"For the time being, there is no scientific evidence of life," the priest added in the interview published Monday.
"For the time being", sound like he's expecting scientific evidence of life.
"However, we are gathering observations that point to this possibility. The universe is so large that it would be folly to say that we are the exception. The debate is ongoing and complex."
What's to debate. The first and second sentences are logical hypotheses/probabilities.
"If I were to meet an intelligent being from other worlds who revealed to me a spiritual life and told me that his people have also been saved by God through sending his only Son, he would ask me how it is possible that his only ´Son´ was present in different places. Thoughts of this kind are a great challenge," the priest said.
Yes, that would create a considerable challenge.
"Jesus Christ is true God and true man. Can this true man also appear in another planet? I don't know; I don't know whether I should deny or affirm this."
How about a thousand planets with intelligent life. I mean, the probability of intelligent live being on just two planets is astronomically high. Heck with a hundred million galaxies containing a hundred million stars each I'd say that there's probably millions of planets bearing intelligent life. We just haven't figured out how to get access to the UWW Universal Wide Web.
"Anyway, science does not destroy the believer's faith, but stimulates it."
Stimulates implications.
"It is true that the cosmology of the big bang is certain today as a scientific model," he said. "But it tells us very little about creation, or rather nothing, because creation as understood in the Bible does not answer the question about the origin of the universe, but why there is something instead of nothing."
Catching on that something cannot come from nothing.
"This is a theological response to a question of faith," Father Coyne said. "Science, however, is concerned with discovering the origin of the matter we know. In other words, sacred Scripture and theology do not refer to the way God created the universe. The two questions are not in conflict and, when this happens, very serious misunderstanding can arise."
In other words, when science proves intelligent alien life exists and we either ask them how and who created the Universe, or we ask the Universe Wide Web, and we learn that it was intelligent life that created the Universe and that creating Universes is not unusual for intelligent life to do it doesn't create a conflict between science and theology. It just means that theology hadn't considered those aspect. Nor did it consider the aspect that intelligent civilizations on many other planets have lived for tens-of-millions of years longer than intelligent man has lived on Earth. Those civilizations would be so much more technologically advanced than Earth's civilization that it's logical to conclude that they out-competed war and those who start wars. Why? Because we look at our own civilization and witness that the people that create wars have more than enough weapons of mass killing, nuclear/chemical/biological weapons to annihilate man ten times over. Of course, the intelligent aliens would also have developed definitive biologic immortality. And that creates for Father Coyne, yet another great challenge.
I short, they are us and we are they but our civilization is still in its infancy -- they're our cousins.
He created a scientific commission responsible for studying the elements necessary for the reform of the liturgical calendar that took place in 1582.
That was forty years after Nicolaus Copernicus released his geocentric (Earth centered) busting paper, "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium)" that gave mankind the heliocentric (Sun centered) model of our solar system.
In other words, while much is unknown, nothing is unknowable to the conscious mind. By nature, the conscious mind requires no change or evolvement to understand anything in existence. On acquiring the correct knowledge, conscious beings today are capable of doing anything within the immutable laws of physics throughout the universe.