In his most bodacious interview book, GOD AND THE WORLD
It seems somehow obvious to suppose that we cannot be alone in this great immeasurable ocean of stars. We cannot absolutely exclude this hypothesis, because we have no cognizance of the whole breadth of God’s thought and his creative work. Yet it is a fact that thus far all attempts to discover anything of this kind have failed. Meanwhile, one strand of thought, scientifically well grounded, tends to regard extraterrestrial life as being extremely improbable. Jacques Monod, for instance, who was certainly not a Christian, says that in view of everything we are able to discover about the world from a biological standpoint, the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial beings is so small as to be verging on the impossible.
What we can say is simply: We do not know. But there are no serious grounds for thinking that similar beings exist elsewhere.
On the other hand, we do know in any case that God took man, on this little speck of dust that is earth, so seriously that he came and lived here himself and has bound himself to this earth for all eternity.
That corresponds to the model fo divine action that is known to us. God always takes up exactly what seems unimportant and shows himself to man in what seems like a speck of dust, or, as in Nazareth, in a little place that is next to nowhere. Thus God always corrects our standards of judgment. It shows that what is quantitatively immeasurable belongs to a quite different order of reality from the immeasurability of the heart, as Pascal has already remarked. What is quantitative has its own indisputable status, but it is also important to see this quantitative value, for instance the infinite size of the universe, in relative terms. One single understanding and loving heart has quite another immeasurable greatness. It corresponds to a quite different order from any quantitative entity, in all its great power, but it is no less great.
Would it be shown in revelation if we had relativfes somwhere in space?
Not necessarily, because God had no intention of recounting everything to us. Revelation was not there to give us a complete knowledge of God’s ideas and of all space, with no gaps in it. One of the Wisdom books, often quoted by the Fathers, says about this in one place: God has given us the world to argue about. Scientific knowledge is, so to speak, the adventure he has left to us ourselves. In revelation, on the other hand, he tells us only as much about himself as is needed for life and death.
In this article, Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., a Vatican astronomer makes the point that extraterrestrials would pose no problem for religion. The title of the article is “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” and can be found at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/35/story_3519_1.html
Too many books I need to read. I can’t keep up…and there’s only one lifetime.
I used to think that E.T. life was probably everywhere, but now I think that perhaps intelligent human-like life is very unlikely.
Billy,
“but now I think that perhaps intelligent human-like life is very unlikely.”
Not only that, but it would appear that the odds of finding intelligent human life on Earth itself is increasingly difficult in today’s day and age. I would suggest that rather than spending so much effort worrying about intelligent life outside of Earth we should focus more on creating more intelligent life here at home 🙂
>In this article, Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., a Vatican >astronomer make
Interesting article, though towards the end he started waxing Carl Sagan (“our cousins in the cosmos”).
If the Son of God became one of the other beings as well as being human, then our dogma that Jesus is True God and True Man is incomplete! He would also be True Klingon, True Romulan, etc. etc.
I don’t see problems about bacteria or plant or animal life out there, but intelligent beings? Impossible. Total conflict with the Catholic faith. If they do find aliens out there, it means the Catholic faith is false, and I will leave it…except there’s nothing else out there so I will probably stay anyway, but be really grumpy.
Of course there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the Universe. They’re angels, and some of them are fallen and want to kick our butts.
Whoops. I sent to early. I meant to add that I always thought it was a little goofy to think that any intelligent beings besides us somehow had to BE like us: carbon-based, oxygen-sucking, opposable digits…
I’ve never seen a problem with the various star trek type humanoid races being just a different sort of man-kind– I’m not Jewish, but that didn’t keep Jesus from show up for me, too.
(No, I’m not saying that Jews are a different species!)
Question: I kind of got lost with the second half of the answer in the original post…. did he say “we have no idea, and no really good way to even have a guess”?
The issue of plural universes has a long pedigree in Catholic theological speculation: bottom line is that it does not necessarily pose a scintilla of problem for our faith. HInt: the Hypostatic Union leaves a lot of room for a lot.
Actually, we’ve faced this problem. Once upon a time, Christopher Columbus sailed the Atlantic and found — well, they looked like people in many respects. Certainly more like people than like anything else on the planet.
But — did they really come from a common origin with the rest of us? The old recursive “born of a man and a woman”?
Which was why a Pope, confronted with two of them who convinced them that they had become Christians, issued a decree that someone who could become a Christian was human.