If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in one of the following directions.

A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.

B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.

C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.

D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.

But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination. 

“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”

“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.

“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.

But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"

“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”

Why should life evolve at all?

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and so on at some length. In summary, his argument goes like this:

1: The Universe is big.
2: The Universe is old.
3: The Universe is complex.
4: The Universe is ordered.
5: Humans do not understand the Universe.
6: Therefore Humans are not the greatest thing in the Universe
7: Therefore something greater than Humans must exist.

I am not sure he actually needed to bother with stages 1-6. If there is extraterrestrial life, then it must by definition be either a: greater than humans b: less great than humans or c: about equal to humans. And if there are a huge number of extraterrestrial life forms, then it is highly probable that at least one of them must be our superior. The proposition is actually “If we are not the only thing in the universe, then we are almost certainly not the greatest thing in it.”

But is there any extraterrestrial life at all? Walters explains that someone called “the man in the street”, relying on something called “common sense” is entirely skeptical about it.

“If these brainy chaps wanted to believe that, then let them. Mr Ordinary Man knew better. He felt in his bones that he was ‘the tops’. How could there be a higher form of life, he asked himself proudly as he looked around at his pubs and bingo halls, his motor cars and tinned foods, his palaces and slums.”

The Man in the Street does not point to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or King Lear as proof of man’s superiority: this is the voice of grammar school educated British Interplanetary Society member sneering at the plebs who only made it to Secondary Modern. But It’s a decent enough device for getting readers on side. Obviously, we all want to be on the side of the Brainy Chaps.

We aren’t told what the man-in-the-street thinks about religion: but we get a brief insight into what Brainy Chaps think. Benson, it turns out, is strictly agnostic. He thinks that the universe has three qualities

1: Complexity
2: Beauty
3: Infinite wonder.

It isn’t clear if he thinks that complexity is intrinsically beautiful, or if there could have been a universe was beautiful and simple, or one which was complicated but ugly. It also isn’t clear if “wonder”, “complexity” and “beauty” are intrinsic properties that the universe has, or merely descriptions of human beings reaction to it. But he does think that they might imply that there is a “thing” that “lies behind” the universe.

He does not think that this Thing, if it exists, would have explanatory power. He does not say that the universe is so complicated, beautiful and wonderful that some Thing even more complicated, beautiful and wonderful must have had a hand in the design of it. But if such a Thing exists, we can reasonably ask what the Universe is for. The existence of the Thing implies that the universe has a “meaning” and that there is a “direction in which it is moving.”

It is trivially true that if Man is not the greatest thing in the universe, then something greater than Man must exist. And if there are many things in the Universe and many degrees of greatness, one Thing must necessarily be the greatest of all. But it is by no means the case that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" is also the "greatest thing which could possibly exist". But we seem to have agreed that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" can reasonably be given the name "God". 

Whiskers reasoning goes beyond Benson’s

1: A race with more complicated machines and greater scientific understanding can be said to be more advanced than one without those things.
2: An older race must have been developing longer than a younger race.
3: An older race must have been evolving for longer than a younger race — indeed, it must be "more evolved".
4: Advancement, development and evolution all imply an increase in greatness.
5: The thing with the most greatness is called God.
6: Therefore older races must be closer to God than younger ones.
7: God is by definition good.
8: Therefore older races must necessarily be more good than younger ones, and our heroes have nothing to fear from the aliens.

Whiskers is, in fact, conflating “greatness” with “goodness”: he is assuming that “more advanced” is synonymous with “better”. We could label this Taylor’s Fallacy: “Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man”.

Sir Billy, who has replaced Sir George as head of UNEXA, points out that evolution is not a matter of linear improvement: “many other things” apart from the human mind has evolved. But Whiskers refutes this — there have been “set backs and side tracks” but the “trend” has always been towards greater intelligence. The arc of evolution is long, but it bends towards Prof Albert Einstein. 

This is indeed the view of evolution promulgated in 1970s school text books which tended to show chimpanzees turning into stockbrokers and codfish turning into triceratops as automatically as kittens turn into pussy cats and tadpoles turn into frogs. A scientific theory about change and adaptation has morphed into a narrative about inevitable improvement. This provided Creationists with a convenient stick with which to beat Charles Darwin: since the "inevitable improvement" theory was obviously silly, the whole idea of evolution was obviously fake news.

“What you are saying,” Lord Benson interposed “is that because [the Alien] must come from an older race, it must necessarily be from a more advanced and intelligent race. That evolution is always towards a higher plane, is always an advance.”

“Something like that.” Whiskers agreed…”Evolution has a definite direction and objective” he declared firmly. “I believe it is towards God himself.”

And later

“So what you are saying is that because this Alien comes from a far more technically advanced civilisation than ours, from a race that must have been evolving far longer than ours, they must be nearer and more like God than we are?” Lord Benson enquired.

So: we have a hypothesis. Because the Alien is technologically superior to humans, it must necessarily be morally superior to humans as well. 

And back on the surface of Planetty McPlanettface, we see the hypothesis being tested.

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by Hugh Walters

The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost definitely read if you were at school in the 1970s. 

This volume raises some weightier than usual questions, and I respectfully suggested the long-than-usual essay may be of interest to people who don't remember the Chris Godfrey series. 

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

VII: The Chief End of Man

I don’t think I got the joke when I first read First Contact? There was zero sex-education at primary school: I don’t think I even knew words like “anus” or “penis”. There were the words that were used at home and the words that were used in the playground. And if anyone had laughed I would have priggishly pretended not to understand, because science fiction was very serious and important and grown up.

It’s a very silly joke, because the correct pronunciation isn’t Your Anus; it’s Urine Us.