A Theological Interpretation of the Prospect of Other Life Forms in the Universe, Part I

A fascinating article entitled "The Far, Far Future of Stars" appears in last month's issue of Scientific American.  The article, written by Donald Goldsmith, delves into what he calls "[s]cientific eschatology"¹ and explains, so far as astrophysicists can tell, what will be the future of the universe.

Goldsmith contends that the nature of the universe in the future will be hospitable to new forms of life.  The reason why the prognosis of the future universe is full of life, although the sun is projected to burn out in roughly five billion years, is that newer generations of stars have heavier elements than previous generations.  "The extraheavy elements should... favor the birth of planets, along with stars, and thus the prospects for life in the universe," states Goldsmith.  He grants that, at least initially, "the proliferation of planets does not seem promising for life" since many of the stars in the distant future will be significantly "less luminous than the sun."  However, continues Goldsmith, "A star with as little as one one-thousandth of the sun's luminosity can maintain temperatures that allow liquids to exist on close-in planets, satisfying what seems to be a requirement for living things to exist."²

NGC 7027, Planetary Nebula, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute, on Flickr

Goldsmith is optimistic that the future of the universe will be filled with life.  He explains why in the following passage:

[L]ife on earth, as well as almost all other forms of life that scientists speculate about, depends on the existence of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.  As time goes on, the increasing relative abundance of these elements should yield planets more hospitable to life.  Therefore, as star formation steadily diminishes, every newborn star should appear with a progressively greater probability of lighting one or more potential life-bearing planets.  Some of these new stars will have the low masses and tiny luminosities that allow them to last for hundreds or thousands of billions of years (not that such immense lifetimes seem necessary for the origin and evolution of life).  However full or empty of life the universe may be today, it should teem with more abundant and more varied forms of life in the future.³

Statistically, the odds are in favor of the existence of other forms of life in the universe, and the odds will only continue to increase.  There are three broad theological implications to the prospect of other life in the universe.  The first is perhaps the most obvious, and that is the munificence of God.  The second implication is soteriological in nature.  The third is eschatological.  I will devote a blog post for each of these implications.

In this blog post I will discuss the unfathomable richness of the depths of God.  Jesus called himself "the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6, RSV).  So too, the Holy Spirit is called the one who "gives life" (John 6:63, RSV).  God is the author and source of life and sustains life through his loving regard, i.e. his thought.  This doctrine has its roots in Plato's philosophy.  Plato's theory of the forms is well known.  Essentially, it is the idea that everything that exists has its counterpart in another world, a pure world, of forms, and that everything that exists participates in these pure forms.  Christian theologians modified Plato's theory of the forms and reasoned to what they call the divine ideas.  Essentially, the rationale behind the concept of the divine ideas is that God has an idea of everything that exists - otherwise, they would not exist, since God's being is the source of the being of everything else.  Like Plato, theologians associated beings in this universe with another order.  Unlike Plato, however, theologians saw all things as rooted in a personal God as opposed to a world of forms.  The existence of other life forms would testify to the divine creativity.  The abundance of life on earth already testifies to God's creativity.  One has only to consider that there are approximately 8.7 million species on the earth.  With the possibility of there being literally millions of earth-like planets in the universe, with each earth having millions of species, the extent of life in the universe becomes impressive indeed.

Of course, it could also be argued that life is unique to earth and that this demonstrates the fragile nature of life on earth, the particular love of God for human beings, and his particular concern for the earth.  Perhaps life is unique to earth.  Whether or not life is unique to earth, either the superabundance of God on the one hand or a special concern and tenderness on the other is manifested by the extent of life.  God's glory and majesty are held intact either way.  My opinion is that there probably are other intelligent life forms and that if there aren't now, it is likely that they will develop in the future.  This development, however, would be a part of God's plan rather than being the result of random evolution.  It is important for Christians to insist on a divine hand in evolutionary processes - otherwise, the development of the universe and of humanity would be the product of chance and fate.  This is the ancient teaching of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), and many people today ascribe to sophisticated forms of both his cosmology and his emphasis on pleasure as the goal of human life.  That these two views go together is not accidental.

The variety of life on earth even now attests to God's generosity and his overflowing goodness.  The presence of life in other corners of the universe would amplify our knowledge of the scope of God's munificence.  The discovery of alien life would not add anything new to God, but it would give us a greater insight into his grandeur. 

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1. Donald Goldsmith, "The Far, Far Future of Stars," Scientific American (March 2012), 34.^↩

2. Ibid., 36.^↩

3. Ibid., 38.^↩

The Growth of our Understanding of Sacred Tradition

The phenomenon of tradition is something intrinsic to humanity.  To be a human being means to be the recipient of language, customs, regulations, and above all, a wealth of knowledge accumulated over the course of centuries.  Whereas animals receive truly remarkable instincts from nature, human beings rely on tradition.  Technology itself is a powerful example of tradition - it is a handing down of practical discoveries.  Human techne far surpasses that of the animals.  Even if one were to argue that animals pass down certain traditions or customs or knowledge, the degree and scope of humanity’s collective historical consciousness essentially demarcates human beings from the rest of the animals.

The etymology of “tradition” is revealing.  The word comes from the Latin tradere, which means “to hand down.”  Traditions are handed down generationally.  Every tradition has a source from which it emerged.  From the many sources of traditions come the traditions which shape the human world.

Vatican II | Source: scriptoriumdaily.com

Like secular traditions, Sacred Tradition is something which is handed down to successive generations.  Unlike secular traditions however, the origin of Sacred Tradition is God.  The primary “object” which he hands down is Jesus, the incarnate Word (cf. John 3:16).  Jesus hands down to his disciples the words of the Father (John 17:8) and the disciples, through the assistance of the Holy Spirit (John 14:26), hand down the words of Jesus to subsequent disciples.  Sacred Tradition is a handing down of the revelation God has given to the world in and through Jesus Christ.

The great Dominican theologian Yves Congar describes Sacred Tradition as "an offering by which . . . a multitude of people, physically separated . . . by space and time, are incorporated in the same unique, identical reality, which is the Father's gift . . . the saving truth, the divine Revelation made in Jesus Christ."  In other words, Sacred Tradition is a divine unifying force which transcends the normal human limitations imposed by space and time. Congar continues, "Tradition is the sharing of a treasure, which itself remains unchanging; it represents a victory over time and its transience, over space and the separation caused by distance."¹  Sacred Tradition contains eternal truth, i.e. the revelation of God the Father.  The object of this truth, Jesus Christ, who is himself the Truth, remains unchanging.

Although "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8, RSV), the theological understanding of the content of the revelation given through Jesus Christ is subject to change.  The changes which the understanding of Sacred Tradition is subject to are not based on a relativistic understanding of truth or on pluralism – instead, the changes of the theological understanding of Sacred Tradition are predicated upon the collision between the Tradition as it was understood in the past with present experiences.  In other words, it is a fusing of what has been handed down with present experiential knowledge.  Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) expresses this idea in the following passage from Principles of Catholic Theology:

Together, memory and speech offer a model of the relationship of tradition and time.  For memory works to give meaning by establishing unity, by communicating the past to the present and by providing a mode of access to the future.  It reveals itself as true memory, on the one hand, by faithfully preserving the past and, on the other hand, by understanding this past in a new way in the light of present experiences and thus facilitating man’s advance into the future.  As for speech, it is essentially as something bestowed, something received, that it fulfills its function of conferring unity.  The condition of its effectiveness is its permanence.  Yet, at the same time, it fulfills its function of preserving history only if it is open to the ever new experiences of new generations and so maintains its ability to give expression to the tradition that is continually in the process of formation, to the purification of tradition and hence to the history that is still to be made. ²

Tradition, theology, doctrines and faith are living entities.  They grow, they develop, they contain an inner dynamism which enables them to adapt so as to respond to the various philosophical, societal and human problems which arise in every age.  If they did not develop, they would be dead. 

The growth of the entities mentioned above is not open to development in any and every direction; these entities develop organically, as John Henry Cardinal Newman explains at length in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.  There is a necessary principle of continuity in theological growth and in the development of Sacred Tradition, just as there is a principle of continuity in the growth of a human being.  Although one undergoes many material changes throughout one’s lifetime, one’s identity remains the same; likewise, the identity of Sacred Tradition must be kept intact.

Furthermore, the material changes of organic growth occur under specific norms – if they do not follow these norms, an aberration of nature results.  Similarly, theological monstrosities are produced when there are deviations from the norms of theological development.  It is far easier, however, to recognize that there are norms for theological development than to actually enumerate and describe these norms.  I will save the discussion of these norms for another day.

Sacred Tradition is God’s gift to humanity, but it needs to be interpreted in light of present experiences without losing its identity.  Only then can theology grow and engage in dialogue with the modern world rather than retreating to an ivory tower, becoming more and more obsolete rather than remaining relevant.  Theological fusions of horizons, fusions characterized by the interpretation of what has been handed down to us from God the Father in light of our present situation, are imperative for the future of the Church.

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1. Yves Congar, O.P., The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A.N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 12.^↩

2. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 88.^↩

An Advent Reflection

Advent is a time of preparation, waiting, and expectation.  Israel had to wait nearly an entire millennium from the end of the reign of King David to the coming of the Son of David, Jesus Christ.  In this vast stretch of time, Israel endured a schism causing the division into the northern kingdom (Israel) and the southern kingdom (Judah), exile (Israel first in c. 720 B.C. and Judah later in 586 B.C.), a return from exile (538 B.C.) and foreign rule under various nations, a far cry from the ideal rule of Yahweh and his anointed as envisioned by the Psalms and the prophets.  From the glory of Solomon, David's successor, until the advent of Christ, the contours of the history of the people of Israel starts with an apogee, decreases to a nadir in the exile, and plateaus in an uncomfortable interim post-exilic period.

What I have described above is Israel's pre-incarnational perspective.  From the perspective of humanity, however, the time of waiting is longer.  Since its emergence on the earth, the human race has recognized something about itself which is deeply disturbing.  The earliest memories of humanity's collective consciousness is checkered with murders, lies and intrigue.  The gods were often depicted as tyrants who ruled the earth according to their whims, and human beings were seen as the mere playthings of the gods.  Shakespeare puts this thought in the following words: "As flies to wonton boys are we to th' gods, / They kill us for their sport" (King Lear, Act IV, scene 1, 36-37).  It took the coming of Christ to convince the gentiles (at least on a wide scale) that they are not subject to blind fate or indiscriminate chance and that instead God providentially oversees the activities of human beings.  God speaks to us lovingly through the incarnation.  As the Word, Jesus speaks the words of God to us in such a way that we can understand them.  Through his incarnation, the gentiles realized that God shares our lot.  God becomes a human being not only for the sake of solidarity but also to point the way back to God and to encourage us to believe and to trust in him.

I want to broaden the perspective of humanity to a cosmic perspective.  From the first moment of its creation, the universe was in a special relationship with God.  Created by God, the universe was entirely distinct from him.  There were two opposing forces, however, which led to the entrance of God into the universe through the incarnation.  The first is entropy and the second is evolutionary biological development.  St. Thomas Aquinas argues in Summa Theologica III, Q. 1, a. 3, resp. that the Son became incarnate so as to provide a remedy for sin, i.e. moral entropy, which the book of Genesis tethers to death, the ultimate end of an organism's biological entropy (cf. Gen. 2:17).  The means through which he became incarnate, however, is through the evolutionary development of human beings.

From the first moment of the universe's existence, the universe was progressing, eventually developing stars and galaxies.  One of these stars, the sun, had a planet revolving around it which would eventually form and sustain intelligent life in the form of human beings.  Christianity holds that God became one of these human beings in the person of Jesus Christ.  The entire pre-incarnational period (from creation to the incarnation) can be seen as a period of cosmic preparation for the entrance of God into the universe through the development of human beings.  For billions of years, matter had developed so as to allow for the incarnation in the birth of Jesus.  As Mary gave birth to her savior, so too did the universe give birth to its savior.  According to modern science, the iron in his blood, which was shed on the cross, was the result of a supernova, the violent death of a star.  And it is the light of a star (cf. Matt. 2:1-2; perhaps the "star" was Jupiter or a supernova) that first points the gentiles to the direction of Christ, who is "the light of the world" (John 8:12, RSV).

Three Wise Men, CC Image courtesy of ideacreamanuela2 on Flickr

This Advent and Christmas season, let us contemplate the national, human and cosmic scopes of the drama of the incarnation so as to cultivate a deeper appreciation for the momentous entrance of the Son of God into human history.  May we be inspired as we pray for the coming of Jesus into our hearts as he came into the universe through his birth at Bethlehem, and may his light lead us until "the morning star rises" (2 Pet. 1:19, RSV).