biancadarc.com Blog

Religion & Aliens

Like many, I was a little surprised by the Vatican’s chief astronomer saying that it’s possible that other intelligent life exists in the universe. Now, I’ve believed in that possibility ever since I first saw Carl Sagan on Cosmos when I was just a kid. Remember his talk about “billions and billions” of stars and planets, etc?

But as a columnist for the Financial Times put it:

…one has to admit that the first response to this notion was “Crikey! Does the Vatican have a chief astronomer?”

That was my response too, though being American, I never say “crikey.” I’ve been mulling this over in my mind, recalling a conversation I had with an Israeli Biblical scholar during grad school. He indicated that in early, non-Catholic/Christian versions of Genesis, other planets are mentioned. He said that the ancient texts talk about other planets God created before he created Earth. I was always intrigued by that quick conversation I had with this man so many years ago.

Now it seems, the Catholic church has similar ideas, though I guess they’re not going to revive earlier versions of the Bible anytime soon. ;-) Here’s what Reuters had to say about the initial news story, with quotes from the priest involved:

“In my opinion this possibility (of life on other planets) exists,” said Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, a 45-year-old Jesuit priest who is head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict.

“How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview in its Tuesday-Wednesday edition, explaining that the large number of galaxies with their own planets made this possible.

Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: “Certainly, in a universe this big you can’t exclude this hypothesis”.

In the interview headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother,” he said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God.

“Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can’t put limits on God’s creative freedom,” he said.

“Why can’t we speak of a ‘brother extraterrestrial’? It would still be part of creation,” he said.

Funes, who runs the observatory which is based south of Rome and in Arizona, held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the “lost sheep” of the universe.

“There could be (other beings) who remained in full friendship with their creator,” he said.

To quote a famous TV alien, this is simply “fascinating!”

Now, I write about aliens quite a bit, but mine are the fantasy hunks of my limited human imagination. I freely admit I write about these cool alien dudes because I don’t think men like them exist on Earth. LOL! Well, okay, maybe there are a few… but not many! So to justify the existence of so many “perfect” (or at least really compelling) men, I had to turn to the unknown of outer space. I just hope the real aliens will forgive me for taking such liberties if/when they ever show up!