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.'"
What about Gingers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I guess the trick is you have to ask? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why many Christians disagree with infant baptism.
So if a dog or gorilla understood the implications of baptism and wanted to be baptised, then I personally see no reason why the dog or gorilla shouldn't.
Even a reasonable Atheist should allow such a creature the freedom to do so, despite disagreeing with it.
FWIW, I think it may not be such a great idea to keep creating more and more transgenic animals (or even very advanced AI). It looks like society wouldn't be able to handle/treat such creatures appropriately.
Just because it can be done now doesn't mean it should.
Better wait till we grow up first.
Re:freedom to love (Score:3, Interesting)
While the other attributes he lists are inherent in intelligent life, an alien intelligence may not necessarily anything resembling love.
Now, not getting too far into this topic as we are discussing his comments in the third person and therefore can't really ask him to expand upon them. I don't think he is referring to the basic emotions assigned to monogamous couples.
The biblical 'love' has the same definition problems as the biblical 'know'. The words are similar but the meanings are much different. And even then, the term 'love' from a biblical sense has much more philosophical implications than are easily understood in a quote from an interview.
Re:Good read (Score:5, Interesting)
>>You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin
If you consider Original Sin to be a nature that is anything less than perfect (which is what it more or less means these days), it makes sense. Redemption for your fuckups.
>>Or is he thinking that Adam and Eve were the original ancestors of all intelligent beings
Doubtful. Back in the middle ages, the question arose if elves and giants could be baptized. They'd been sending missionaries out to the northern reaches of Europe, where everyone knew giants and elves lived. So the pope considered it, and said, sure. They could be baptized, too, if they wanted it.
So this isn't much of a departure from precedent.
Wrong cross (Score:2, Interesting)
Definition of a Soul (Score:4, Interesting)
He lists the requirements for having a soul as:
- have intelligence
- free will
- freedom to love
- freedom to make decisions
Putting aliens to one side for the moment, as I don't think Lrrr is going to drop in on us tomorrow, I wonder how he feels about some intelligent animals.
Chimps, gorillas and other primates have been shown to fulfill these requirements to varying degrees. Dolphins have also. Would they baptize a dolphin? (How would you do that? Raise it out of water?)
I wondered if anyone ever asked Koko what gorillas think about a creator. Thanks to a Google search, I turned up this exchange:
Francine Patterson: "Who is God?"
Koko: "Me."
Patterson: "Who created the world?"
Koko: "Another woman."
(Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_12_131/ai_n8569017/?tag=content;col1 [findarticles.com] )
Somehow, I don't think Koko's religious outlook would gel with the Vatican's. ;-)
Re:What if the alien race has their own "Jesus"? (Score:1, Interesting)
What if the alien race has their own "Jesus"? And who's to say which "Jesus" is really the "son of good" and which one is the impostor.
Why, the answer is obvious. Our Jesus is really the "son of god" - you don't need aliens to show you that: despite the number of choices people have (Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, etc.) everyone believes that their god is the true god. So why would adding alien gods make any difference?
However, if they are a much more technologically advanced society (they would have to be, compared to our present level of tech.), they very well could have their "god" perform miracles. There will still be people who still remain "faithful" to their original religion, some who swap over, and some who reconcile the two gods (ours and theirs) as the same via imaginative interpretation of the holy books.
Re:It'll make great TV (Score:2, Interesting)
If we grant the fellow his premises(which I in no way agree with; but theism/atheism arguments are boring at this point), humans must be baptized in order to achieve salvation because of original sin and the resultant human concupiscence. That was a particular event that occurred somewhere in the ancient middle/near east on a small rocky planet orbiting a not especially distinguished star.
Why would an entity that was created or evolved on an entirely different rock, without the slightest connection whatsoever to humanity, be affected in the slightest by some human behavior in the early pre-lapsarian habitat?
Is the Vatican's official policy that humans managed to sin-ify everything in the entire universe that has a complex neural net(or analog thereof), or that a separate Fall occurred on all planets with sentient life?
I'm not at all surprised that the Vatican acknowledges the possibility of alien life. Not doing so would be placing limits on God's creative power(which would be a doctrinally unsound move) as well as ignoring the scientific fact that space is pretty fucking huge. I am rather surprised that they would view alien life as being in need of their attention(particularly when some fairly clever, if not exactly unequivocally sentient, terrestrial species are viewed as being wholly unaffected by human Fall and salvation. If the higher primates don't need baptisms, why would the xenofungus of Alpha-Centauri?
Re:Pre-Fallen? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've loved the idea of Religion and Aliens.
Good geek fun huh? :-)
What if they have never "eaten of the forbidden fruit?"
Their fall may be quite different in nature, angels had a fall unrelated to fruit.
Re:Brother Guy Consolmagno (Score:3, Interesting)
(And, he seemed like a heck of a nice Guy. Forgive the pun. :)
Yes. He was quite popular with the chemistry and biology crowd at my institute. People always go to post-seminar receptions for the free food and beer. But in this case, much of the audience also chose to go so that they could continue to talk with him after the question-and-answer time had already run out. Nobel laureates excepted, I can't remember another time when so many people spent so much time with the speaker at the reception. It seemed as if it could be interesting talking with him for the whole afternoon, if only he didn't have to leave for the airport so early.