Are We the Only Children of God?

Project Hail Mary, extraterrestrial life, and a new way of thinking about our origin story.

What happens to our idea of God if we discover that we are not alone?

For centuries, our origin stories have placed humanity at the center. We were the chosen ones. The final form. The creature made in the image of the Creator. Even when modern science challenged the timeline, the deeper assumption remained:Earth was the stage, humanity was the drama, and the rest of the cosmos was scenery.

But what if that is too small?

What if the existence of extraterrestrial life does not diminish the Creator, but enlarges our understanding of creation?

That question came alive for me while thinking about Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir’s novel and now film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling, in which Ryland Grace encounters Rocky, an alien who is not portrayed as a monster, a symbol, or a lesser being, but as fully conscious, intelligent, loyal, inventive, courageous, and capable of friendship.

That is what makes Rocky so moving.

He is not human.

And yet he reveals qualities we recognize as deeply human.

He cares.

He risks.

He communicates.

He learns.

He sacrifices.

He loves, not sentimentally, but through action.

In other words, Project Hail Mary quietly offers one of the most beautiful theological possibilities in modern science fiction: that consciousness, goodness, and moral beauty are not limited to the human form.

And if that is true, then perhaps we have misunderstood what it means to be made in the image of God.

Maybe the image is not the body.

Maybe it is consciousness.

Maybe it is the capacity to know, to choose, to love, to suffer for another, to recognize the other as real.

This is the territory I am exploring in my new novel, The Lemurians: A New Testament for the Soul. At its heart is a different way of looking at our origin story—not as a rejection of creation, but as an expansion of it. The story asks whether consciousness came before form, and whether bodies are not the source of awareness but the vessels through which awareness becomes visible.

In that view, Earth is not necessarily the center of creation.

It is one expression of creation.

Humanity is not the only form through which divine awareness may appear.

We are one way the Creator learns to speak through matter.

This changes everything.

If consciousness comes first, then life throughout the universe would not be an accident competing with humanity’s sacredness. It would be evidence of a greater sacredness. Other beings would not threaten our relationship with God. They would reveal that God’s creative imagination is far more vast than we dared to imagine.

The Creator would not be tribal.

Not planetary.

Not confined to one species, one scripture, one biology, one atmosphere, one nervous system, or one face.

The Creator would be the source from which all conscious life emerges.

Different worlds.

Different bodies.

Different languages.

Different forms of intelligence.

But perhaps the same divine origin.

This does not make humanity less meaningful. It makes humanity less isolated.

We have often assumed that to be special means to be alone. But maybe that is a childish view of creation. A child thinks love is diminished when another child is loved. A more mature soul understands that love expands by being shared.

If there are other conscious beings in the cosmos, then the question is not, “Are we still important?”

The better question is, “How large is the family of God?”

This is where Lemuria enters—not as a lost continent, but as a symbol of an earlier condition of consciousness. In my new novel to be published this summer, Lemuria represents the first state of human awareness, a time before separation hardened, before the self experienced itself as cut off from the world, before knowledge became something we gathered from the outside rather than something we participated in from within.

Lemuria, in this sense, is memory.

Not historical memory in the ordinary sense.

Soul memory.

The memory that consciousness is not trapped inside the human body.

The memory that we are not separate fragments wandering a dead universe.

The memory that life is connected by something deeper than biology.

And perhaps extraterrestrial life, if it is truly conscious, would not be alien to that memory.

It would be another expression of it.

Another variation.

Another continuation.

This is why Project Hail Mary feels so important right now. Rocky does not merely prove that another species can be intelligent. He suggests that another species can participate in the same moral universe as we do. He may not share our body, our language, our planet, or our history—but he shares something deeper.

He shares being.

He shares presence.

He shares the mystery of consciousness.

That is the bridge.

Not biology.

Recognition.

When we recognize goodness in a form unlike our own, we are forced to ask whether the Creator’s image was ever limited to our shape in the first place.

Maybe God did not make one form and stop.

Maybe creation is not a single act completed in the past, but an ongoing expression of divine consciousness through countless forms.

A human hand.

An alien claw.

A whale’s song.

A child’s dream.

A tree turning light into life.

A mind awakening somewhere beneath another sun.

All of it may belong to the same vast sentence.

All of it may be creation still speaking.

And maybe that is the deeper origin story waiting to be told.

Not that we are less than we believed.

But that everything is more than we imagined.