Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien 308
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Guardian reports that Guy Consolmagno, curator of the pope's meteorite collection and a trained astronomer and planetary scientist, says he would be 'delighted' if intelligent life was found among the stars. 'But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it — when you add them up it's probably not a practical question.' Consolmagno adds that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. 'Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul.' Would he baptize an alien? 'Only if they asked.' Consolmagno dismisses the ideas of intelligent design as a pseudo-scientific version of creationism. 'The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.'"
Deliberately misconstruing speaker (Score:4, Informative)
The Vatican dismissing creationism? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good read (Score:3, Informative)
It shows that the stereotype of the church is against is untrue. It has some interesting observations on the Catholic church and its views on things.
It should be pointed out that he is no ordinary priest (actually, he's a monk). He is a Jesuit. [wikipedia.org] An order organized during the renaissance to preach to the more educated people of the time.
Today they are known for administrating most of the church's universities. One of the requirements is to have a minimum of a bachelor's degree.
Guy Consolmagno (Score:4, Informative)
Brother Guy Consolmagno (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. Several years ago, I heard him talk on the prospects for finding more exoplanets in the future. He's a serious and highly competent scientist.
He also is a Jesuit monk. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
(And, he seemed like a heck of a nice Guy. Forgive the pun. :)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno [wikipedia.org]
Baptizing (Score:3, Informative)
He is a Catholic so he can baptize in an emergency. And he is a priest so he can baptize in all cases.