Alien Souls

Do space aliens have souls? Who cares? Well, I'm sure the space aliens would. But, of more immediate importance, as our ability to see and hear across vast reaches of space improves, we may one day come into at least indirect contact with such creatures, if they exist. Such contact, besides being very exciting, could have deep implications regarding our view of ourselves, God, and our relationship to Him. For example, if we could communicate with far off creatures and found them to be like us, what would that mean to believing Christians? For what view of God would the implications be most troubling, even shattering?

Luckily, the Vatican has been thinking about this, in the person of a Vatican Astronomer, the Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno. In a Catholic News Service story about the Brother and his work, he said his aim is to reassure Catholics "that you shouldn't be afraid of these questions" and that "no matter what we learn, it doesn't invalidate what we already know" and believe. In other words, scientific study and discovery and religion enrich one another, and do negate each other. If new forms of life were to be discovered or highly advanced beings from outer space were to touch down on planet Earth, 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," he said.

In a pamphlet he has prepared for the British-based Catholic Truth Society, Brother Consolmagno says, "There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm or contradict the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe." He writes, "What Genesis says about creation is true. God did it; God willed it; and God loves it. When science fills in the details of how God did it, science helps get a flavor of how rich and beautiful and inventive God really is, more than even the writer of Genesis could ever have imagined"

But what about God's plan of salvation? The Catholic apologist Mark Shea writes at The Catholic Exchange:

"As C.S. Lewis pointed out, life on other planets only becomes a problem for the faith if we find a) it is intelligent life capable of communion with God, b) it has fallen, c) redemption for such life can only be accomplished in the same way redemption was accomplished for us, d) redemption has been denied such creatures, and e) redemption will always be denied such creatures. Unless all five of these propositions is true (and they may very well all be beyond the possibility of our ever discovering them), then there's nothing much to say about life on other worlds. It will certainly be cool if life is discovered. And there's no particular reason it won't be. But, neither is there a particular reason it must be. I, for one, would not be shocked to discover that we really are All Alone (except for God and the angels, of course)."

[The image above, Mother and Christ Alien, is by Norton Wisdom, who created this and other images for the band Revolve. You can see more of Wisdom's strange art on Revolve's web site and at his own online gallery. - MM]