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11/11/2009
Does Jesus save aliens?
Four hundred years after Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his belief in the "plurality of worlds" (aliens), scientists and religious leaders gathered this week at a seemingly more open-minded Vatican for a conference on astrobiology (aliens).
The meeting focussed on current science, rather than the theological quandaries thrown up by the possibilty of other life forms beyond this planet. But that hasn't stopped debate spilling over outside the conference.
Yesterday I spoke to Paul Davies, a cosmologist from Arizona State University, just after he addressed the conference. In his view, the possibility of other civilisations - potentially more intelligent than our own - puts Christians “in a real bind”. Specifically, he says that nobody's satisfactorily addressed the question of whether aliens get saved. “The Catholic church offers a very species specific brand of salvation. Noone says that Jesus came to save the dolphins and certainly not little green men,” he said.
The possibility of extraterrestrial life does not pose the same problems for Eastern religions, which tend to be less Earth-centric, or Islam, which speaks explicitly of life beyond Earth, he said.
The Vatican does not have an official position on alien life forms, but a number of its scientists have spoken out on the issue. Father Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory told the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that the possibility of “brother extraterrestrials” was not incompatible with Catholic theology.
William Stroeger, an astrophysicist at the Vatican Observatory Research Group and a Jesuit priest, agreed: “There might be fundamentalists for whom the two things are incompatible but mainline congregations - Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists - would not have a problem with this,” he said.
Stroeger pointed out that the Catechism introduced after the second Vatican council states that there can be no conflict between science and religion. “If there’s a contradiction it means that we haven’t understood or interpreted one of them correctly,” he said.
This may be the case, but I agree with Davies that this isn't a trivial issue for theologists. Giggle factor aside, the question of whether Jesus would save aliens goes right to the heart of Christian beliefs. If you believe that "intelligent life" equals having a soul, then you have to ask where you'd draw the line. If scientists found dolphins on a distant planet, they would be mad with excitement at having found something so smart. But what would theologians make of them?
Stroeger conceded that the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe would pose a challenge, but said that it would not be insurmountable. “There are some difficult issues to resolve, such as whether Jesus as saviour is the one who saves everyone in the Universe or if there are other equivalent salvation events that take place elsewhere in the Universe,” he said.
I was left feeling slightly mind-boggled at how you would even begin to answer such a question.
Glyn Hughes'
THE BOOKS WHICH DEFINED THE WAY WE THINK NOW.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads.
"Like reading the bible without all the begats" - Jim Curtis
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For ten years, it has been your helpful suggestions which have made Squashed Philosophers so good. It's this popular in 2009: | The First Philosophers | "Philosophy begins with Thales" | The First Philosophers | |||
| CONFUCIUS | "The object of the superior man is truth" | The Analects (c450BC) | ||||
 | PLATO | "Until Philosophers are kings...cities will never have rest from their troubles". | The Republic (c355BC) The Symposium (c355BC) The Apology (c355BC) | |||
 | ARISTOTLE | "If it is in our power to act nobly, it is also in our power to do evil." | Nicomachean Ethics (c300BC) The Politics (c300BC) | |||
 | EPICURUS | "No pleasure is a bad thing in itself" | Sovran Maxims (c300BC) | |||
 | CICERO | "Virtue is the foundation of friendship" | On Friendship and Old Age (c50BC) | |||
 | Marcus AURELIUS | "...We live but for a moment" | Meditations (c180AD) | |||
 | St AUGUSTINE | "Too late have I come to love you, O beauty so ancient and so fresh" | Confessions (c390) | |||
 | Severinus BOETHIUS | "The good are always strong" | The Consolation of Philosophy (c520) | |||
 | Desiderius ERASMUS | "Fortune favours the fool." | In Praise of Folly (1515) | |||
 | Thomas MORE | "All princes have more delights in warlike matters... than in the good feats of peace" | Utopia (1515) | |||
 | Niccolò MACHIAVELLI | "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed" | The Prince (1520) | |||
 | Nicolaus COPERNICUS | "Therefore, the earth is not flat" | Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs (1543) | |||
 | Francis BACON | "if a man ... be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. | The Advancement of Learning (1605) | |||
 | René DESCARTES | "I think, therefore I am" | Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Discourse on Method (1637) | |||
 | Thomas HOBBES | "...the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" | Leviathan (1651) | |||
 | Blaise PASCAL | "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed." | Thoughts (1660) | |||
 | Baruch SPINOZA | "there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope" | Ethics (1677) | |||
 | Isaac NEWTON | "I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me." | Natural Mathematical Principles of Philosophy (1677) | |||
 | John LOCKE | "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts" | Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) | |||
 | Gottfried LEIBNIZ | "The soul is the mirror of the universe" | Monadology (1698) | |||
 | George BERKELEY | "Essence IS perception" | Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) | |||
 | David HUME | "It is never possible to deduce judgements of value from matters of fact" | Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1751) | |||
 | Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU | "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in irons" | The Social Contract (1762) | |||
 | Adam SMITH | "It is not from the benevolence of the.. baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." | The Wealth of Nations (1776) | |||
 | Immanuel KANT | "Reason is the pupil of itself alone. It is the oldest of the sciences" | Critiques of Pure & Practical Reason (1781) Metaphysics of Morals (1785) | |||
 | Jeremy BENTHAM | "Mankind is governed by pain and pleasure" | Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) | |||
 | Thomas PAINE | "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil" | The Rights of Man (1792) | |||
 | Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT | "I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves." | Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) | |||
 | Le Marquis De SADE | "Cruelty is a virtue, not a vice." | Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795) | |||
 | Auguste COMTE | "Society... cannot be regarded as composed of individuals.." | Positive Philosophy (1795) | |||
 | Carl Von CLAUSEWITZ | "War is the continuation of politics by other means" | On War (1830) | |||
 | Alexis de Tocqueville | "In America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself." | Democracy in America (1835) | |||
 | GWF HEGEL | "God is the absolute truth." | The Philosophy of Religion (1832) The Philosophy of History (1837) | |||
| Ralph Waldo EMERSON | "A man is a god in ruins." | Nature (1836) | ||||
 | Arthur SCHOPENHAUER | "We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without." | The World as Will and Idea (1844) | |||
 | MARX and ENGELS | "The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas." | The German Ideology (1846) The Communist Manifesto (1846) | |||
 | John Stuart MILL | "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." | On Liberty (1859) A System of Logic (1843) | |||
 | Henry D THOREAU | "It is never too late to give up our prejudices.." | Walden (1854) | |||
 | Charles DARWIN | "...endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." | On The Origin of Species (1859) | |||
 | Friedrich NIETZSCHE | "When you stare into an abyss ... the abyss also stares into you". | Beyond Good and Evil (1886) | |||
 | William JAMES | "If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience". | Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) | |||
 | Sigmund FREUD | "...we men... find reality generally quite unsatisfactory" | Psychoanalysis (1910) | |||
 | Albert EINSTEIN | "Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice)" | Relativity (1916) | |||
 | Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN | "The world is the totality of facts, not things." | Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) | |||
 | A.J. AYER | "...logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else." | Language, Truth + Logic (1936) | |||
 | Jean-Paul SARTRE | "Once freedom has exploded in the soul of man, the gods no longer have any power over him" | Existentialism is a Humanism (1945) | |||
 | Alan TURING | "Can machines think?" | Computing Machinery & Intelligence (1950) | |||
 | Sir Karl POPPER | "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification" | The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1957) | |||
 | Ayn RAND | "Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness." |
| © | Glyn Hughes is the author of this collected work of condensation and abridgement and asserts his right to be recognised as such in accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. The use of the word 'Squashed' as part of the title of works of condensation, abridgement, is a Trade Name. 'Squashed Philosophers' 'Squashed Divines' and 'Squashed Writers' are Trade Names. |
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