hooray for the Vatican!

It's OK to believe in aliens, according to the Holy See. Whew... I'm glad that's been sorted out.

You might think that aliens and religion don't mix, but in truth they mix all the time. Plenty of folks who claim to be religious also claim to have some interest in (or even experience with!) aliens. Let's focus on fundamentalist Christians for a moment. I think a major problem for scriptural literalists is the "only begotten Son" question. If there are many worlds with intelligent life, is there only one savior for all of them? If it's one savior per world, doesn't this contradict the "only begotten Son" notion, or the "no one comes before the Father but by me" notion? If there's only one savior-- Jesus-- is it incumbent on us to spread the gospel to other worlds? While I'm not particularly interested in this question as a serious topic for discussion, I'd be curious to know what scriptures, if any, have been interpreted by some Christians as references to alien life. At a guess: apocalyptic imagery and certain miracles (e.g., Christ's ascension).

A different article about the Vatican's claim offers this:

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

The interview, headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother," covered a variety of topics including the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science, and the theological implications of the existence of alien life.

Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made exploring the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.

The Bible "is not a science book," Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most "reasonable" explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

Referring to an extraterrestrial as one's "brother" might score rhetorical points, but the term "brother," while often used in a metaphorical manner, is fundamentally a statement about a biological relationship, one that entails masculinity and femininity. What if we find aliens that come in a variety of sexes-- say, five or six distinct genders? What if these aliens aren't born in a manner we understand? What sorts of terms would the aliens themselves use to describe their familial(?) relationships? Well, I suppose "the extraterrestrial is my xargh-ka'iii" is a phrase we could get used to.

As you can tell, I'm merely playing with this topic, but back when I was a little kid, I was truly bothered by it, especially by the "only begotten Son" problem. Nowadays, the thing I notice is that religious themes almost always find their way into science fiction, which has become one of the most popular carriers of the religious meme. The Matrix films, for example, are less cyberpunk than a religious "Where's Waldo?", with Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Gnostic, Platonic, and messianic themes haphazardly interwoven. The Battlestar Galactica series is driven in large measure by the religious tensions between human polytheism and Cylon monotheism; the 1970s series' original dramatic structure owes much to Mormon theology, strong echoes of which remain in the rebooted series. The Star Wars movies contain Manichaean ethical dualism, hints of philosophical Taoism, a good load of Buddhism, and some not-so-subtle references to Abrahamic religion. Science fiction is a major vehicle for religion.

Like all phenomena, religions change.* A modern religious worldview has to consider what we now know (and can guess) about the nature and sheer vastness of the cosmos. Many traditions are at least trying to rise to that challenge. In Christianity, for example, there are strains of ecotheology that take the primordial notion of stewardship and apply it to how we should treat the environment. The more we learn about the fundamental nature of matter, the more we hear from Buddhists and Taoists to the effect that science's findings are consistent with ancient intuitions about being as process and interconnection, not as an agglomeration of discrete monads. Reality is less particle, more flow, and there's vanishingly small room for old notions like "soul" and "self" (though process theology, a modern form of theism that borrows heavily from the thinking of process philosopher AN Whitehead, thinks it has a response to this).

I'm no longer all that interested in what the existence of aliens may imply, theologically speaking, but I was amused when I saw this article and thought I'd chew on it for a bit. If you find a link to the Vatican astronomer's interview (I checked the Osservatore Romano section of the Vatican website and found only a one-page PDF that did not contain the interview), please let me know.

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*This change isn't always for the better.


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