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"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you start losing your common sense." - G.K. Chesterton
This is a trope with two opposing halves that explode on contact, much like matter and antimatter.
Trope Part the First : Anyone on television who is a person of faith is a person who will believe in anything. Unicorns. UFOs. Psychics. Snake handling. Bigfoot. Yes, all of them at once, with no exceptions. Even if they are contradictory. Thus: If Jesus, then Aliens. "Believers" are all gullible idiots who will accept pretty much anything as not just possible, but probable, or even likely.
Trope Part the Second : Anyone on television who is a skeptic, rationalist, atheist, "scientist" or other critical-thinking type believes in nothing. Thus the corollary: If Not Aliens, then Not Jesus. Alien abductions are bunk, and so are psychics, and therefore God does not exist. A declaration by a scientist that they do not believe in one thing, such as ghosts, automatically means they think that anything supernatural, including the spiritual and the religious, is total nonsense and anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot.
The rhetorical term for this kind of thinking is a "False Dichotomy": A person must be either a Believer or a Rationalist, but may not ever be both, nor fall somewhere between the extremes.
The existence of characters of this type is sometimes caused by a Writer On Board, but more often is the simple result of taking complex, complicated real people with diverse belief sets and trimming them down into stereotypes so they can be pitted against each other in a "Faith Versus Science Showdown." This usually just comes off as an insult to everyone involved. It ignores the fact that from a skeptical point of view, the existence of one supernatural thing provides no reason to believe in another unrelated supernatural thing, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that many religions frown heavily on belief in miracles that do not come from God.
Done with a small amount of finesse, this particular conflict can actually be entertaining: thus we have Agent Mulder and Agent Scully in their original forms, with the small but interesting subversion that the original Mulder would believe any fantastic explanation except a religious one, while the original Scully would be reluctant to believe any fantastic explanation unless it was religious in nature, in which case they would swap roles: she would become the Believer and he would become the Rationalist.
Related tropes include All Myths Are True, and Arbitrary Skepticism. If the Writer On Board is in the "Believers" camp, a Straw Vulcan is likely to appear; if in the "Rationalist" camp, expect at least one, and probably more, examples of Holier Than Thou.
Truth In Television: People who do believe in divine miracles and angels actually are more likely to believe in UF Os and psychic powers. Conversely, atheists are also likely to disbelieve in supernatural powers. Thus, in addition to belief deriving from specific belief systems, people do vary in their general level of skepticism as well. In general, it is best not to make assumptions about what other people find credible.
Not to be confused with No Such Thing As Space Jesus, which is the opposite. Sort of.
Examples:
- In NUMB3RS, this trope seems to crop up with distressing regularity. Every few episodes, Charlie is challenged to move beyond the empirical world to a matter of faith, only the matter of faith in question is something completely outside the normal debate of science vs. religion, and yet Larry's right there urging Charlie to consider that it might possibly be true. After all, even scientists don't pretend that they can know everything, right?
- Joan Of Arcadia: "Touch Move" as well as several other episodes.
- The movie version of Contact started out avoiding this trope by having Jodie Foster's character, Ellie Arroway, believe in aliens yet not Jesus, although the other characters tended to believe in either everything or nothing. After Ellie's trip through a stargate machine built from alien-transmitted instructions, however -- a trip which nobody believes actually happens ( after encountering an alien intelligence who appears as her dead father, she returns to Earth in the same instant she left with no recorded evidence of her trip at all) -- she finds herself in the same position she previously dismissed in other characters: furiously arguing for the truth of a cosmically important experience for which she can provide no hard evidence at all. While Ellie doesn't go so far as to literally believe "if Aliens, then Jesus", the message of the film -- that faith is better than skepticism -- is fairly heavy-handed.
- And what makes all of this deliciously ironic? The book the movie was based off was written by. . . Carl Sagan.
- Eureka, "God Is In The Details".
- Both Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel slightly subvert this trope in one Running Gag: the characters are aware of the existence and deal with all kinds of supernatural creatures on a weekly basis, but are quick to point out to any 'misguided' person that leprechauns don't exist.
- This trope was actually mentioned by a character in Baywatch as her personal beliefs. In her own words, "If there can be aliens, there can be elves." The supernatural, however, was not a part of the show.
- Averted by the characters of Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf. In true Chestertonian fashion, Rimmer scoffs at the notion of God but is frighteningly eager to declare any unexplained phenomena the work of aliens; Lister, on the other hand, is a pantheist but also considers human sapience to be alone in the universe (Lister is closer to correct; all the "alien" species they encounter evolved from Terran life forms.) On the other hand, Lister is also described as or implied to be an atheist a couple of times as well - so either he became a pantheist at some point or it's just another case of Red Dwarf's rampant retconning.
- To be entirely precise, Rimmer effectively substitutes belief in Sufficiently Advanced Aliens for a belief in God while Lister is more of an irreligious skeptic (either believing in no God or in the universe as a non-personal God). This doesn't really conform to this trope, either straight or as an aversion.
- The movie version of 1408 had a super-rationalist reporter who debunks tales of hauntings as the protagonist. He checks into a hotel room which, of course, actually is haunted. The movie indicates that the reporter is also an atheist. At the end of the movie, having found himself unable to explain away the haunted hotel room, he comes to the conclusion that there must be more "out there" than what he can see and touch, and has his doubts about the nonexistence of God and an afterlife severely shaken. This is supposed to provide him some comfort over the death of his daughter. In other words: "If ghosts, then Jesus." The Stephen King short story on which this was based did not have this subtext present; it was a straightforward "guy tries to survive a night in a room that's way more haunted than he ever guessed" story.
- The author Robin Ramsay actually puts forth the "If Jesus then Aliens" theory in his book about conspiracy theories
 .
- The short-lived sci-fi series Special Unit 2 centered on a secret police bureau devoted to tracking down "Links", evolutionary deviations that were responsible for the ideas of classical monsters. Throughout most of the series, there's a scientific explanation for most of the deviations. The episode "The Eve", however, quickly set about smashing this troper's suspension of disbelief to tiny little pieces. A Link so old and so powerful he's considered the Devil? Sure. He can raise people from the dead? Okay. There's a prophecy about him? Sure, I could buy precognition. He needs a magic ring to carry out his plans? Er, all right, I could buy that it's of special Applied Phlebotinum. He needs to pull off a magical ritual to gain the power? Oh, fuck that noise.
- The X-Files is a subversion: Mulder, who appears to be an atheist or agnostic, believes in aliens and most paranormal reports. Scully, who may or may not be faithful, but who wears a cross around her neck, initially denied the existence of most paranormal phenomena.
- This subversion was most apparent in any episode featuring religious supernatural phenomena. Mulder and Scully would actually switch roles, with Mulder being the skeptic and Scully trying hard to believe.
- In The Simpsons, Lisa's careful balance between sweet little girl and intellectual genius was broken severely by the episode where they found an angel's fossilized remains. Lisa is portrayed as a condescending and atheistically unbelieving skeptic, despite the fact that she was always portrayed as being somewhat religious before then (and after, to the point where when she lost her religion she was not satisfied until she found another).
- To her credit, we are talking about not believing in angel fossils here. And she was right, they weren't angel fossils at all.
- Additionally, this one cuts both ways. Everybody else was acting pretty stupid about the thing - wanting to kneel down to it and pray, having pointless arguments over what it was the angel of, wanting to use it for a good luck charm, etc.
- The graphic novel Creature Tech had an... interesting take on this. The protagonist, Dr. Ong, is an atheist and a brilliant scientist, working at a top-secret lab researching the weird and supernatural. Then, he runs across the actual Shroud of Turin at work (they know it's the real deal because the blood on it heals people and raises them from the dead). This makes Ong admit to his preacher father, "You were right, Jesus was the real deal"... but he doesn't give anything more than intellectual assent to Jesus. Dr. Ong remains this way, until a teleportation accident land him on another planet, at the foot of a cross where an Alien Jesus is being crucified. I kid you not: If Alien Jesus, then Jesus.
- Slight subversion on Star Trek Deep Space Nine - Major Kira is one of the most overtly religious characters on all of Star Trek, but also very cynical, some times even about the aliens/gods her people worship.
- Truth In Television: There exists (at least) one cult that believes God would come to Earth in a flying saucer.
Q. Is it possible that there are intelligent beings created by God on other planets of the universe?
A. Yes; it is possible that there are intelligent beings created by God on other planets of the universe, because God's power is unlimited.
- Real Life aversion: Ask your average person (at least in most Western nations) to read the humanity's origin story in Genesis (universe created in seven days, Garden of Eden, Tree of Knowledge). Then have them read Operating Thetan III, the Scientologist account of human origins (space tyrant Xenu, alien ghosts, brainwashing through movie theatres). They're probably going to find one far more believable than the other, though both have quite a few discrepancies with modern scientific evidence and Fridge Logic moments.
- Of course, one works way better as an allegory than the other (hint: the one that works doesn't have DC-8s in space).
- And one (the same one) doesn't read like bad science fiction. Of course, the other one probably sounded similar when it was written, but we've had 3500 years to lose any tropes it might have used.
- This trouper ends up following this trope himself to some extent. While I'm not ready to believe that that just because Jesus existed, so do goblins and aliens, but I do believe there is some room for possibility or that it's a misinterpretation of something else.
- This trope is used to explain why Stanley Uris, one of the main characters in Stephen King's IT can't fully accept the existance of the book's creature and eventually kills himself rather than return to face the monster. In one inner thought sequence he explains to the reader that the existance of the monster actually OFFENDS him, because the existance of ANY supernatural phenomena destroys his neat and tidy rationalist vision of the world. "Everything leads to everything..."
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