Catholic
New World - Newspaper for the Archdiocese of Chicago
Archdiocese of Chicago Directory
Periódico official en Español de la Arquidiócesis de Chicago
Oficjalne wydawnictwo Archidiecezji Chicago w języku polskim
October 26, 2008
Extraterrestrial life would not harm faith, speaker says
Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, speakers at an Oct. 11 symposium at the Adler Planetarium told participants.
“Do you believe in the Big Bang or divine creation? Do you believe in evolution or divine creation?” asked Jesuit Father William Stoeger, an astrophysicist at the Vatican Observatory. “It should be an ‘and’ in those sentences, and, of course, the answer to both those questions is ‘yes.’
“Creation is not an event, something that happened way back when. That’s not a Catholic or even a Christian philosophical conception of creation. The picture is that creation is active all the time. Creation is not an event. It’s a relationship.”
Stoeger offered the first presentation in the symposium, which was sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Lumen Christi Institute. The Lumen Christi Institute was founded by Catholic scholars at the University of Chicago to nurture intellectual work done in relation to the Catholic tradition.
Other presentations included considerations on whether Thomas Aquinas was a scientist, in the modern sense of the word; the challenge of biophysics in the interface between science and theology; how religion can and should be handled in science classrooms; whether God is a scientist in light of evolution; and what the religious implications are in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Jesuit Father Chris Corbally, the assistant to the director of the Vatican Observatory for the research institute of the observatory in Tucson, Ariz., took on the question of whether extraterrestrial life would be harmful to religious faith.
His short answer: no, because the God who created the universe would necessarily have created any other life that exists.
Humans, and every other form of life, are made of elements that were created by the death of stars, Corbally reminded the audience, so all humanity has an intimate relationship to the cosmos.
With the number of stars in the universe, it’s conceivable that another has a solar system that has a planet that had the conditions for life to be created, he said. If there is a form of life with equal or superior intelligence to human life, it might change some religious beliefs with its understanding of God, but faith would survive, Corbally said.
However, that’s a topic that science teachers in public schools most likely shouldn’t address, said Kenneth Kemp, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
“Teachers must teach in their own discipline,” Kemp said, meaning that science teachers generally should not try to teach religion. But at the same time, they have to be open to the idea of interdisciplinary topics, including the relationship between faith and science.
