Published April 9, 2025
I’m a 4 a.m. guy. I rise early to think and work in the silence. But every once in a while, the outside world intrudes. I’ll turn off the lights and listen in the dark to a symphony beyond my window: the long sigh of falling rain; the percussion of faraway thunder. It’s the music of nature, alive and fertile. It’s suffused with beauty. And we humans were made to be part of that beauty, with a dignity unlike any other creature. We have the ability to dream and build, and the genius to make things happen. J.R.R. Tolkien described our species as “sub-creators.” In effect, we’re junior partners with the Creator himself. We have a unique role in making all things new. For better or worse.
I was reminded of this recently while reading yet another lurid tale about Elon Musk. Musk is now something of a hate magnet. He’s routinely cast as the dangerous, unelected Tech Bro of Washington’s Boogeyman-in-Chief. A late March Wall Street Journal report highlighted the DOGE master’s role in disrupting NASA’s plans for a return to the moon. According to the Journal, Musk has pressed the agency to pursue a manned mission to Mars instead. This would arguably benefit his own company, SpaceX, in a perceived conflict of interest. And it would fit very comfortably with Musk’s lifelong personal goal of colonizing Mars. “Occupy Mars” is the slogan on his favorite tee shirt.
So how does this connect with anything Christian?
I’ll explain. Musk is a conundrum; a cocktail of the brilliant, the awkward, and the naive. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum. This accounts for some of his more curious behaviors and views. His intimate personal relationships are, to put it kindly, eccentric. But as a visionary with a genius for making his dreams real and useful, he has very few peers. Both he and his fixation on Mars embody something hardwired into the human condition. They’re an expression of man’s chronic appetite for exploring and understanding things unknown. In Musk’s case, that appetite has billions in cash and immense skill to feed it. And, on the balance, I’m glad. Here’s why.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s on a steady (if sometimes cheesy) diet of science fiction books and movies: novels like The War of the Worlds and The Martian Chronicles; films like Invaders from Mars, Devil Girl from Mars, and Mars Needs Women. Mars is the red planet, earth’s failed twin. It’s a tractor beam for the imagination; a stubborn itch on man’s curiosity precisely because it’s so mysterious, so seductive, and just out of reach.
C.S. Lewis argued that all great science fiction has an undercurrent of theology, a disguised religious quest for human meaning and our place in the void. Musk describes himself as a “cultural Christian.” Whatever that means, and however scant the evidence, it suggests something more human in the man than the standard materialist desert at the heart of so many of today’s techno-scientific luminaries.
Here’s the point: Elon Musk, and the gifted men and women like him, personify our species: both its strengths and its brokenness. We may one day go to Mars. We might someday colonize whole planets. But we won’t escape ourselves, because we can’t. Ever since Eden, we drag our sins and delusions along with us.
Our tools – our technology and science – can ease our burdens or destroy us, but they can never redeem us. They can never make us whole or more than what we are. And every attempt to use them for that purpose, every attempt to make ourselves into little gods, backfires in a revenge of unintended consequences because we’re not gods, we’ll never be gods, and we were made for something more than this life.
In Ray Bradbury’s memorable novel, The Martian Chronicles, men do go to the red planet. They find an ancient civilization with a refined and elegant people. But as one of the explorers warns, “No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never [really] touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, we’ll rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
He adds that:
We [humans] have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. . . .We made a mistake when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix. Or at least we didn’t think they did . . . .So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. . . .We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for . . . .We were and still are a lost people.
Exactly as predicted, a mild human virus – chicken pox – exterminates the native population. And human colonists pour in hoping for a new life. . .but dragging along their old life: their shops, hot-dog stands, jealousies, resentments, and conflicts. They can’t escape themselves. They can’t redeem themselves. Our sins and imperfections follow us.
Toward the end of World War I, Sara Teasdale wrote one of the great, if disillusioned, poems of the last century: “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It speaks of man’s insignificance and nature’s indifference to human suffering and disaster. But she was wrong. I feel it. I know it, because this morning, in the dark, in these last few days before Holy Week, a soft rain beat against my window and the heart turned instinctively to Psalm 63:
O God, you are my God, I seek you
my soul thirsts for you
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where no water is.
There will come soft rains, yes. It’s the music of nature, alive and fertile. It’s suffused with beauty. We humans were made to be part of that beauty. And today the news is good: Redemption is at hand.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
