Posted on 07/01/2011 6:19:36 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Veritas Riff is a group of friends who combine deep faith with world-class expertise in subjects ranging from politics, science, culture, business, medicine, and more. They offer their informal take on the big questions facing us all. I'm the host of the Veritas Riff, Curtis Chang.
For centuries, humans have asked whether life exists on other planets. In the last decade or so, astrophysicists have made actual progress in answering that question. As more exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—are discovered, the chances of locating extraterrestrial life rises. But how would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religion, and particularly Christianity?
Today we're talking to an expert uniquely suited to address this topic. Jennifer Wiseman is Chief of Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics at NASA. She's also the director of the Dialogue of Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
Jennifer, where are we headed with this current pace of discovery? Is science on track to discover the presence of extraterrestrial life any time soon?
My personal opinion is that if we get the support we need in the next twenty years to build more sophisticated telescopes, we'll find several planets that are earth-sized, perhaps in our neighborhood of stars, that support atmospheres similar to earth's atmosphere. I don't think that's enough time to do what we would like to do, which is actually to find incontrovertible biomarkers, as we call them. A biomarker is a chemical signature in a planet's atmosphere that is a telltale sign of life. I think there will be so much ambiguity at first that we won't be able to say such a thing.
Now, if you ask me about fifty years instead of twenty, then I would say at that point we should have a great inventory, including all the spectroscopic studies, of hundreds of neighboring stars, including a detailed study of their atmospheres, and we should be able to say whether or not there's at least simple life on those planets. And now I'm getting into my true speculation, but I really believe there's a chance we'll find a signature of simple, single-cellular-type life somewhere out there. If Earth is as abundantly full of life as we think it is, then I have to think that other planets could be the same.
Take off your NASA hat for a moment and speak to me as a scientist who happens to be a Christian. If we got the news flash that there is intelligent life out there, how do you imagine that would impact Christian thought?
I imagine two steps in the Christian response. The first has to do with the idea that creation is good. That's set forth clearly for both Jews and Christians in scripture. Creation is a good thing, and God has created abundant life. Now, "created" could include evolutionary processes, but the point is that since God is the author of all of it, whatever is there is good.
So, with that theology when we see the abundance of life flourishing on this planet, we could simply broaden our view of God to include life elsewhere. If God is the author of life on countless other worlds, it increases our sense of wonder and appreciation.
The second step is this. In Christian thought, humans have a problem in their personal relationships with God. We're separated from God by our own sin, we need restoration of that personal relationship, and that restoration has been provided by God becoming human. God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and walked the surface of the earth, guided us, and then died and rose again. That restored our relationship with God.
So if there are other intelligent civilizations out there, how has God interacted with them? Have they sinned? Have they needed redemption? Did Christ visit them in their forms? Or did his work here on Earth suffice for all life everywhere?
We get into a conundrum about the exact work of Jesus Christ on this planet and how it could pertain to life all over the cosmos. That's particularly important in Christianity, because it's really only humans in Christian theology who have this problem of sin. That's where we get into a really interesting theological case.
This is the sort of territory C.S. Lewis explored, of course, in Perelandra. What if we drill down beyond this abstract level of theological reflection to actual Christian communities? What is their range of reaction to news of extraterrestrial life?
I suspect the range of reaction, if we find simple life elsewhere, will be mostly positive. It's similar to when we found unusual life forms at the bottom of the ocean. It simply broadens our view of life and creation. If we find intelligent beings, that requires more thought. But if they're there, they're there, so it has to be incorporated into the theology.
I have some quotes from theologians and believers across the spectrum of Christian belief. Billy Graham said, "I firmly believe there are intelligent beings like us far away in space who worship God, but we have nothing to fear from them because, like us, they are God's creation." That would be one reaction. Another Christian leader in a ministry here in the United States felt that if we found extraterrestrial life it would actually make a mockery of our Christian faith, since the entire focus of creation, in his view, is mankind on this earth. In this person's view, finding life elsewhere would be a major shock to the way he had conceived God's work on earth.
So I'm not sure how people will react. Most, when asked, seem to think it would simply enrich their view of God, and they would be all the more awestruck. But for some, it would create this feeling of disorientation, like maybe what they've believed all along isn't right. It might strike a chord of fear and reexamination.
It seems to me that the fear and anxious reexamination might be concentrated in certain church traditions that elevate this personal God-and-me relationship over and above everything else in their teaching. Recently I drove by a church near my home, and the church had a sign: "God loves you as if you were the only one there is." What would happen if we discovered we aren't all there is? Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life threaten Christian notions of significance?
If we're looking at things from a Christian perspective, we have to examine where significance comes from scripturally. It never comes from a person's life span or location. Sometimes it's overt. The psalmist, for example, tells us that we're made of dust, and we're like grass that's here today and gone tomorrow. Yet we're constantly reminded of God's great love for us as individuals, so much that God even knows the number of hairs on our heads.
God's love is by choice, not by merit of place, time, or character. So I think we can expand that too. We already know that the universe is vaster than our wildest imagination. We have literally hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one with hundreds of billions of stars. We're looking at a universe that's been around for over 13 billion years and is still expanding. So the universe should already make us feel quite, quite small and insignificant in a spatial or temporal scale. But that does not at all translate to whether or not we're significant in the sight of God.
This should give Christians great comfort. Biblically, our significance is based on God's choice to love us.
Well, there is inforamtion in that Angels can mass and move, go into and out of our spacetime reference field, and even that they can dance on the head of a pin. Those traits seem to indicate they exist in some sort of time frame and occupy space of some kind.
I read that. I don’t get what you are concluding from that. To me it suggests that non-physical things can make changes in physical things.
When one says “be a real man” does that mean he should become more physical in order to be more real? Or does it mean live more by the truth or what is true? How physically tangible is the truth?
What an almost slightly cute dodge.
The “angels on the head of a beer, uh, pin” thing is about the difference between location and extension. A point does not occupy space.
I think certainly once you have creatures you have “before and after” so I think you have to have time. But I’m not sure you would have to have space. That is, of course angels appear and make stuff happen. But I’m not sure they HAVE to appear, that they essentially take up space. I’m not saying they don’t, I’d just like to see the explanation.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a dodge. It is hard to build a shared language when talking about the big stuff. “Real” and even “physical” are words to be used carefully.
There is only One uncaused cause. If an Angel effects something physical then the Angel has been a cause for the effect achieved. Thus the Angel is in some form of where/when (my designation for spacetime) if it causes an effect. Prove for me that a point occupies no space. Dimension space has three measureable expressions, linear, planar, and volume, but a point has no measureable expression. Does this mean it does not exist or that it occupies no space? Even Planck’s distance is a mathematical amount, and any linear expression of space is composed of points along the linear span. A photon crosses the universe of space remaining always in the present of when it was emitted. Does this mean it does not occupy temporal expression?
Normally, I’d be inclined to agree.
In this case,
No deal.
Nope.
I just finished my evening glass of wine, BTW. Hope your beer is pleasing.
How many heavens are there as described in the Christian’s Bible?
When the veil of reality was ripped back in front of the eyes of Isaiah the Prophet was he looking at an intangible heaven or a physical heaven filled with stars, galaxies, and the like?
There’s absolutely nothing in Scripture to indicate that Isaiah or anyone else was looking at an intangible Heaven.
How many rooms are in North America?
How many canyons are in Australia?
How many mountain peaks are in Asia?
How would you describe an elephant?
Sigh.
Jews received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Christians created a better, more improved version known as the New Testament. The Muzzies thought they had a better version with their Koran. Then the Mormons created their own even better book of Mormon.
What I’m trying to say is that human beings will disagree with a text like the Torah and create their own because they disagree with it. Then they say it superior to the book that preceded it.
Polygamy is in the Torah. If you look at Deuteronomy 17:17 it says...
“The king must not take many wives for himself, because they will turn his heart away from the LORD. And he must not accumulate large amounts of wealth in silver and gold for himself.”
The rabbis asked what is an excessive amount of wives. They determined the number was 18. How they came up with that determination I do not know.
Heaven is another world, place distinctly separate and non-physical place from this universe where everything is one where there is no separation, division, and only where eternal peace and forgiving love reign which radiates from God. There aren’t any brothels or bordellos there.
Guess they’ve never read CSLewis’ book Out of the Silent Planet...
1) The air above the ground where birds fly.
2) The region above the firmament, possibly in the vicinity of what we call the stratosphere.
3) The region of the stars or outer space.
4) The abode of God.
On the other hand, you got: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth . . . " (Philippians 2.10) It might not matter whether the species is homo sapiens as much as whether it is rational, capable of perceiving the Good and able to choose otherwise and has become (in, I believe, Walker Percy's phrase) discontinuous with the Divine, and therefore will, as much as (if not more than ) Man need redemption--all of physical creation will be in need of redemption, which is held to have been accomplished in the death and resurrection of Christ.
Just supposing, of course, and not attempting to establish an argument for extraterrestrial evangelization.
But maybe those supposed flying saucers are full of religious pilgrims, coming to see the planet where God was born, suffered, died and was resurrected as a finite being like themselves (and us), as told to them by their prophets.
I wrote this brilliant answer this morning, and then I hit the wrong key on my crackberry and it's gone forever!
Part of our problem is the absence of shared vocabulary and context.
I mentioned the prime mover as an example of something immaterial having material effects. If God can do it, he could enable the angels to do it.
In the modern geometry in learned in high school “point” was undefined. Euclid (Heath translation) says “A point is that which has no part.”
His second definition, which is charming, is, “A line is a breadthless length.”
Now I THINK both Euclid and say, Lobachevsky, thought they were writing about real things. But, of course, the term “real” is loaded, and doesn't necessarily mean “material” or even “empirically observable.”
I don't know how to “prove ...that a point occupies no space.” It's what we mean by point, I would have said. When you think of Latitude 0 deg 0 minutes 0 seconds and Longitude 0 deg 0 minutes 0 seconds, are you thinking of an area?
“...and any linear expression of space is composed of points along the linear span. “ At least back when the world was young there was an infinite multitude of points in any linear expression of space. If we sort of do lightning math history for dilettantes and we have the Cartesian line (1,0 - 2,0) Dedekind will assert (and appear to prove — to my satisfaction) that between any two given points there is another point. And if that is true then the operation of denominating that point can proceed without end. and if THAT’s right, then there is an infinite multitude of points in a linear span. Yes?
Mind you, In a Philosophical Theology for Amateurs 101 class I taught for a few weeks mumble mumble years ago, I drew a round thing on the blackboard and asked what it was. A kid said, “A circle.” I said, “No, it's a PICTURE of a circle.”
So that's how I think, Gawd ‘elp me.
In other words, as Quix knows (and places his face firmly in his palm in my direction when he remembers it), I think there are no examples of a triangle (or of triangularity) and at most only one enduring and perfect (so far) example of “human nature”. But Triangularity and Human Nature are “real”. Not only that, but they are, in a way, realities whose existence we deduce from observation. But what we observe approximates the “real” thing.
(Excuse me while I go remind myself what the heck Planck's constant is ....) Okay, the size of a “so much” (quantum) or the amount of energy or, wait, my head hurts.
Now, what I am doomed by my fate to wrestle with is, “is it meaningful that I can express Planck's Constant, slap parentheses around it, draw a line under it and a 2 under the line? I'll get a meaningful mathematical expression — meaningful in the sense that it doesn't violate the rules of mathematics or lead to an absurdity. Just 'cause I won't see something that size, doesn't mean (to me) that it's not a ‘real’ value. It's just not one I'm likely to run across a whole lot, if ever.
Mutatis mutandis for 1.616252(81)×10−35 metres. If I can say that, then I can say [1.616252(81)×10−35]/2 metres, and [1.616252(81)×10−35]/2 is a real number.
(Let's all pause and give thanks for Wikipedia.)
I guess to bring it all back home, IF one acknowledges the "reality" of, say, "circularity", then one acknowledges a kind of reality which is not "material", "natural", or "physical".
AND, stuff in the "material", "natural", or "physical" sort of reality seems "ordered to" this immaterial reality. Things are ALMOST circular or triangular. Deeds are more or less "just", objects are more or less "beautiful."
And once you've done that, the cat is out of the bag. We can have entities, beings, which are utterly immaterial and which still influence material stuff.
And so, as many angels as you please (and even more!) can dance on the rough surface of the salt-rimmed Margarita glass. And the ones who fall in will consider themselves especially blessed.
Recently I drove by a church near my home, and the church had a sign: "God loves you as if you were the only one there is." What would happen if we discovered we aren't all there is? Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life threaten Christian notions of significance?Those of us who read English see that the words "as if you were" indicate that the writer of the message does not believe what ever comes after those words. So when the interviewer goes on to say, What would happen if we discovered we aren't all there is? the thing he is quoting has already addressed that. So either the quote is irrelevant or he doesn't understand it.
I'm having a tough time following you because I see so many implications of some of your statements but I can't pick out which ones YOU mean to imply.
We Catholics don't think of the New Testament as an improvement over the Old Testament any more than we think the front wheel of a bicycle is an improvement over the rear wheel. (All responses suggesting the children of Israel went around on unicycles will be laughed at.)
It is a further revelation.
One of the things one has to wrestle with, I think, is the problem of talking about God. You can't say he's just without sooner or later having to say he's merciful. And then you have to come up with an explanation which allows mercy to be consistent with justice, when, certainly at first thought, mercy seems to contradict justice.
Certainly, for those who believe in a literal Eden, it's no great stretch to think that God "put on" human appearance, complete with the sound of footfalls, when he interacted with Adam and Eve. And, as certainly, he knows that roasting beef (or mutton) can smell good. The manner of his perception is not as important as the fact of it. But "smell" is the name we usually use for the perception of odor. So why not? Hebrew is not a philosophical language. No language is without work, which is why there are philosophical jargons.
When I used to play hide-and-seek with my daughter, I knew perfectly well where she was, as I also did on the rare occasions when she was in trouble. But even I, who am evil, know to give a miscreant child as many opportunities to do the right thing as possible. So I could see God knowing perfectly well where Adam and Eve were hiding and still asking them to reveal where they were.
I guess if I HAVE a point it's that these suggestions of the inadequacy of the Old Testament seem to me to be really more about the inadequacy of some ways of reading the Old Testament. So, and I don't mean to be offensive or that this was your intent, but to me they seem rather like straw men.
What I’m getting at is God gives man a divine love letter to mankind via the Jews. Then a little later non-Jews decide that there is additional revelation that supersedes the previous revelation. The New Testament supersedes the Torah, the Koran to the New Testament, and the Book of Mormon to the Koran. I have to wonder what will supersede the Book of Mormon. You’ve heard of replacement theology, correct? If God’s word is infallible and complete truth why should man try to re-make the wheel?
The rabbis say the Torah is the Word of God and the rest of the Tanach (the Bible - the historical Writings, words of the Prophets) is commentary on his Word.
Up until the time the Torah was given polytheism was all the rage and a god could be anything - even a man. Then the Torah was given and Jews said there was only one God and no others, was indivisible (a complete unity), invisible, seemed far away but closer than anyone you’ll ever know, and is non-corporeal with the only closest expression taking a spirit form, who resides in a world that is non-physical. Doing so p.o.ed the rest of the world. The concept was extremely radical just like the day of rest (the Sabbath) because everyone worked every day from sunup to sundown every day until they became an disabled or died.
Even Christians get it right with John 4:24 saying “God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth”. You don’t see in this statement anywhere defining him as a physical human being.
But with the Christians revelation of a New Testament it became necessary to cross the line that Jews have always defined God as being - a physical human being - in the form of a deified Jewish rabbi. Even today some of the followers of the late Rabbi Schneerson have tried to give him Divine status after he died caused much disagreement and in-fighting within the Chassidic (Lubavitch) community.
Do you think that if a human being overcomes death in the ascension process that this human being qualifies for the title of God? Even Adam and Eve had eternal, immortal life until they lost it because of the sin/mistake they made and one we live with today. Did that make them God, too? There can’t be more than one God because he has stated so and get’s a bit jealous if one attempts to go after other man-created gods.
What happens when man returns to a similar state as Adam and Eve? Do we all become gods?
Once Christianity opened the door for a Jewish rabbi to become God it doesn’t surprise me to see Mormonism telling their followers that any Mormon become a god of a planet in this universe if they follow certain rules and do certain things.
If life is found on other planets does this invalidate Christianity? What’s interesting about the article is when it says this.
“God’s love is by choice, not by merit of place, time, or character.”
God is beyond the physical in order to be able to love beyond the merit of place, time or character. God is the complete totality of truth. How physically tangible is the truth. It never has been. His eternal and forgiving love is complete and perfect. How physically tangible is love? His peace, too. How tangible is that, too?
Here’s an interesting video of where Eden might have been (the Persian Gulf). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxU47eGegEc&feature=related
Would classifying the Old Testament as inadequate that God is inadequate or that the explanations of it were inadequate? How can the Old Testament be “old” if God’s truth is eternal and never changes? Is there old truth and new truth?
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