A senior Vatican scholar has said it's OK to believe in aliens. In an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published on Tuesday, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, who serves as the director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the possibility of extraterrestrial life "doesn't contradict" the Roman Catholic faith and that ruling out the existence of such life forms would be tantamount to "putting limits" on God's creation.
"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" states Funes in the article entitled The Extraterrestrial Is My Brother. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."
The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical organizations in the world. It was founded as part of the church's efforts to reform the Julian calendar in 1592. Today the organization serves as a bridge between church and science. With its help, the Vatican has adopted a somewhat more enlightened and conciliatory approach to science and its practitioners since the days when it imprisoned Galileo for his heretic belief that the earth revolved around the sun (and not vice versa, as the church liked to think at the time).
During an address to The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, Pope John Paul II famously quoted Pope Leo XIII saying, "Truth does not contradict truth." Clarifying the church's position further, Funea states that the Bible "is not a science book," and that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most "reasonable" theory to explain the creation of our universe, though he, of course, maintains that the big bang didn't happen by chance, but was instigated by God as part of his universal master plan.
Funes' recent L'Osservatore Romano interview, which has garnered much press, is not the first time the Vatican has gone on the record with regards to embracing the concept of alien life. A colleague of Funes', Brother Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory's Research Group, which is based at Arizona's Steward Observatory, published a 48-page pamphlet on the subject in 2005 entitled Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic Belief and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life. In it, he posed many religious and philosophical questions about alien life: Do aliens have souls? Are they were subject to original sin? Do they need to be baptized and have a belief in Jesus in order to be saved? Do they even need to be saved? And if so, do we have the right to evangelize alien cultures?
Like Funes, Consolmagno is comfortable with the relationship between the Catholic faith and science, and the possibility of alien life. When asked about "how Catholicism would hold up" if intelligent life was discovered beyond our planet in an interview with the Catholic News Service, he responded by saying 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."
