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In 1958, writer James Blish
published his award-winning book, A Case of Conscience. In it ,a team of
scientists, including a Jesuit priest, travel to the planet Lithia to
examine the intelligent lizard-like beings who live there. Father
Ruiz-Sanchez, however, has another agenda --- the Vatican wants to know if
the Lithians have souls. It turns out that while the Lithians conform
perfectly to every essential precept of the Christian moral code, they have
no concept of god and no form of religion. Not Being able to gain any
inkling of their moral life and the role for which God may have created
them, Father Ruiz-Sanchez comes to the conclusion that the Lithians are only
spuriously good: organic thinking machines without souls.
He writes: "What we have
here---is a planet and a people propped up by the Ultimate Enemy. It is a
gigantic trap prepared for all of us --- for every man on Earth and
off it. We can do nothing with it but reject it, nothing but say to it Retro
me, Sathanas." Eventually Father Ruiz-Sanchez proposes that the planet
be quarantined from from Earth and its
people forever.
If that's only science
fiction, here's an ironic fact. A real life Jesuit Brother (and Vatican
astronomer) Guy Consolmagno SJ has recently published a book with the
Catholic Truth Society called Intelligent Life in the Universe ? Catholic
belief and the search for extraterrestrial (ET) intelligent life, in which
the author also wonders if ET has a soul. More specifically Consolmagno
raises the following questions: is Original Sin something that affects
all intelligent beings ? Is Jesus Christ's redemption valid for intelligent
beings throughout the universe (or would other worlds have their own version
of Jesus) ? Would the Church send missionaries to such planets ?
Asked during a BBC interview
for the church's opinion on what would happen if new forms of life were to
be discovered on other worlds Consolmagno said it would not mean everything
it believed in was wrong. "Rather, we're going to find out that everything
is truer in ways we couldn't even yet have imagined." That's a far cry from
burning the Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno at the stake for saying that
the Sun---and not Earth ---was the centre of the solar system. Or
imprisoning Galileo and forcing him to recant for the same. But it shows
that there's one religion at least which is beginning to make its peace with
science. |
