Do space aliens have souls?

You might think that the discovery of intelligent life on other planets would have proufound implications for Catholic theology.

Advanced life on other planets would seem to raise profound questions for Catholic theologians: Do aliens have souls? Does each planet get its own Messiah? If so, what of the Trinity?... Obviously, there's only one God and one Holy Catholic Church. So, if there are aliens and they worship God, does that make aliens Catholics?

Luckily, it's not a big deal, either way.

Brother Consolmagno told Catholic News Service that the whole question of how Catholicism would hold up if some form of life were discovered on another planet has piqued people's curiosity "for centuries."

He said his aim with the booklet was to reassure Catholics "that you shouldn't be afraid of these questions" and that "no matter what we learn, it doesn't invalidate what we already know" and believe. In other words, scientific study and discovery and religion enrich one another, not cancel out each other.

If new forms of life were to be discovered or highly advanced beings from outer space were to touch down on planet Earth, it would not mean "everything we believe in is wrong," rather, "we're going to find out that everything is truer in ways we couldn't even yet have imagined," he said. [Catholic News Service]

[Via Cynical-C]

Comments

[Rob]

That seems to me a very healthy way of thinking. . .

[scarshapedstar]

If an alien is a sodomite but doesn't have a soul, does it still go to hell?

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Scar, that's a good question. It occurs to me that we can't necessarily assume that aliens will have identifiable genders in the mammalian sense. Suppose they have only one, or more than two? How in the heck are we supposed to determine which pairings to stigmatize and persecute?

[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

A Vatican astronomer saying that the way Catholicism relates to extraterrestrial life has "piqued people's interest for centuries" is a bit funny. Giordano Bruno, who theorized that extrasolar planets existed and that other creatures might live on these planets, was burnt at the stake by the Catholic Church for views contrary to church doctrine (including Copernicanism) in 1600.

[Jesse]

Clearly, any aliens we discover were put there by god, to test our faith. And/or the were put there by the devil to tempt us into sin, so the devil can have our souls.

And I am, of course, joking.

[Squashed Lemon]

Why can they hurry up and tackle more pressing problem. (I am not even talking about poverty or world peace)

What happen if we created artificial life? (eg. synthetic bacteria at first) then first synthetic plant... finally higher mammal.

what happen if a computer algorithm gains consciousness?

These will happen far sooner than space travel and alien encounter.

does a synthetic zygot have soul? If so, why?

this whole soul busines is wee bit vague too if you ask me. Somebody ought to build better model than this body-soul duality. It's so confusing.

Why not more than two? eg. biological body, integrity of freewill(soul/sense of self/what have you), social context(to be with other/the stuff between individuals).

hmm.

/end of pointless rant.

[JC]

The bigger dilemma - what if the aliens are delicious.

I don't mean just "tasty" or "good, if you're feeling a bit peckish"

I mean fan-fricking-tastice with bar-b-q sauce. I mean so scrumptious it would be immoral NOT to eat them.

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. Does this so called "booklet" address my concerns? Does it include recipes?

JC

[jimBOB]

Various works of science fiction have imagined how religion might coexist with extraterrestrial contact. J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 series has extensive stories covering both human and alien religions, as well as having a community of catholic monks living aboard the main space station. (There's also an offhand reference to the then-current pope being female.) Interesting since Straczynski himself is an atheist.

[gordo]

The question of whether aliens have souls is indeed an interesting and important one. I'll have to devote some thought to it as soon as I'm done calculating the number of aliens that can dance on the head of a pin.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I'm loving this thread.

[DonBoy]

James Blish's classic A Case of Conscience is about a Catholic priest grappling with the theological implications of some apparently non-Fallen aliens. From what I know of the Jesuits, I'm not surprised that Catholicism has a healthy tradition of what we might call speculative theology.

[almostinfamous]

my favorite quote regarding this came a while back when i watched an episode of futurama where they mentioned the space pope and i searched for the term in google:

Tenebrae:
So all of space is Catholic? How can a building block of reality be any sort of religion? Is time Baptist?

Responses:
Professor Farnsworth

Oh my yes.
And Tau Neutrinos are Seventh Day Adventists

from (http://tinyurl.com/93zxb)

[almostinfamous]

JC, according to the holy gospels of the futurama and starship troopers, i infer that we have every right to eat any alien that does not have the power to enslave and/or eradicate the human race from earth.

[david]

There is a CS Lewis sci-fi novel called "Out of the Silent Planet." I read it a long time ago, but as I recall, Lewis's answer was yes: each planet gets its own messiah. Only, I think it was actually the same messiah each time. The son of God just gets incarnated over and over, once for each planet. I may be misremembering.

[jimBOB]

david, the C.S. Lewis book is the first of a trilogy. Like the Narnia tales, it's fantasy as a wrapper for a largely religious message. The second book, "Perelandra," presents the planet Venus as a place uncorrupted by original sin. The third book is darker, set on Earth, and is pretty heavy-handedly religious (been awhile since I read it).

[Flint]

"If an alien is a sodomite but doesn't have a soul, does it still go to hell?"

- Posted by: scarshapedstar

Beats me but why is that alien in the logo grabbing his/her crotch?

What does and alien crotch really look like? Hmmm?

[blog responder]

Don't forget The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell -- "Editorial Reviews Amazon.com
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being 'human.' When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like 'provocative' and 'compelling' will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449912558

[M. Strowbridge]

Here is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s essay “Religion and Rocketry”:

…It sets one dreaming – to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we me innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen.

We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.

It is interesting to wonder how things would go if they met an unfallen race. At first, to be sure, they’d have a grand time jeering at, duping, and exploiting its innocence; but I doubt if our half-animal cunning would long be a match for godlike wisdom, selfless valour, and perfect unanimity.

I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.

Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted/. “Gun and gospel” have been horribly combined in the past. The missionary’s holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody’s itch, to (as he calls it) “civilize” the (as he calls them) “natives.” Would all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Salvation which God has appointed for Man? Would they denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which the spiritual and biological history of these strange creatures fully justified and which God Himself had blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they had better learn? I do not know.

What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is not due to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.

But let us thanks God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds…

[Christopher]

Well, considering that Catholic explorers already found a previously undiscovered land filled with intelligent beings who knew nothing of Christ or conventional religion (Hint: Many of the posters here live there!), I think we already know what effects finding extra-terrestrial life would have on Catholic theology.

[Jedmunds]

THis reminds me of the time some libertarian dude asked what if there were vampires

[Matt McIrvin]

In the Middle Ages, most learned people agreed that the earth was a sphere, but a major point of contention was whether there were habitable Antipodes on the other side. Many believed (possibly by extrapolation from the Sahara Desert) that the whole equatorial zone was too hot for any human being to pass through, since there were no records of anyone doing it, and certainly no records of the Apostles going to the other side of the earth to spread the Gospel. So some argued that if any Antipodeans existed in the Southern Hemisphere, they'd have to have had a separate Adam and Eve and a separate Christ to redeem them, and used the seeming absurdity of this to argue against the existence of Antipodeans. Generally speaking, it presented the same problems for Christian theology as life on other planets.

Meanwhile, the Antipodeans were thinking of other things entirely...

[Matt McIrvin]

...I tend to agree with Squashed Lemon: the technical problems of space travel, and the apparent absence of other intelligent life in our solar system, mean that the physical meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence that Lewis feared is probably millennia off if it ever happens at all. There's the off chance that we're going to discover messages from space, but if I had to bet, I'd say that other technological changes in the production of intelligent beings will bother us first.

In some ways this has already happened; we've had to deal with the theological implications of the fact that it's possible to make babies without two people having what we'd typically describe as sexual intercourse, though I think everyone agrees that the resulting people are not in any sense artificial people.

[Njorl]

"what happen if a computer algorithm gains consciousness?"

Lots of people are working on machine intelligence. I'm the only one coding up an artificial soul! I'm gonna make a fortune selling them to all those poor soulless AIs!

[Daryl McCullough]

I don't know why the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrials would be any more problematic to Catholics than the existence of "virtuous pagans" who are good people but who have never been exposed to the message of Jesus, due to the bad luck of being born in the wrong place and the wrong time.

There's a particular spot in Hell for virtuous pagans, and I guess virtuous extraterrestrials can go there, as well:

From Dante's Inferno

Between Hell proper, the place of punishment, and the vestibule, Dante places the circle of Limbo, devoted to those people who had no opportunity to choose either good or evil in terms of having faith in Christ. This circle is occupied by the virtuous pagans, those who lived before Christ was born, and by the unbaptized.

[vanmojo]

"what happen if a computer algorithm gains consciousness?"

How would we know the algorithm gains consciousness? Not being snarky, here. The question of self-awareness is one I'm pretty interested in.

I have never been a real fan of the Turing "Chinese Box" problem for sentience testing, but the question remains, how would we when an algorithm's complexity reached a level of self-awareness?

mojo sends