Posted on 01/18/2006 11:42:24 AM PST by Aquinasfan
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world.
But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation?
Curious Catholics need not be space buffs to want answers to these questions and others when they pick up a 48-page booklet by a Vatican astronomer.
Through the British-based Catholic Truth Society, U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno has penned his response to what he says are questions he gets from the public "all the time" when he gives talks on his work with the Vatican Observatory.
Titled "Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic Belief and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life," the pocket-sized booklet is the latest addition to the society's "Explanations Series," which explores Catholic teaching on current social and ethical issues.
Brother Consolmagno told Catholic News Service that the whole question of how Catholicism would hold up if some form of life were discovered on another planet has piqued people's curiosity "for centuries."
He said his aim with the booklet was to reassure Catholics "that you shouldn't be afraid of these questions" and that "no matter what we learn, it doesn't invalidate what we already know" and believe. In other words, scientific study and discovery and religion enrich one another, not cancel out each other.
If new forms of life were to be discovered or highly advanced beings from outer space were to touch down on planet Earth, it would not mean "everything we believe in is wrong," rather, "we're going to find out that everything is truer in ways we couldn't even yet have imagined," he said.
The Book of Genesis describes two stories of creation, and science, too, has more than one version of how the cosmos may have come into being.
"However you picture the universe being created, says Genesis, the essential point is that ultimately it was a deliberate, loving act of a God who exists outside of space and time," Brother Consolmagno said in his booklet.
"The Bible is divine science, a work about God. It does not intend to be physical science" and explain the making of planets and solar systems, the Jesuit astronomer wrote.
Pope John Paul II once told scientists, "Truth does not contradict truth," meaning scientific truths will never eradicate religious truths and vice versa.
"What Genesis says about creation is true. God did it; God willed it; and God loves it. When science fills in the details of how God did it, science helps get a flavor of how rich and beautiful and inventive God really is, more than even the writer of Genesis could ever have imagined," Brother Consolmagno wrote.
The limitless universe "might even include other planets with other beings created by that same loving God," he added. "The idea of there being other races and other intelligences is not contrary to traditional Christian thought.
"There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm or contradict the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe," he wrote.
Brother Consolmagno said that, like scientists, people of faith should not be afraid of saying "I just don't know."
Human understanding "is always incomplete. It is crazy to underestimate God's ability to create in depths of ways that we will never completely understand. It is equally dangerous to think that we understand God completely," he said in his booklet.
He told CNS that his booklet tries to show "the fun of thinking" about what it would mean if God had created more than life on Earth. Such speculation "is very worthwhile if it makes us reflect on things we do know and have taken for granted," he said.
He said asking such questions as "Would aliens have souls?" or "Does the salvation of Christ apply to them?" helps one "appreciate what it means for us to have a soul" and helps one better "recognize what the salvation of Christ means to us."
Brother Consolmagno said he tried to show in the booklet that "the church is not afraid of science" and that Catholics, too, should be unafraid and confident in confronting all types of speculation, no matter how "far out" and spacey it may be.
For science fiction fans, Trekkies, or telescope-toting space enthusiasts, the booklet's last chapter reveals where there are references to extraterrestrials in the Bible.
Brother Consolmagno said the Bible is also replete with references to or descriptions of "nonhuman intelligent beings" who worship God. For example, he said the Scriptures talk about angels, "sons of God" who took human wives, and "heavenly beings" that "shouted for joy" when God created the earth.
The booklet, however, offers no "hard and fast answers" to extraterrestrial life, since such speculation is "better served by science fiction or poetry than by definitions of science and theology," he wrote.
He said the booklet is meant "to put a smile on your face" and, perhaps, make people think twice about who could be peeking at Earth from alien telescopes far, far away.
I believe that there are insurmountable theological problems with intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe. It's true that there exists a category of intelligent creatures other than men. These beings are called angels. Angels and men are categorically different, and they can be differentiated by their mode of understanding (as well as the fact that angels are spiritual beings). The angelic mode of understanding is more perfect than that of man because their knowledge is immediate and perfect, whereas in man understanding proceeds arduously from sensation through abstraction and reasoning.
If other intelligent beings exist on other planets, they would have to be rational animals. But that is the very definition of man. Man is differentiated from all other animals by his intelligence. An intelligent or rational animal is a man.
So would it be possible for men to exist on other planets? That seems to be impossible for a different reason. The Church has rejected polygenism -the descent of the human race from many ancestors. This doctrine follows necessearliy from the doctrine of Original Sin. The Traditional belief of the Church is that mankind has descended from its original parents. For men to live now on other planets, they would have to have travelled to other planets from earth, which would have been impossible.
So I don't see how it is possible for intelligent extraterrestrial life to exist.
I think we answered the burning question of what would the Catholic church do...when the "new World" was discovered. Teeming with little brown Aztec people.
"Peoples of the new galaxy! Greetings from Rome! And begorrah, yer all Catholic now!"
I don't understand your logic. Man is a rational animal,
but that does not imply that only men are rational animals. Man is differentiated from all other terrestrial life by being rational, but that does not imply that there could not be other rational races in other parts of the universe. God is omnipotent, and so He could, if He wished, create other races of rational beings elsewhere in the universe. Those races would not be "men", as they would not be of the human race. They would not be of the same biological species. They would not have to be based on DNA, and even if they were, would presumably be so different genetically from us that they could not interbreed with us.
The doctrine of monogenism refers only to the origin of the human race. All members of the human race are descended from an original pair that Scripture calls Adam and Eve. All members of the human race have original sin. A rational alien race might or might not have original sin, depending on whether they underwent a "fall". If they did, they would presumably need to be redeemed by God. That redemption could proceed through an Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity by that Person "assuming" the nature of that alien race just as He assumed our nature. The divine nature undergoes no change in the Incarnation. It is not "mixed" with human nature. The divine Person has two natures. There is no logical reason that he could not assume as many natures as He wished.
The possibility of ET life cannot be dismissed with a mere syllogism.
You fall into two fallacies: circular reasoning, and reductionism: you assume your answer in your premises, you say that the only rational animal is man, when in fact, there might be other rational animals that are not man, yet, you arbitrarily restrict the definition to humans; which is what needs proof in the first place.
The question will be solved by hard data, not via syllogisms constructed with incomplete information.
-Theo
It would only strengthen my faith.
Catholic novelist Walker Percy took up this question in his excellent (and humorous) non-fiction work Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. I thought he did a better job of answering it than any other Catholic or Christian writer I've read (with the possible exception of Harold Myra's novel No Man In Eden.
In short, Percy's answer was "yes". He then followed it up by addressing the question "how would they act if they were un-fallen, and we attempted to make contact with them?"
Not in and of itself. But consider this. Jesus has forever taken on the accidental and glorified form of man. It's logically impossible for Him to take on another eternal accidental form. So it would be impossible for Him to redeem other rational creatures by His becoming one of them, and then offering His redemptive death to the Father.
Moreover, we know from Revelation that Jesus is eternally offering Himself to the Father. He does this in His eternal divine personhood and glorified accidental human form. There is no room for any other eternal redemptive act on behalf of other rational creatures.
I can think of another converging argument, and that is that there exists on earth no other rational animal aside from man, while there exist countless other species of animals. This would seem to make the existence of rational, non-human animals on other planets improbable.
Which IMO leaves us with only two choices, both of which concur with your statement:
1) If there are "space aliens" with souls, either they are somehow redeemed by the redemptive act that Jesus performed on *our* planet (not requiring Him to become incarnate again, in their form on their planet, or
2) They are an "un-fallen" race that do not require Jesus' redemption at all, having never fallen out of fellowship with God.
Reminds me of the cartoon of two astronauts landing on a distant planet, and one sees a serpent offering a naked lady an apple, and runs over waving his arms yelling "No, no, for God's sake, don't."
I know, it loses something in the translation.
1) If there are "space aliens" with souls, either they are somehow redeemed by the redemptive act that Jesus performed on *our* planet (not requiring Him to become incarnate again, in their form on their planet, or
This seems to me to be unjust, inasmuch as one rational animal (man) would have been redeemed by Christ taking on human form, while another (hypothetical) rational animal would have been redeemed by the same act, without Christ taking on their form. It seems to me that God would be favoring one rational animal over another, even though both rational animals would be the same, at least by virtue of their rationality. I don't know if this argument is insurmountable, but it seems to me to be problematic at the very least.
2) They are an "un-fallen" race that do not require Jesus' redemption at all, having never fallen out of fellowship with God.
The problem here is that if we came in contact with them, we would have to corrupt them, wouldn't we? After all, the human race fell within its first generation. And then the previous problem arises again.
How many space aliens can dance on the head of a pin?
That's an old anti-Scholastic canard. Anyway, it's an interesting and fun topic to speculate about.
C.S. Lewis is the only author I know who has tried to address this. He does so, somewhat, in two of his "Space Trilogy" books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. In them, not every rational species in the universe was created at the same time, any/all rational species created after the Incarnation are humanoid because of the Incarnation, and any redemption required by said later humanoids would point back to the Incarnation that occured on our planet (ie not requiring a "new" one on theirs).
The problem here is that if we came in contact with [an unfallen race], we would have to corrupt them, wouldn't we? After all, the human race fell within its first generation. And then the previous problem arises again.
Some of the authors I've mentioned differ on whether we would actively try (and whether said unfallen races have some form of protection/resistance to temptation, after having passed their own "Eden" test), but generally speaking I think the answer is "yes". Percy's Lost In The Cosmos, Myra's No Man In Eden, and Lewis' Perelandra all deal with this question in similar ways. Percy's and Myra's versions happen to deal with Earthlings making contact with mature unfallen races via space travel, whereas Lewis' version has two Earthlings transported into an otherworldly Eden situation, with one of them acting as the "snake".
Thanks for that. I'll have to check out Walker Percy's book, at least, if not the others. Peter Kreeft highly recommends "Lost in the Cosmos."
I think this explains it all. Caution, if you are easily offended by religious humor, don't click. OTOH I found it quite funny. BTW, don't go wandering around putfile without an escort...........http://media.putfile.com/exterminator
Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis
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