A God of Extraterrestrial Life?

NASA recently said its Kepler spacecraft spotted “earth’s bigger, older cousin,” the first nearly earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own.

The agency can’t say for sure whether the planet, which is 1,400 light years from earth and 60 percent bigger, has water and air, but it’s the closest match yet found.

“That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise,” a NASA spokesman said.

These kinds of discoveries always make me think about what finding life on other planets would mean to belief in God and the practice of religion. I understand that it may make some people question their faith, but I don’t see a problem and others don’t, either.

Opens the Heart and Mind

“Astronomy has a profound human value,” said Jose Gabriel Funes, an Argentinian astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory. “It is a science that opens the heart and the mind. It helps us to put our lives, our hopes, our problems in the right perspective. In this regard, and here I speak as a priest and a Jesuit, it … can bring us closer to God.

“Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures over the earth, so there could be other beings, even intelligent (beings), created by God,” he said. “This is not in contradiction with our faith because we cannot establish limits to God’s creative freedom. To say it with St. Francis, if we can consider some earthly creatures as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, why could we not speak of a ‘brother alien’? He would also belong to the creation.”

The idea that believers must reject science and its theories is prevalent. A Gallup Poll about a year ago showed that more than four in 10 Americans, taking the creation scenes in the Book of Genesis literally, believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago….”

I don’t know whether the rejection of evolution results from a faulty understanding of faith and the Bible or a faulty understanding of science or both. What I know is that there is no contradiction between belief and science. And I believe the perceived contradiction is a stumbling block for many people searching for God.

The Same Author

Faith and science, after all, are both ways of knowing. Writes theologian Elizabeth Johnson: “…The book of nature and the book of scripture…have the same author.”

But if we disagree with the views of those 40 percent of Americans who reject evolution, we shouldn’t take our cue from some scientists who are equally guilty of seeing reality solely from their own discipline’s perspective.

“A scientist cannot properly introduce God to account for a phenomenon that is not yet understood,” writes Johnson. “In that sense, scientific method is properly atheistic. Scientists who apply that ‘atheism’ to the question of God, however, are not basing their view on science because that question is not answered by science.

“There is no scientific evidence for God, it’s true, but neither is there scientific evidence that there is no God. No, these scientists have adopted a philosophy, often called ‘materialism or evolutionary naturalism,’ the belief that ‘matter’ is the ultimate origin and destiny of all that is.”

In “The Language of God, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and director of the National Institutes of Health, quotes astrophysicist Robert Jastrow about the blindness of some scientists in their search for the truth and how it all might end.

Sitting There for Centuries

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”As I’ve written often, people searching for God (another way of saying “the truth”) must be open to all ways of knowing. By definition, God can’t be limited to our puny categories and restraints.

So how can we believe that he/she couldn’t have caused the existence of creatures on other planets?

By the way, people who search for God do find him/her, though in this life the “find” is never complete. A man who describes himself in a recent letter to America magazine as “a very old professional scientist,” comments on the fact that both faith and science are about “discovery.”

“My entire career has been about just this,” he writes, “and as it continues I am ever aware of how little I know. I, a tiny and very limited creature, am loved by an eternal Creator in an infinite universe. It is a concept beyond my grasp, but the journey of discovery has been rich and beautiful beyond belief, and at age 85, I am ready and, thankfully, eager for the ‘rest of the journey.’”