Man, The Image of God by Schoenborn Christoph Cardinal

Author:Schoenborn, Christoph Cardinal [Schoenborn, Christoph Cardinal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586174200
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

I

The Improbability of Life

In the December 2001 issue of the periodical Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German edition of Scientific American, an article appeared with the title, “A Universe Hostile to Life”.1 Two of the three authors, Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, published a book in 2000 on the same subject: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe.2 In its March 2002 issue, the monthly journal First Things in New York featured an article by Fred Heeren entitled “Home Alone in the Universe?”3

Everywhere people are discussing the same topic: the inquiry into a sort of reversal of the Copernican Revolution. The Copernican cosmology banished the earth from her privileged position in the universe. First the sun moved to the center. Soon it, too, had to be content with being only one star among billions in our Milky Way. Finally our galaxy became one among billions of galaxies. The relativizing of our earthly habitat in the inconceivable expanses of the universe led without fail also to the relativizing of the uniqueness of life, indeed, of human civilization on our planet. After all, life, especially intelligent life, cannot be a one-time occurrence in such a gigantic universe. Besides, the luxuriant fantasy of science fiction novels and films long ago filled in the gaps in our knowledge, and the authors’ purses, too, because they evidently meet a deep need for other mysterious worlds. The statistics are impressive: psychologists estimate that in the 1990s in the United States alone, 900,000 people claimed to have been in contact with extraterrestrial beings and to have been abducted by them for a time.4 The fervor with which some keep watch for extraterrestrials has a quasi-religious character, and any questioning of the significance of ETI research is perceived almost as interference in religion. Considerable financial resources are spent on the search for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence—all the more considerable since findings so far have still not gone beyond zero.

Is there life somewhere else in the universe? Most importantly, does today’s science indicate that intelligent life is a reality that occurs frequently with a high degree of probability? Or are the conditions that made life and especially intelligent life possible on our planet so complex, is the conjunction of these conditions so improbable, that it again becomes important to talk about the singularity of our situation?

Without addressing the question in detail, I would like to comment briefly by making three points:

1. From the perspective of the Church’s faith, there is no reason to rule out the existence of other worlds or even other intelligent beings in the universe. In 1277 a French council condemned the position that tried with Aristotelian arguments to disprove a plurality of worlds.5 Nor is the assumption that there are other inhabited worlds incompatible with the uniqueness of salvation in Jesus Christ. One may assume that Christ’s one work of redemption applies to all worlds with free, intelligent beings, or one may consider the possibility of worlds that are not fallen and thus not in need of redemption but only of perfection, as C.

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