In his most bodacious interview book, GOD AND THE WORLD
, the pontiff formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger was asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. Here’s what he said:
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.
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