Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope's astronomers, said he would be "delighted" if intelligent life was found among the stars. "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."
Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”
Consolmagno said it was a "complete coincidence" that he was speaking at the British Science Festival at the same time as the papal visit.
It seems to me, that the catholic church is trying to play both sides of the fence on this stuff. They’re starting to realise they’re being handed their ass on a platter by science, so they want to show that they can “embrace” science. But while this scientist tries to appease thinkers, his pope is walking around saying the most insane shit. Presumably to keep the “non thinking” crowd in check.
All living things have souls, but only angels and humans have spiritual souls. Animal and plant souls are material principles that cease to exist at death. Angels do not die, and human souls survive the death of the body.
Typical religion, creating more questions than answers.
He means to say: "only if they ask, and do exactly what we tell them. (abandoning any logic/reason/intelligence/truth that they may have in favor of the religious delusions of the catholic church)
I'm confused - why does the catholic church feel the need to speak at a Science Festival at all? Are they trying to reconcile religious 'theories' with scientific facts? Good luck to them, thats not going to work out well I don't think. I agree with BoogieMonster, and someone else who I can't remember where I read it who said "Brother Cakeandeatitoo needs to pick a goddamn side"
reminds me of the novel i read, called Xenocide, where a catholic colony had been establised on an alien world, and the resident intelligence was converted by the priests. and the tribes wanted to kill each other off, because the one tribe killed one priest, and the aliens interpreted the christian ways into their own bloodthirty, warmongering ways.
either way, i honestly dont think a race that travels all over the universe, will be much impressed by our religion, and will propably be waaaay beyond having need of a religion. or will just convert us to theirs.
shame, the poor church is desperately treading water at speed, and coming up with all sorts of bullshit.
The same way all religious “knowledge” comes to light: It’s made up as its supporters go along, and, once made up, all it needs is to be repeated often enough with the right kind of solemn conviction before becoming “fact.” Of course, the problem is that the storyline can never lose any of its elements. It can only ever gain more, usually ones that are specially designed to cover up embarrassing holes in the plot of the existing narrative. It’s quite a lot like that “three-word story” game where the players take turns to add exactly three words to a developing story. Silliness is the almost unavoidable result.
ETA: Then again, GCG’s rendition has lots of merit, too.
Just imagine. An awesome creature with knowledge and technology WAY beyond our own, gets confronted by a tract-bearing woo asking, “Have you met Jeeeeezhus?” Talk about awkward.
Could be interesting to see how long it takes an alien to realize that people on earth actually take this BS seriously - I can only imagine that an alien race will assume the story of the bible etc to be some work of fiction (and not a very good one, at that) They may pity us for having bad taste in literature before they realize that trying to tell the woos the story is nonsense, is useless.
Ya know, now that I think about it, this guy has no business being called a scientist to begin with.
You just can’t make completely baseless assertions like that if you want to be taken seriously as a scientist. I officially declare that the term “Vatican scientist” as mentioned in the article, is an oxymoron.
