Theological Implications of Extraterrestrial Life
The Church has been the world’s greatest patron of science throughout history
There is a long tradition among anti-Catholic bigots to portray the Catholic Church as being anti-science. Unfortunately, this thinking has seeped into the thinking of most people. Ironically, the biggest adherents of this way of thinking often seems to be misinformed cafeteria-Catholics.
Many people are under the misconception that Galileo was persecuted by the Church. They use Galileo as an example of how “backward” the Church is. What they believe is only an urban legend, before they were even called urban legends. In fact, the Church did not oppose Galileo’s theory. In fact, according to Wikipedia, Pope Urban VIII was one of Galileo’s strongest and most influential supporters. Pope Urban VIII merely requested Galileo to include the pope’s views in Galileo's book. Galileo, who was astonishingly ungrateful for the Pope’s support, chose to present the Pope’s views, but attributed them to a character he called Simplicio, which means simpleton. In the book Simplico was often caught in his own errors and came across as a fool. Of course, everyone knew that Simplico represented the Pope and it exposed the Pope to a great deal of ridicule and embarrassment. Perhaps the pope should have turned the other cheek, but before we judge him, we should ask ourselves how we would like it if we were called a simpleton on national television. It is true that Galileo fell into the Pope’s disfavor. However, it was not because of Galileo’s science but instead it was because Galileo seems to have been an arrogant ingrate.
It is unfortunate that anti-Catholicism has penetrated the pubic thinking – Particularly since the Church has contributed so much to science through the centuries.
In Thomas E. Woods excellent book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, he describes:
· How modern science was born in the Catholic Church;
· How the Catholic Church invented the university system; and
· How no institution has done more to shape Western civilization than the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church.
As an example of the contribution of Catholic clerics to science, Catholic Answers reports that thirty-five craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians. When in the nineteenth-century Charles Bossut assembled a list of the 300 most significant mathematicians from the period from 900 B.C. through 1800 A.D., 5 percent of them were Jesuits. Even though the Jesuits were around for only two of those centuries, this single order of Catholic priests supplied the world with one out of twenty of its greatest mathematicians in 2,700 years.
Although I will have some complaints in posts about Jesuit-run universities, the Jesuits do have a proud history. Catholic Answers also reports that the Jesuits
“contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics—all were typical Jesuit achievements... Seismology, the study of earthquakes, had been so dominated by the Society of Jesus that it became known as ‘the Jesuit science.’”
Fr. Nicholas Copernicus, a Polish priest and astronomer proposed the first mathematically based system of planets going around the sun. In 1533 Pope Clement VII approved the theory and encouraged Copernicus to publish it. Copernicus referred to God in his works, and did not see his system as being in conflict with Christianity.
Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian Augustinian monk who in the 1800’s became the father of modern genetic science.
According to Wikipedia, Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest, and a professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In 1935, after hearing a detailed description of the theory, Albert Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
Pope Pius XII embraced the new theory of the origin of the universe and perceived it as a scientific validation of the Catholic faith. After all, there must have been a Force that caused the big bang.
There is no conflict between science and religion. In fact, they work together. Pope John Paul II said, “Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”
In 2006, a study published in the Astrobiology journal discussed a meteorite that originated from Mar. The meteorite revealed a series of microscopic tunnels that are similar in size, shape and distribution to tracks left on Earth rocks by feeding bacteria. Although this is not conclusive proof, it does suggest the possibility of the existence of some form of life on planets other than Earth.
Based on observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, there are at least 125 billion galaxies in the Universe. It is estimated that at least ten percent of all suns have a system of planets, If only one out of a billion of these stars have planets supporting life, there would be some 6.25×10^9 (billion) life-supporting planetary systems in the Universe. In 1961, University of California, Santa Cruz astronomer and astrophysicist Dr. Frank Drake estimated that there are approximately 10,000 planets in the Milky Way galaxy containing intelligent life with the possible capability of communicating with Earth.
The Church is open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
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