Set no limits on intelligence
The AP carried this interesting news story out of the Vatican that mentions space and aliens, but it has a far deeper message that gets missed a lot in the media.
What prompted the article was remarks the Vatican’s chief astronomer made publicly.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
Which turned into the Vatican saying ‘it’s okay to believe in aliens’, and variations on that.
In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.
It’s a good article and it gives due attention to the Church’s great interest in science and technology. This line is key:
Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made exploring the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.
Exactly. It was at the center of his Regensburg University lecture, though few outside the serious academic world know that.
A few months ago, Pope Benedict was surprisingly disinvited from presenting an address at “Rome’s university” on the subject of faith and reason because of a small group of noisy activists on campus with minds far more closed than they accused the Church of having. Vatican watcher Sandro Magister has the best account of it, written when it happened.
They welcomed him at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. They offered him the lectern at the university of Regensburg. They’re waiting for him in New York, for an address to the United Nations.
But not at the Rome university “La Sapienza.” He’s shut out. Benedict XVI had to decline to deliver an address, on Thursday, January 17, at the main university of the diocese of which he is bishop.
Why? Because the uninformed activists were threatening a big disruption of the Holy Father’s visit. Though they were wrong about what Benedict believed and said and taught. For a long time. Willful ignorance, actually.
So the Vatican published the address the pope would have given at La Sapienza, the day before the visit would have occurred.
The whole text is there, at Sandro’s site Chiesa. It is brilliant, as Professor Joseph Ratzinger has always been.
L’Osservatore Romano also ran a front-page column by Giorgio Israel, a Jewish professor of the history of mathematics at La Sapienza, explaining “the background on the failed visit”, as Sandro puts it.
That it should be a non-Catholic intellectual to explain what happened, in the newspaper of the pope, was emblematic of how Benedict XVI looks at what a university should be: a “cosmos” of reason in its various dimensions and specializations, which are called to listen to each other, to work together, to critique each other; a “cosmos” of which the faiths are also a living part, on the same footing as the sciences, each with its distinctive characteristics.
That, right there, shows the intellectual embrace of faith and reason in the professor pope, representing the Catholic intellectual tradition of critical thinking applied to all the disciplines. Here’s how Israel began his column:
It is surprising that those who have chosen as their motto the famous phrase attributed to Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – should oppose the pope’s delivering an address at the “La Sapienza” university of Rome. It is all the more surprising in that the Italian universities are places open to every sort of expression, and it is inexplicable that the pope alone should be barred from entering.
What could have been so serious as to have prompted the setting aside of Voltairean tolerance?… What appears “dangerous” to him is that the pope should attempt to open a conversation between faith and reason, to re-establish a relationship between the Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic traditions, that he would not want science and faith to be separated by an impenetrable seal…
The opposition is of an ideological character, and has as its specific target Benedict XVI, in that he permits himself to speak of science and of the relationship between science and faith, instead of limiting himself to speaking of faith.
So look at who’s putting limits, harsh limits, on speaking of science and its relationship to faith. A group of the university’s professors who didn’t want the truth to get in the way of their distorted perceptions.
The good news is that the Vatican continues to pursue great scholarship and dialogue among the disciplines of science, theology and the nature of the universe. And to consider them in relation to human existence. And they’re doing it with top-notch professors from excellent universities who are not hostile to the pursuit of the truth.
Separate faith and reason? Talk about alien…