Posted on 11/04/2011 7:57:09 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
Plenty of people throughout history have pondered the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists on a planet other than Earth, but how does that relate to Christian theology and teachings?
The idea that life could exist elsewhere and how it might relate to Christian and Catholic beliefs will be the topic of a free lecture Tuesday at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo. The Rev. Dr. Thomas O'Meara, retired University of Notre Dame theology professor and nationally renown author and speaker, will present his lecture, "Christian Theology and Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life," at 7 p.m. Members of the public are welcome.
O'Meara, a Dominican priest and professor emeritus of theology at Notre Dame University in Indiana, said the recent and frequent discovery of so many other planets outside our solar system has raised the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists elsewhere.
"We have entered a new world," he said, quoting the opening remarks for the lecture he will give during his first visit to Ventura County. He will discuss ongoing scientific attempts to examine the stars, planets and outer space, and to look for life on other planets.
"Since 1995, 645 planets have been discovered outside of our solar system: 50 in late September, of which 16 are like Earth. NASA has launched a telescope, Kepler, to study 155,000 suns to find what are now called 'exoplanets,' " he said. "The big new breakthrough is that the universe is so huge and it has so many galaxies with so many billions of stars that it seems kind of unlikely we are all alone. Believers by and large don't have any problem with this.
"Church authority has not made any decisions in this area. They couldn't say anything about this because the Christian revelation isn't about other galaxies; it's about Earth. Jesus and the Bible have to do with Earth.
"A theologian would not presume to decide whether there are other intelligent beings in the universe. Neither theologians nor astronomers should dictate to the divine power. You can't tell God what God can do. ... Other galaxies might produce stars and planets far in the future. God could be preparing intelligent civilizations long into the future," he said.
O'Meara taught at Notre Dame from 1980 to 2007. Recently, he has been a visiting professor at St. Joseph's Theological Institute in South Africa (2005), at the University of San Diego (2006 and 2008) and at Boston College (2007-2008). He has contributed numerous articles to popular journals and has written more than a dozen books, including "God in the World: A Guide to Karl Rahner's Theology" (2007), "A Theologian's Journey" (2002), "Theology of Ministry" (1999) and "Thomas Aquinas: Theologian" (1997). Early in 2012, Liturgical Press will publish his latest book, "Vast Universe. Extraterrestrials and Christian Revelation."
It had worried me for a long time. I could hear his voice,
... the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
I heard Carl Sagan repeating those words again recently when I looked along a surf beach on the Taranaki coast. Later that evening I looked up at the sky. We are fooled somewhat. Our eyes can only resolve about 5000 of the brightest stars, mostly close to our Sun, and typically within 1000 light years (1 light year is the distance light, travelling with a velocity of 300,000 kilometres per second, covers in 1 year).
Our Galaxy however, is probably greater than 100,000 light years in diameter. Hence we can resolve only a very small fraction of our Galaxy with our eyes. As well, whilst our view of the brightest stars is a magnificent panorama we do not get any sense of depth or relative distances of stars. For example, the two bright stars close together, alpha and beta Centauri, (commonly called The Pointers because they guide us to the nearby Southern Cross) are at very different distances. Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar (their common names) are 4.3 and 490 light years distant, respectively. Hardly neighbours! In contrast we now know there are Far more Galaxy's than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. Recently a probe sent in space in 2007, just passed Pluto, took one more picture deep into the cosmos with its infrared telescope, the results are in. In just that one picture, a computer counted 2,357,344,234,939,888,102,300,639 galaxy's besides our own Milky Way. If we multiply all the stars in just our universe times the number of universes in just one narrow picture from the probe, I would not have time in the rest of my life to write the number on paper. In 2079 the probe will finally pass Hadar, snap a picture beam it back, we will receive it in 2098. Traveling at 210 thousand miles per hour the probe passed by the sun using its whipping power to increase its speed from a mere 28,000 m.p.h., the ion engine then pushed the probe to around 721,000,000 miles per year. One thing we learned from the probe photo is even our most powerful orbiting telescopes with their super powerful range, only see about 1/10,000th of the distance of the pluto probe photo. I thought about this, accessed the super computer on campus, entered some equations and after 2 days the computer answered. If we counted all the grains of sand on the earth, the moon, all our planetary neighbors, and the sun, (based on their mass) we would only be about 1,000,000,989 to equaling just 1% of the galaxies found by the probe.
would = wouldn’t (I make my own point)
CC
CC
“God created the heavens AND the earth. If he chose to create others and keep it to himself, I’m not going to make any demands for answers.”
Yup. Just because the Bible is the Word of G_d doesn’t mean he’s told us everything he knows. I seem to recall reading about a guy who thought he was going to find out everything G_d knew, and it ended badly.
Other models of the Universe (essentially ignored because they contradict the ever-changing Revealed Truths of Modern Science) such as the Plasma or Electric model of the Universe, conceive of space and time in radically different ways. The reality is, aside from our grandiose theories imagined from the myopic perspective of a tiny speck of dust in the vast universe, we really know very little about the nature of Reality.
Fortunately God - and I for one find it impossible to imagine the Universe without the infinite love and goodness that characterizes God - has spoken, sometimes "through a glass darkly" but nevertheless we can know some things, even imperfectly.
My own view is that "eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the mind of men" what lies "out there." I believe that infinitely wondrous things await those who love Him.
Well, it is REMOTELY possible, if you know what I mean. Everything in that picture is a few billion years old.
He should ask himself the question:
Where was I before I was born?
IIRC, Carl Sagan was an atheist.
To possess all that vast cosmological knowledge and believe it all to be be nothing but random collisions of insensate molecules, including one’s own very existence,
Now THAT’S loneliness!
...they’re out there........waiting...waiting...
bump bkmrk for Sunday study...Thanks Alex.
But what if he's not Mormon?
He used to be an atheist, today he is a believer.
Scientology here they come
I don't see how this follows. The Bible says nothing about the Western Hemisphere, and yet we can't infer that intelligent life doesn't exist here.
There are even huge amounts of things that Jesus said and did, that are not mentioned in the Bible. So many things, St. John says, that if they were all written, the earth could not hold all the books.
Some Bible scholars interpret null and void, not as if there’s nothing there, but what the earth was originally before God worked on it, an ice ball or a planet like Venus.
It’s possible that Moses, in vision, was standing on the Earth when it looked more like Venus and wrote down what he saw as God did His work.
For example, when God cleared the clouds and let the sun and stars lights finally shine through, to Moses that may have looked like God created them right then, when it was simply that they were not visible on the Earth until then.
“He (Carl Sagan) used to be an atheist, now he is a believer.”
THEOLOGICAL MONEY QUOTE OF THE YEAR!
You, my FReeper, just took Richard Dawkins and knocked him for a row of ash cans, because the atheist cannot will the end of his own existence, as there is a Someone Who alone can decide the atheist’s fate.
Thank you, sir, thank you, tomorrow’s Sunday worship has been immeasurably brightened!
:^)
Then provides his own answer; it is unknowable, but please attend my conference anyway.
"It must be so" is not a very good scientific argument.
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