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Title: I'd love to baptise ET, says Vatican's stargazer
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URL Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet ... Aliens-souls-living-stars.html
Published: Sep 19, 2010
Author: By DAVID DERBYSHIRE
Post Date: 2010-09-19 11:09:24 by gengis gandhi
Keywords: None
Views: 144
Comments: 6
I'd love to baptise ET, says Vatican's stargazer By DAVID DERBYSHIRE Last updated at 9:16 PM on 17th September 2010 Comments (104) Add to My Stories The Pope's Astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, says that intelligent life elsewhere is probable, but believes that we are unlikely ever to encounter it Intelligent aliens may be living among the stars and are likely to have souls, a senior Vatican scientist said yesterday. The Pope's astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, said he would be happy to 'baptise an al ien' - but admitted that the chances of communicating with life outside the Earth were low. Speaking at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, Dr Consolmagno also dismissed Creationism and claimed that the revival of 'intelligent design' - the controversial theory that only God can explain gaps in the theory of evolution - was 'bad theology'. Dr Consolmagno, one of a team of 12 astronomers working for the Vatican, said the Catholic Church had been supporting and funding science for centuries. A self-confessed science fiction fan, he said he was 'comfortable' with the idea of alien life. New frontiers for Christianity: NGC 300, a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way, and located in the nearby Sculptor Group of galaxies. Taken at the La Silla Observatory in Chile Anyone out there? The discovery of aliens would raise huge theological problems for the Catholic Church 'God is bigger than just humanity. God is also the god of angels.' Film: ET in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film In the middle ages, the definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions, he said. Those characteristics may not be unique to humans. 'Any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul,' he added. In practice, machines were unlikely to be smart or human enough to have souls. Dr Consolmagno, 57, the curator of the Pope's meteorite collection, is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican's observatory. On 'intelligent design', which claims that Darwin's theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of life, he said: '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.' The phrase 'intelligent design' was centuries old and described the idea that God could be discovered in the laws of space and time and the existence of human reason. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312922/Pope- astronomer-Guy-Consolmagno-Aliens-souls-living-stars.html#ixzz0zzKhyivO
Asked if he would baptise an alien, he replied: 'Only if they asked.' He added: 'I'd be delighted if we found life elsewhere and delighted if we found intelligent life elsewhere. '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.
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#6. To: gengis gandhi (#0)
The few aliens I've known melt when water gets on them. Those baptizer types would be pretty shocked at committing murder. Maybe it would be involuntary manslaughter.
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