Washington D.C., Nov 20, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).
The unresolved question of whether life exists on other planets continues to spark curiosity from the public and the interest of scientists — but one Catholic physicist working on missions to search for potential life also recognizes it as an opportunity to see the glory of God.
Jonathan Lunine, a convert to the Catholic faith and the chief scientist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, spoke to roughly 100 Catholic scientists about the subject at an event in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Nov. 15.
The lecture followed a Gold Mass, celebrated for Catholic scientists, at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. A Gold Mass is held on the feast of St. Albertus Magnus — a Dominican friar, medieval scientist, patron saint of scientists, and mentor to St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was sponsored by The Catholic University of America and the local chapter of the Society of Catholic Scientists, which seeks to respond to St. John Paul II’s calling for Catholic scientists to “integrate the worlds of science and religion in their own intellectual and spiritual lives.”
“I’m not a theologian; I’m a scientist,” Lunine told the crowd as they finished eating brunch at the Beacon Hotel, which is a short walk from the cathedral, about a half-mile north of the White House.
Lunine — whose work at NASA has involved the search for the possibility of unintelligent microbial life on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan — said that as a scientist, “this has been a wonderful journey, being able to participate in these missions.”
As a Catholic scientist, he said he sees “the gift of the mind” as a gift that “God has given us to … understand the glory of God’s creation.”
Microbial life on other planets, if it were to be found, he said, would be a “manifestation of the order that is baked into the universal design that God created when he created the universe” and created so that “beauty might shine forth from that very order.”
Lunine said those three moons are the most likely locations to have the conditions to sustain life that we have the ability to reach, particularly due to the prevalence of water. The mission to Europa should conclude between 2030 and 2035, the mission to Titan should conclude in the 2030s, and the mission to Enceladus should conclude in the 2040s, he said.
If microbial life were to be discovered on any of those moons, Lunine told CNA, it would show us that there are “other places beyond the Earth where life began.”
Lunine said more theological questions would be raised if the search for life on other planets develops into a search for intelligent and self-aware life that developed on another planet. This would lead to questions like “Are they saved?” or “Are they fallen?”, he said.
If intelligent life exists on other planets, he said it would be “hard to imagine” that none had fallen from God’s grace, noting that it is easy to fall and “even the angels, some of them have fallen.” He said this would create questions such as “did Christ come to their world in a separate incarnation” to save them, and how would humanity would “be the central pivot point of cosmic history.”
The Catholic Church holds no official position on whether intelligent life exists on other planets, but Pope Francis commented on the subject in 2015, saying: “Honestly I wouldn’t know how to answer,” adding: “Until America was discovered we thought it didn’t exist, and instead it existed.”
The pontiff, however, did affirmatively say that everything in the universe has been created through divine intelligence and “is not the result of chance or chaos.”
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More than a century ago, Catholic poet Alice Meynell’s “Judgement Night” speculated about that final reckoning of intelligent life from all the worlds, the moment when “we show forth a Man.”
Of course, science fiction writers have attacked that question every which way. A classic example is the first real sf novel I read as a child, “A Case of Conscience” by James Blish, which turns on the question “Can Evil create?” after humans discover a an advanced (but godless) lizard-like alien race. More more on this issue, see The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
We read: “’did Christ come to their world in a separate incarnation’ to save them, and how would humanity would ‘be the central pivot point of cosmic history’.”
A separate (!) incarnation?
As in Hindu reincarnation, or maybe primitive Pachamama theology, or highly advanced AI lacking a soul? As neither a scientist nor a theologian, yours truly advances the following additional questions on whether THE Incarnation is ever mass produced, so to speak:
(1) Have any possible and technologically advanced civilizations in the cosmos also been GIVEN, by the transcendent God the washroom key for “wisdom” and for the Beatific Vision? Or, is there a glass-ceiling threshold for this favored kind of “intelligence,” gifted and governed more from above, than from below?
(2) How, exactly, might any implied cosmically-multiple polygenesis (poly-redemptoris?) square with terrestrial Original Sin (just a quaint local narrative?) plus the SINGULAR redemptive act of Christ—-a “person” fully human and divine, both (!)—on Calvary in our otherwise insignificant galaxy?
(3) Or, is any such Redemption multiple across space and time while still ONE ACTION, just as every Mass around our small world is the unbloody renewal/extension of the singular Self-donation on Calvary, while also “numerically distinct”—within/by the indwelling Holy Spirit? Or, instead, does the humility of God (!) expose Himself only “here” in humble and backwater Jerusalem? Perhaps because none of those other hypothetical intelligences ever had the gifted freedom (!) and capacity to abysmally “fall,” because not created fully in the “image and likeness” of an absolutely personal God?
Surprise!: “…Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings [!] without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision” (Humanae Generis, n. 26).
(4) Or, instead and with Blessed Duns Scotus, might Christ have become incarnate here (and even elsewhere?) ABSENT our fallenness and particular and interior need for salvation history, by an action of overflowing divine charity that includes, but is not limited to our terrestrial added need for divine damage control?
(5) Or, despite hypothetical technical superiority elsewhere, is our human access toward beatitude still a most singular gift into the cosmos—and into the LOGOS? Beyond mere astronomy, what is “the world”? Pope St. John Paul II proposed a distinctive “ONTOLOGICAL LEAP,” sometimes fatally mistranslated (cross-dressed?) as only “evolutionary”:
“The moment of transition to the SPIRITUAL cannot be the object of this kind of observation [meaning the natural sciences], which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again of aesthetic and religious experience fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans” (“Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” Oct. 1996).
Perhaps Pope Francis was a bit too much off-the-cuff when he once said that he would “baptize a Martian.” At such a new and hypothetical Galileo Moment, some future pope, and theologians and even scientists, might pause…