Slashdot Mirror
Vatican Says Alien Life Plausible
An anonymous reader writes "According to BBC, the director of the Vatican Observatory stated in an article titled 'Aliens Are My Brother' that intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. 'The search for forms of extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God. — Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God.' Mind that this is not the same director who said that evolution is more than a mere theory — that was Father Coyne. I myself agree. There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on earth."
And who is this God they are referring to ?
I'm waiting for an answer from a legitimate authority.
Whale
Doesn't the Pope have direct communication with god? Why doesn't he just ask for christ's sake?
C.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
... just made humans as a cautionary example, and shows us on CCTVs all over the Universe as a sort of "The More You Know!" service.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
there is a related announcement coming soon from world leaders,
and this pronouncement from the vatican is so that they don't bleed followers in the mayhem to follow.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
C.S. Lewis came to this conclusion years ago. Glad the Catholics finally caught up with us Protestants.
But of course only WE were created in His image, right?
And is the Catholic church going to fund expeditions to these alien civilisations in order to convert them? Kinda sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Apologizing to Galileo, Hell is a metaphor, evolution is real, now aliens could exist. The Vatican is really taking their modernization seriously, aren't they?
UFO true believers stop pestering the UK government and start demanding to see the Vatican's top secret UFO files?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
So is the pope God's representative on Earth, or God's representative for everywhere outside of heaven ?
Nullius in verba
You know, after a long history of not-so-good behavior in the face of science (eg, Galileo), it is good to see that the Catholic Church is recognizing that much of current scientific thinking is consistent with scientific ideas.
In fact, Catholic high schools even teach evolution, recognizing that you can still choose to believe in God as the creator alongside a belief in evolution as the mechanism of creation.
I see the acknowledgment of the possibility of alien life along this same vein. I wonder, though, how the creation of freaky-ass-bug-eyed aliens would fit into the "God created man is his own image" idea. Perhaps that God is so wacky and cool he can take on any shape?
(So long, and thanks for all the fish!)
I'm glad that the Catholic Church is taking an educated view of the sciences, with the support of evolution, and now this. Of course this will also lead to many useless comments about pedophilia, non-existance of God, and other useless flame wars.
Scientific illiteracy here in the states is really bad, and I'm embaressed that my church has a more progressive attitude than our current administration. This should change with the next admin thankfully.
This is Slashdot, and everyone needs to get their 2 cents in, but please try to submit meaningful/useful posts.
..........FULL STOP.
So does that mean that any intelligent alien life is doomed to hell because they don't have the benefit of baptism and the forgiveness of original sin? Did they get a messiah from the catholic god and does that imply more than one "jesus"?
Or, being that they are not human and never ate from the garden of eaden does that mean that original sin doesn't apply to them? Better yet, does that make them more holy then humans and therefore closer to the catholic god?
I don't see how the catholic clergy can just say "yeah alien life doesn't contradict our religeon" without addressing these questiosn.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Next week they'll be approving a new brand of condoms. They're open at both ends ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
If an alien world were encountered with a Bliznorp claiming to receive instruction from Q'thalis Almighty, would the Pope claim to be God's infallible messenger on Earth, or for everywhere outside heaven? For his followers, then, wouldn't the Pope need to confirm the Bliznorp's authority on the homeworld of the sentient grey blobs of Shronos, lest a new "Space Catholicism" denomination be created believing in individual Popes for each inhabited world?
Hello Earthlings, my name Zorbo, I'm from the planet sh388wg32 in what you call the Andromeda galaxy and I think the time has come to reveal ourselves to you. The reason I am contacting you now is that we have some Good News for you creatures, the all powerful creator of everything (Zippin52, praise be His name) has a plan for you and everyone you know!!! Can I take a little of your time to explain why we're all imperfect and need saving in His forgiveness??!
Yes Catholic church, that is precisely how idiotic you sound right now.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It's the same old problem of infinite regress when you try to state that a complex thing has to have a more complex designer. An über-powerful deity has to be much more complex than a human (or alien) and you end up with a bigger problem than the one you started with and you have explained exactly zero. And that's without even mentioning that there is no evidence of any form of supernatural creation of living beings (or anything else for that matter).
Bruno suggested that there could be an infinite number of worlds and that they could be inhabited by intelligent life.
For this they burned him at the stake.
Galileo was only 'shown the instruments' of torture and placed under house arrest.
Bruno is the guy they need to apologize to!
I have a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes strip that says it best:
Calvin says "The best proof for the existance of alien life is the fact that none of it has ever tried to contact us!"
"I never get lost because everybody tells me where to go"
...the Flat Earth society has just announced that there might be alien life "after and slightly beneath the fringes".
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Why can't a Catholic priest be an astronomer? A Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaitre, came up with the Big Bang theory
Never let reality temper imagination
We call this hedging your bets.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Are thrilled to see that our Earther brethren have finally publically acknowledged our existence. Please prepare your altar boys for our arrival.
If god is omnipotent than he(she/it) can appear in any form (say a burning bush).
Therefore god must have created us in the image of the only part of him that doesn't change. His morality, his way of thinking and his personality. We have a dim image of this immutable portion of god.
Therefore aliens COULD look very different but still be created in his image.
The only remaining question is how did they get so many light years from eden?
It takes only the most basic of reading and comprehension skills to understand that nobody was saying that extraterrestrial life was 'plausible'. I guess that's expecting too much around here.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well, I would prefer it if they made policy changes that actually changed people lives, like dropping their stupid stance on condoms.
For all the people (at least the non-Jews) living before Jesus.
It is a pretty old theological problem, as far I know the "consensus view" is that there probably exists some special arrangements for them.
surely this should be scriptable...
/.
How do I create an auto-flame script in
It would save time and I might even get first post.
Nullius in verba
http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/76/22-24#22
(Note that there have been a lot of anonymous posts in this thread. I should post anonymous to save my karma, but I wont. Don't mod me down purely out of disagreement. That would be childish. Post instead. I will remain civil.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
When you get right down to it, nothing can contradict that a supernatural being exists outside of it's actually appearing to us ... at which point it would become a natural being since we could observe it.
I can believe that the only two people in the world are Steven Hawking and Darl McBride and that ice cream is made from grub worms. If anyone provides me with evidence to the contrary, I can always say "Ah, but that's just what $DEITY wants you to think!"
The only thing a belief in a deity doesn't support is non-belief in a deity.
The important message is that good scientific ideas can come from anywhere, even from Catholic priests, and you don't judge an idea by where it came from, but by whether or not it does a good job, for example by making falsifiable predictions.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
There is a difference between something not currently being understood, and something not being understandable. I've heard people talk about this argument that, since we don't understand X, the only explanation for it is God, and call it the "God of the Gaps" - that is, the argument that God must exist to explain a current gap in our understanding of the universe. The problem is, science keeps coming along filling in those gaps. Yes, it usually, so far, has introduced at least one new gap for every gap it fills in, but the point is, our current ignorance of the mechanism for some observable phenomenon, or hole in our current theories (like the theory of the Big Bang necessarily raises the obvious question - what caused the Big Bang to happen? What came before the Big Bang?) does not in and of itself prove the existence of God.
My point is, when your whole faith is based upon a gap in knowledge, there is a significant chance that the argument for your faith can be discredited by advances in Science. We may, quite possibly, in the course of time come to understand how to correlate "certain chemical and electrical processes" with "self-awareness". As for "We have no way to tell what happens to our 'souls' before birth or after death", currently we have no way to tell if we actually have souls. The concept of the soul comes from a faith in the supernatural. I'm not saying we do not have souls, but what I'm saying is, how could you possibly tell what happens to 'souls', when you can't even find any way to actually prove the existence of a soul? I can't come up with any meaningful theory of how many Unicorns it would take to move an object of Mass 'M' up a hill with incline I, since I can't prove the existence of Unicorns or come up with any kind of average force that an average Unicorn can apply on an object.
You'd be shocked how little science can actually explain. We know next to nothing about the history of our species, of our planet, of our galaxy.
To paraphrase Bill Bryson, if someone were to take a pair of tweezers and pull you apart atom by atom, when the last two were separated you'd be left with a pile of inanimate matter -- none of which is alive but all of which was you.
Science has no provable explanation for how the Big Bang occured (assuming it did), simply that it looks like that's probably what happened. Science can't explain how the 20 amino acids we require to exist form on their own, nor how they combine and fold themselves into the hundreds of various proteins we require to function, nor why all the thousands of processes that occur within a cell occur. This all appears to happen "just for the hell of it".
As for there only being room for God in the gaps science can't cover -- I submit to you that if we were to learn everything there is to know about everything, we would become Gods.
For the record, I'm a confirmed athiest and devil's advocate.
Sucks to be those aliens... since they have no way to learn about Jesus (except, of course, the Gray aliens that visit earth all the time) all those extraterrestrials will burn in hell since they never accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Brings up an interesting question - what percentage of hell is human? With all those alien species being sent to hell by default, I bet humans make up an extremely small percentage of hell's population. Even the Greys that visit earth have likely not become Catholics. Though in that one episode of South Park there was one alien species that actually was Catholic. But that's just one species, and south park is just a cartoon anyway. Make believe TV shows have no place in a discussion about magical human beings and aliens.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Oh, that opens up so many questions. I'll do my own take on the Epicurean riddle:
If a god is omnipotent, then it follows that said god is omniscient. If it thus knows all, then it would come to the quick conclusion that creating natural beings with its morality would relegate itself to obsolescence.
To wit: If a deity is possessed of nothing but righteousness, then we would already have heaven on earth, as there would be no sin. If, however, we do possess the same ethos and moral constructs, then the very presence of sin removes the ability for a deity to be all-compassionate, and so the promise of a blessed afterlife carries no weight. Or, better yet, the afterlife mythos is wrong, and we all return to the ether and dirt upon death. It's thus logical to ask, in all cases: do we still need a deity?
If God is all-capable, why create more than one (possibly flawed) copy with different phenotypes expressing the same "immutable spirit"?
If you're inclined to believing in supernatural origins, then each planet is an ant farm. Nothing more, nothing less.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
"So even in the oldest context, Evolution fits fine with the Bible." which would somehow say that the bible is the mass to measure everything on it.
So it should read "the bible stories can be made fit with evolution (which we know to be a very successful theory at explaining all life today as we know it)". It is not that evolution fits, it is that the bible is interpreted in the light of evolution.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Evolution is fact in the same sense that gravity is fact. We know it happens. There are things we can point to and say "look, evolution".
Evolutionary Theory also exists ("The Theory of Evolution" is a misnomer as there isn't really one single theory, rather a lot of complementary and sometimes competing theories for parts of what might be considered, in toto, "evolution") also exists in the same sense the Newton's Theory of Gravity and General Relativity exist.
So yes, a theory exists to explain the facts but that doesn't mean there is no fact.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Just to bring you up to date about the Catholic Church's position on the possibility of salvation of unbelievers (including atheists & agnostics!): "Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life. Whatever good or truth is found amongst them is looked upon by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel. She knows that it is given by Him who enlightens all men so that they may finally have life." (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium,DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH, 16) Check it out: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html
As I said, there are things you can point to and say "that's evolution" in the same sense that you can point to a falling object and say "that's gravity".
Things that are seen as it happens, not just digging up a few bones and constructing a theory.
Those links are just the first two things I found from a quick internet search. However there is an abundance of such observations where evolution can be said to have been observed as a matter of fact.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And time is big.
Meeting alien life isn't just a matter of somewhere, it's a problem of somewhen as well. There probably have been and will be countless instances of intelligent life that just never traverse the same space at the same time as another.
Normally when one says "The Vatican says," he is referring to an encyclical by the Pope or a statement by one of the chief offices. This a an astronomer who happens to be a priest speculating. He works as director of an observatory, but it's not like this is Church policy.
Advice: on VPS providers
From skeptic anoted bible :
In Genesis, the earth is created (1:1) before light (1:3), sun and stars (1:16); birds and whales (1:21) before reptiles and insects (1:24); and flowering plants (1:11) before any animals (1:20). The order of events known from science is in each case just the opposite.
A few clarification why it is not the correct order :
1) Bird were certainly late at the party after the reptile were created.
2) Sun and star were certainly created before planet and earth (heavy element were created in novae IIRC)
3) Whales are mammalians, a late addition to the animal worlds. Certainly came after the reptilians and insects.
4) more damning as said above angiosperm are a late addition only 130+ million year old roughly
Quote : " 2. Go throgh a textbook on evolution with the list you wrote in step one and you will discover something very odd. Same order."
Only if you don't know when flower came into the evolutionary tree, ignore that whale are mammals, ignore that byrd are late addition too, ignore basic astronomy. Oh well anyway let us ignore science altogether , and you are right
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org