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Vatican Debates Possibility of Alien Life
Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church. For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church. Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God 'made man in his own image' and Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused; would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal? Just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible's teachings. 'Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God,' says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organizers of the conference. Others do not agree. 'If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations,' says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist. 'The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism.'"
some branches deal with things that may or may not exist. God may well be similar to quantum theory, with faith corresponding to observing
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Or maybe someone on this other planet 2,000 thousand years ago compiled a bunch of thousand-year-old stories and attributed the result to the creator of the Universe. Then over the next 500 years or so a group of people schemed to get to the top of their society by carefully editing the stories, leaving out whole books of it and only including what they could use. Then they controlled their world for the next 1,000 years or so by using careful doses of applying the resulting book and torturing and killing people who disagreed with them. Then some people finally started waking up and learning to think for themselves and maybe the original people who were oppressed by the holders of the book have now ascended to the top of the societal pyramid and are terrified of not having oppressors and tyrants telling them what to do, so they vote and influence policy to try and force everybody under the rule of that original book again, which in the meantime has lost all of its meaning and can be interpreted to mean anything at all. Just saying. This is just the kind of thing that could happen on an alien world in a bad Sci Fi plot, isn't it?
Um, just because it's magical doesn't mean you have to explain it with magic. If something has an unexplained behavior, the logical course of action is to influence it and make deductions based on the outcome. You use conscience as an example. Well there are degrees of awareness you know. There are the moments of torpor that leave you with little of it, and there are the adrenalin pumping moments that leave a heightened sense of existence. So already we know of a way to manipulate this magic, so I'm sure as technology improves we will understand it better.
A funny question posed in a philosophy debate is how do you know you experience conscience? What if you only had some mechanism that was inferior to conscience similar to the way some people can detect more variations in light qualia?
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Not that it stops people from believing it with extreme fervor. I view the most common problem with religion as the fact that there are so many of them. And all of them are held to be absolutely, 100% true and most often, entirely exclusionary. "My God exists, and is the only god. Any other gods are a blasphemy" and all that.
Why is it that, supposing that there is one true faith with a set of predetermined moral values that do not change, just hypothetically, this faith is not the clear winner? Does God, often depicted as being omnipotent and all knowing, merely have the worst PR department in history? He has the opportunity to rig the greatest advertising campaign in the history of the universe, and still there are hundreds of copycats, knock offs, and competitors that are doing just as well, if not better?
To me, a much easier explanation would be that people rarely question the beliefs imposed on them in their adolescence, which would also explain why, up until globalization, faith was almost always easily determined by location.
Let me ask you this. In the Old Testament, this God feller was pretty active: he created he world in six days, then stopped for a smoke break. He committed genocide against several populations, slaughtered all the people on the planet save one family, smashed cities, parted seas, turned women into condiments, etc. In the New Testament, Sky Daddy still made himself obvious. He raped young virgins, raised zombies, fed multitudes with a packet of crisps and a six-pack. But ever since his son said "Screw you guys; I'm going home," no more miracles, really-- nothing more convincing than Jesus tortillas, anyway.
Why? I don't recall any mention of this in the Bible. He never said, "oh hey, by the way, I'm going to be out golfing for the next couple thousand years. Try not to slaughter yourselves."
What science has that religion does not is falsifiability, and a vastly greater degree of self-consistency.
"All these years later, we know so much about science and technology, but nothing about that feeling of being alive. It's there, and unexplained in any way so far. Without it, our lives would be simply meaningless computation. There's still some magic in the universe we need to explain."
Unless the emotions you feel don't have any significance. Then we could write off the feeling of being alive as an instinctive response, without any bearing on the nature of the universe.
There are two possibilities: That your emotions are a reflection of some deeper spiritual meaning, or that they're simply instinctive responses that have evolved to help keep humans alive. Now, answer me truthfully: if your emotions had no spiritual connection, would you be able to tell?