If there are aliens

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Bezant

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…would God’s plan of salvation apply to them, assuming they are intelligent (that is, human-like), or would it only apply to humanity? Would we evangelise them?
 
I imagine that yes, God’s plan of salvation applies to them as well. We definitely should evangelise them if we can.
 
Bezant said:
…would God’s plan of salvation apply to them, assuming they are intelligent (that is, human-like), or would it only apply to humanity? Would we evangelise them?
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Until a confirmed and undeniable encounter with non-terrestrial sentient life occurs, we simply cannot know this answer.

You could take a supposition that may support what God *may *do for extraterrestrial life, based on what is shown with humanity. Some research suggests that the human brain may have a tendency to seek spiritual life as if the brain itself were instinctively “hard-wired” to seek God.

While not all religions can possibly be true, history has shown that, true or disproved, people and cultures and communities and nations and empires often find themselves uniting and seeking the spiritual into everyday life throughout human history.

Given that, it could be *reasoned *that any sentient life in God’s creation elsewhere in the universe may, too, have an innate tendency to seek Him out. How this is done, in what form(s) that God reveals Himself to these creatures is simply impossible to know.
 
This interesting subject has come up on the catholic.org forums. Here are my comments when it came up again not long ago. 😉
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This was discussed on these forums many years ago. I made a lot of claims which were not seriously contested. Here they are.

First, while the Son of God is co-eternal with the Father and Holy Spirit, Jesus the man, body and soul, was created by God two thousands years ago.

Could intelligent beings on other planets also have their own Messiahs? Why not?
God makes the rules. If he chooses to have every civilization have its own salvation plan with its own Redeemer, he is free to do so. I see no reason why the Son of God could not take up more than one civilization’s Redeemer onto himself. One, or many, it violates no rules. If God chooses, each Redeemer has responsibility for his own civilization, although there is only one Son of God for all.

Our Redeemer, Jesus, may be aware of other civilizations but would not need to have detailed knowledge of their histories.

God may choose to keep intelligent civilizations forever separate from each other, for reasons we can’t know ( although it would be interesting to speculate why! ). He can maintain this separation in two ways: distance and time.

There can be no communications between galaxies because light and radio waves are scattered by dust. ( Presumably, an extremely advanced civilization might make its entire galaxy blink Morse code, but we haven’t seen it yet. ) Traveling between galaxies is similarly impossible because of the millions of years needed to do this. It’s been said no spaceship could travel more than ten percent of the speed of light because of the need to get space debris out of the way. It would take twenty million years to travel from Andromeda to the Milky Way one way.

God can separate civilizations from each other by time. One civilzation has its five million years on one world, then another has its five million years elsewhere, but not at the same time. In this way, there could be hundreds or thousands of civilizations in the same galaxy but at different times. Finding evildence of another long dead civilization would be extremely unlikely, because it would be necessary to visit each planet and look around, but there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. I think this exceeds NASA’s budget. http://forum.catholic.org/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif
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Ah, yes. It’s a heavy burden knowing everything. 😃
 
Haha, thanks, I just saw the other discussion on the forum. Thanks for your answers though.
 
It’s not definitive, per se. If they were merely “intelligent” and “human-like” that doesn’t mean they have souls automatically. If you want to get crazy sci-fi and believe that maybe some such race came and abducted humans descended from Adam back in the year 400 or something, and then a race of humans grew on some other planet, then those “aliens” would be descendants of Adam and in need of Christ as Savior. I think C.S. Lewis had a book about some race of humans that never fell, but I don’t know what happens. :o
 
MarcoPolo said:
It’s not definitive, per se. If they were merely “intelligent” and “human-like” that doesn’t mean they have souls automatically. If you want to get crazy sci-fi and believe that maybe some such race came and abducted humans descended from Adam back in the year 400 or something, and then a race of humans grew on some other planet, then those “aliens” would be descendants of Adam and in need of Christ as Savior. I think C.S. Lewis had a book about some race of humans that never fell, but I don’t know what happens. :o
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Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are C.S.Lewis’ books (only the Perelandra beings are truly humanish - the third book in that series is primarily about events on the fallen world ;))

The Babylon 5 TV series had religious themes ingrained deeply into the plot.
 
Bezant said:
…would God’s plan of salvation apply to them, assuming they are intelligent (that is, human-like), or would it only apply to humanity? Would we evangelise them?
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I think they should evangelise us judging by our bloodstained history. 🙂
 
Originally Posted by tonyrey
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Why are you so sure? :confused:

Because there ain’t any. Where would they come from 600 million light years away?
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As I indicated in post #5, civilizations might be separated from each other by time as well as distance.

If by time, than there could have been an intelligent civilization only a hundred light years away, but they died out a million years ago,
or God decided it was their turn for the end of the world.

Out turn is next, maybe two million years from now,
meanwhile another future intelligent civilization is still swinging through the trees 122 light years away,
and they will have their industrial revolution two and a half million years from now, when we’re gone.
 
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