take seriously geological history and the significance of the geological agency of homo sapiens. It also requires that we, as members of a species, own our responsibility for inducing new technobiogeochemical cycles into our planetary history.

Conceptualizing Nature

This chapter explores how astrobiology invites us to reconceptualise ‘nature.’ It explores how the constitutive mutuality the Anthropocene opens for our environmental imagination—between nature and human being—‘corroboartiavely’ taps into the intra-action of astrobiology and symbols used in theological anthropology. To do this, it examines the flexibility inherent to the use of the term ‘nature’ as it has been developed within a typology of American environmental imagining. It characterizes how the story of human being and nature interacting has slipped away in light of the call to recognize intra-action: how the Anthopocene symbolizes a disorientation implicit to astrobiological ways of framings a human relationship to world.

Exoplanets and Icy Moons and Mars, Oh My!

This chapter examines astrobiological phenomena in order to press beyond popular preconceptions about the field of astrobiology: that it is solely or primarily concerned with studying aliens that we do not yet know exist. Specifically considering Kepler 452-b, Proxima-b, Enceladus, and Mars, the chapter considers implications that emerge from closely studying the scope and scale of astrobiological research. These issues of scope and scale are figured in relation to the astrobiological concern for microbial life, the importance of living-systems, and models of habitability.

Epilogue: Ad Astra Per Aspera

What happens when the Anthropocene and the imago Dei become corroborative symbols in the astrobiological contexts that shape our engagement with the world today? My argument has been that, in the face of various instances of ecological crises, the Anthropocene symbolizes the existential concerns at stake in this devastation so that we better understand that our way of meaningfully orienting our existence toward the natural world is askew. To remember that we are the imago Dei can give us courage to stay with the trouble of this disorientation a moment longer and imaginatively play out new realities that confront the inevitable ecological devastations that have been wrought upon the earth.