Posted on 11/05/2005 4:49:35 AM PST by Momaw Nadon
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 rarely even use the word “literature”, most people who do wouldn’t consider the stuff I dig up to snuff. I reckon you can read stuff either because a bunch of elbow patches say it’s good(doesn’t mean that it’s bad writing), or just to please yourself(doesn’t mean that it’s great writing). If at the end I have found it enjoyable then what more can I want?
Good luck with Book of the Long Sun, as well as the gardening! There’s passing mention of a garden in BotLS if I recall...
Freegards
I can’t stand supposed “modern literature”, or at least stories about mundane people being miserable in ordinary surroundings. I just read whatever trips my trigger, usually sci-fi or speculative fiction/fantasy.
"Modern literature" is, technically, whatever gets written in the modern world, which includes Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," accounted by British readers as "The Novel of the Century"--and rightly so, as I will explain at length and at the drop of a hat to anyone I can force to sit and listen to me--also, Gene Wolfe, Louis L'Amour, Isaac Asimov, C. S. Lewis, John Updike, Jack London, and even Garrison Keillor. What you are calling "Modern literature" (modern people who are miserable in their modern surroundings and reveling oh-so-miserably in their modernity--those who scoff and jeer and look askance at those bucolic dunces who haven't yet understood the hidden gnosis that drives them and enlightens them to Darkness--what we might call “the literature of misery“ or, for short, “mizlit“) is as surely a genre as any detective story, Harlequin romance, western, crime novel or bug-eyed science fiction adventure--that is, it is a distillation of human experiences, perceptions and interests into a particular little cocktail that floats the boat of the particular collective who embrace it--and it is nothing more. It is no more an indication of the true shape of reality or the true nature of modern life than a Zane Gray novel is: it is just the particular taste of a particular group of people who have decreed themselves the "taste-makers" of what we have decided to call "the modern world"--the academics, and the sorts of people who really believe that getting published in The New Yorker is the apotheosis of the writer and the validation of one's life as a human, making one one of the Chosen Jeerers.
I think it was JRR Tolkien (or maybe it was his pal, CS Lewis) who responded to the charges of writing “escapist literature” by saying that there is nothing at all wrong with dreaming of escape if one is in prison, which is an apt description of the experience of living in the modern world, or reading what is taken by some to be its representative literature. SF (the “S” can stand either for “Science” or “Speculative”) and fantasy writers are engineering a jailbreak: they want, not unnaturally, to get the hell out of here! And who (besides the mizlit crowd, who have pre-emptively decreed that there is nowhere else to escape to) would disagree? It is a world of Fact without Meaning, of Desire without Hope, of Life without Joy-- the sort of place whose denizens congratulate themselves on their wisdom of realizing that they are imprisoned without Hope--because, without Hope, there is no reason to make the effort to escape; the fundamentally-disillusioned cannot, after all, ever be disappointed, because there was never anything to hope for anyway.
The impulse towards fantasy and science fiction literature has, I believe, its grounding in what is inadequately called the “religious” impulse. It is the desire for the world as our more "ancient" (i.e., less delusional and more aware of the realities around them, and less sheltered by merely intellectual constructs that tend to disenchant reality so as to geld it and make it more malleable to our immediate plans for it) forbears experienced it: a world of awe and wonder and unimaginable danger, a world of infinite (or at least, really, really big) possibility, a world where Something or Someone far greater than oneself was waiting for you, a world full of freedoms and powers and astonishments undreamt of--in other words, we want miracles, which are not just wonders, but signs from the bigger world beyond--signposts, in fact, pointing THIS WAY OUT. Where SF too often fails (or rather, its practitioners fail) is that they wind up constructing immense Disneylands where everything is an E-ticket (and there is no Small World pavilion), and where you can have a great time while you're there--but it's really just this world rearranged, and with some new, cool gadgets that capture the attention--"and," as a friend of mine remarked, "eventually, you know, you have to go home."
The best SF (like the best movies, plays, concerts, art exhibits, or anything) goes home with you. It actually shifts your vision and your understanding, at least on an intuitive level if not a cognitive one. You see the world differently; sometimes you see beyond the world (and I don't mean just the planet)--maybe to possibilities that you don't believe are true, but which may be possible--and even entertaining the possibility can be vision-shifting, maybe even a little disturbing, but the disturbance usually helps you to clarify your own vision. It can provide you (at least imaginatively) with experiences it isn't possible for you to have. It broadens you in a way that a mizlit addict can't be broadened, because his literature is a celebration of right where he is, and is based on the firm belief that there's no need to go anywhere else because nowhere else is really any different--it's just more of the same, but a different color.
Way past time to shut up. Your serve.
That is just a great post, thank you for the effort. I’m going to put that in the whole mental cabinet and refer to it if this subject ever comes up! If I recall Gene Wolfe mentioned the “taste makers” as well. One of the things he pointed out was that the taste makers usually dug things like the Odyssey, but anything modern dasn’t contain fantastic elements lest it be considered garbage.
Anyhow I never come across folks who are jumping up and down to want to tell me all about this new novel concerning mundane folks self-loathing in their mundane world. I run across people exited about the fantastic new sci-fi/fantasy book they just discovered or rediscovered all the time. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but I reckon something more might be going on. I can live with either.
“Way past time to shut up. Your serve.”
I hope you like Pabst Blue Ribbon, selected as America’s Best in 1893.
Freegards
Not much effort involved, sir--I blather my opinions incessantly at the drop of the proverbial (or literal) hat!
One of the things he pointed out was that the taste makers usually dug things like the Odyssey, but anything modern dasn’t contain fantastic elements lest it be considered garbage.
.The Odyssey comes pre-approved, and is one of the world's certificate-bearing classics, so it's safe (in fact, obligatory) to praise it. It's the same for HG Wells and Jules Verne--they're school-approved must-read (literally: you must read them!) classics. As for the newer stuff, a lot of it hasn't been around long enough for enough of the Right People to consume them and excrete the orthodox opinion which will be assimilated unthinkingly by the goose-stepping grunts and promulgated as doctrine.
Anyhow I never come across folks who are jumping up and down to want to tell me all about this new novel concerning mundane folks self-loathing in their mundane world.
There is no joy in Mudville, which is where most of these self-orbiting scroonts stumble somnambulistically through what they like to imagine as their lives. There will be no joy in Mudville, if they have anything to do with it! I mentioned that, a couple or so years ago, British readers chose The Lord of the Rings as the novel of the twentieth century--encouraging to me, as if suggests that the British have not yet (and fatally) lost touch with Reality.
But the taste-makers and somber critics of Mudville would not have this! There wasn't much they could actually do about it, as the choice had been made, and stood--but they could lecture and complain about the choice. Apparently, the greatest weakness of the book was that so many people loved it! And in Mudville, the innate quality of a book is in inverse proportion to the number of people who like it--'cause, see, people (according to the Mudvillians) are mostly stupid cattle, and whatever lots of people like is automatically bad! They have not been given the gnosis--their tastes have not been made, but simply allowed to grow, as natural things will do until you take the hoe to 'em.
Other "more deserving" novels were suggested to the benighted British reading masses, and included the list of the usual suspects: James Joyce, Virginia Wolfe, Hemingway, et al., ad infinitum--anyone but the one they had chosen and loved. I suspect the taste-makers' reaction were based not so much on literary quality as on the same reason that the Chinese government has recently banned (yes, banned!) time-travel fiction on Chinese TV--because you shall not, even in your imagination, prefer a China different from or (how dare one even think it?) perhaps better than the one in which you are currently and gloriously living? There shall be no escape! There shall not be even the dreams of escape!
Well, like I said: blather on endlessly.
I hope you like Pabst Blue Ribbon, selected as America’s Best in 1893.
As a matter of fact, I am partial to Pabst Blue Ribbon, but haven't had a bottle in years! You've given me an idea . . .
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