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SpiritMeadow
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Amen Petrus!
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drpmjhess
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Thanks, SpiritMeadow!
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mschrank
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Maybe they could, if God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… would a mere million, or hundred million, be enough to shine upon the one you love? Wouldn’t you be tempted to create just one more… then another?
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drpmjhess
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I forgot to mention (not really a propos of Adam and evolution!) that last week our Schola Cantorum sang Palestrina’s Missa Brevis in F, and next week we will sing Schubert’s Mass #2 in G major. Strangely, we are one of the few parishes in our metropolitan area that has a sung Latin mass. It is enormously popular, and illustrates the hunger for prayerful liturgies in Latin and with great music from the depths of the Catholic tradition. One of our priests even says the words of institution in Latin – the kids love it!Thanks, SpiritMeadow!
Petrus
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drpmjhess
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Well…and how many egocentrics does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one, and the world revolves around him!Maybe they could, if God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… would a mere million, or hundred million, be enough to shine upon the one you love? Wouldn’t you be tempted to create just one more… then another?
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Benadam
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There are very many theological reasons why God wouldn’t incarnate simultaneously in different cultures on other planets amongst other beings made in His image. They are the same reasons He didn’t incarnate simultaneously in different cultures.
The structures of heaven are the bonds between persons. The ‘Hypo’ Static’ 'Union" is a bond as well. The whole Idea of that Union fragmented as simultaneous manifestations denies it’s very essence which is articulated in the beginning of Genesis, " and God created the Heavens and the earth." This is the entire cosmos. God has established the means that He is received and it is through the bonds between persons. If there are multitudes of beings made in God’s image throughout the cosmos we can expect that God is communicated from through and too them respectively. God communicates Himself through the bonds between persons. This is the only order revealed and since it is revealed as the means God communicates Himself to the entire creation from angels to beast I see no reason to believe life on other planets would change that.
I know this may sound arrogant but then so does the idea of a chiosen people or the idea of the exclusive authority inherent within the eyewitness of the apostles but;
if there are other self determined extraterrestrial moral agents it is without doubt our future mission to reveal the source of their determination and the object of their moral life. Not to mention that we would also feel the weight of responsibility Adam feels. How appropriate eh?
Peace
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SpiritMeadow
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In my heart of hearts I love the Latin Mass. It was my first exposure to Catholicism and the images never faded. It forever became my concept of Church. I grew up in Michigan. In Flint, there was one church that got permission for the Latin mass. They are mighty hard to find, and I’m not aware of any near where I live now. Certainly not in the two local Catholic churches, but they are both rural churches.
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drpmjhess
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Thanks, Benadam – I appreciate your perspective even if I don’t agree with it. The Bible was written from a human perspective, not the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet around Alpha Centauri or some other sun. So of course humans stand at the center, just as Alpha Centaurians would stand at the center of God’s love in their own scriptures.
And as God is God, It/He/She could assume as many hypostatic unions as necessary. Sorting out multiple such unions would be an eschatological matter, assuming that intelligent beings come to know one another eschatologically and trade stories about revelation on their respective worlds.
Since interstellar travel seems impossible from a logistical point of view, human evangelization on the vast majority of planets is exceedingly unlikely. Moreover, since our star is relatively young among the ranks of second generation stars, it seems quite likely that intelligent life and cvilizations evolving on some suitable planets has already come and gone. Gamma Ray bursters occasionally incinerate entire star systems; civilizations that had once been there we would never be able to evangelize. I don’t underestimate God’s power to reveal Godself everywhere in the universe.
Prayerfully yours,
Petrus
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wildleafblower
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God speaks to our soul. In the Old Testament God’s promise of a redeemer. The New Testament is the story of the coming of the Redeemer and of the Chruch He founded to carry out His work. Pope Benedict XV sounds an ardent note of appeal: “Our one desire for all the Church’s children is that, being saturated with the Bible, they may arrive at the all-surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ.” Such is truly the power of the Bible. In its pages the Prince of Peace reveals the law of grace that alone brings peace to the heart of man. Here, too, a loving Father speaks words that have power to illumine with the light of truth and to vitalize every spirit with the hope of peace and salvation.
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inthecloud
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This tread is goind deep! That is what I love of Catholic forums, you do not get this type of speculation in other branches of christianty’s forums. The funny thing is since I suffer from insommia, I was watching the local variant of the History Channel in the early mornig hour and they were discusing the Bing Bang Theory including the work of Monsignor Georges Lemaitre and his impact in Einstein, Hubble and Pius XII. And them they put the documentary Galileo´s Sons about the jesuits Vatican Observatory, in which a atheist/agnostic physics professor found surprizing how a conservative church with a conservative Pope that have social beliefs opposite to his own, is not fundamentalist at all allowing for a symbolic reading of Genesis, and have a Pope that was so interested in Cosmology. For that reasons I found funny when someone tries to set back the Church with young earth creationism. YEC is a necesity for the Sola Scripturists, not for a Church with a Magisterium of experts that can decide under the Holy Spirit which part of the Bible are to be taken literaly and which not.
Is amazing that the scientists took Lemaitre’s theory as too Christian, even if that was right.
Is amazing that the scientists took Lemaitre’s theory as too Christian, even if that was right.
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drpmjhess
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drpmjhess
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Inthecloud, you make an interesting point. A couple of decades ago, Fr. Norbert Wildiers (a Dutch theologian) pointed out in The Theologian and His Universe that theology and doctrine are not static; they are organic and evolving. The theologian who is so wedded to one particular worldview or one unchanging scientific paradigm that he cannot modify or augment his theological perspective is sadly left “high and dry” when the cosmological paradigm shifts.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that theology is a will-o’-the-wisp or subsidiary to science; it simply means that theology must be sensitive and responsive to the world picture in which its practitioners are embedded. It may be that the Big Bang model will one day be superseded or refined, so it would be a fatal error to assume either that the Bible anticipated the Big Bang or that the latter “proves” the truth of Genesis 1:1.
Prayerfully yours,
Petrus
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inthecloud
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Thats is true, and even when Pope Pius XII was enthusiastic about the BIG BANG, Fr, later Mons Lemaitre wrote to the Pope about being careful with openly endorsing it and tying church theology arount it for the same reasons. Science changes over time, so is theology in a non fundamentalist church. They should inform each other, but should also remain science and theology in their own separate ways.
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SpiritMeadow
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We saw the same show a few weeks ago. I just get such a kick out of the fact that it has been a Catholic priest as scientist who have been in the forefront of the Big Bang.
I too marveled when I first came here that YEC could be found in Catholicism since from the beginning I was taught otherwise. I continue to be amazed at the strength of this desire to believe in ideas the Church has long ago released as simply untenable. A guy on another forum I go to made a rather impressive argument about the deliberate and willful mistating of objective reality by those who claim the YEC. In other words he suggests that their view is not belief driven in the sense that they actually believe in YEC. Rather they claim to believe it because it is necessary to their faith. He of course claims this is the height of dishonest discourse. Over there I debate only unchurched fundamentalists, all the Catholics ( or at least all that I have been able to identify as Catholic) accept evolution and Big bang as obvious.
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Benadam
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drpmjhess
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Gottle_of_Geer
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I was sick at heart - but not now. If the Church hasn’t sunk before, Catholic Fundamentalism (now *there’s *an oxymoron !) is not likely to sink it now.
What I would like to see is plenty of explanation of why the Church is no longer semi-Fundamentalist in its doctrine & methods; those who are scandalised - & they are many - by modern methods of Biblical scholarship do deserve to have things explained to them. People need to be helped, not hindered. 
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Gottle_of_Geer
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It would be*** Lutheran*** 
?
Unless OTOH the work of Christ on this planet has cosmic significance
That, until there is some reason to believe in the sinfulness of other (yet undiscovered) fallen & redeemable beings, is MO. In the 1940s, the objection was that Christianity was false because it was absurd to think that God - if He existed - would bother with the one planet in the entire universe that was inhabited. *Now *it’s false because it’s absurd to think that God - if He exists - would bother with just one planet in the entire universe out of the hundreds of millions that are inhabited.
If God is Our Saviour, on even one planet, ISTM that what He does on one is valid for all, given that God is infinite. Ideas about our being descended from spores brought to earth by meteorites would fit this: that idea would establish a non-human origin for the nature taken by the Incarnate Word.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Isn’t it enough that God knows them, even though we don’t ?
One thing I do not believe at all even for a milli-second, is that creation is for the benefit of the creature, intelligent or not. Not ultimately - rather than that, it is all for the honour & exaltation of Christ. Robert D. Culver’s “Systematic Theology” (Calvinist, with tiny print) is very good on this (very Biblical) idea.
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drpmjhess
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Mr. of Geer (or may I call you “Gottle”?), I believe that every created being will be “peccatoris” for the reason that life evolving on any planet will be subject to the constrainys of the environment. In a pre-rational context, lion predation on deer is not a moral issue. When primate brains grew larger this allowed a more complex mental life, and then when hominids appeared (who left traces of a spiritual life 40,000 years ago), predation became a moral issue. When one has the neural endowment and therefore the cognitive faculty to be able to choose differently, competition for resources becomes a moral issue. We can choose whether to kill animals for food as painlessly as possible; we can choose whether to share food with sick members of the tribe or with neighboring tribes in times of extremity.It would be*** Lutheran*** :That, until there is some reason to believe in the sinfulness of other (yet undiscovered) fallen & redeemable beings, is MO.
Unless intelligent and morally responsive life evolves on other planets under paradisial conditions – sufficient food, no disease or death – these beings will experience finitude and the temptation to do evil. So, I do not believe it is possible to have an organic rational species that is sinless.
Petrus
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