We are now celebrating 408 years since the Roman Catholic Church burned the last man for heresy, Giordano Bruno. They have a nice statue of him in Rome now, revered as the first martyr of the Church of Scientism. One of his eight, fire-deserving heresies, was "Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity". So it is not without intentional irony, that the Jesuit Vatican astronomer, Fr. José Gabriel Funes, gave an interview (in Italian) with the official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano,  entitled "The Alien is My Brother" wherein he suggests no contradiction between theology and ET,

Father Funes said it was difficult to exclude the possibility that other intelligent life exists in the universe, and he noted that one field of astronomy is now actively seeking "biomarkers" in spectrum analysis of other stars and planets. These potential forms of life could include those that have no need of oxygen or hydrogen, he said. Just as God created multiple forms of life on earth, he said, there may be diverse forms throughout the universe.
"This is not in contrast with the faith, because we cannot place limits on the creative freedom of God," he said.
"To use St. Francis' words, if we consider earthly creatures as 'brothers' and 'sisters,' why can't we also speak of an 'extraterrestrial brother?'" he said.

This confuses, of course, life and intelligence, since one can have one without the other, e.g. AI and Paris Hilton, as well as confusing life with non-life, talking about biomarkers without water.  Not stopping there, he also confuses nominalism (God can do anything) with Franciscan-flavored Teilhardism (an apostate Jesuit who said God couldn't do anything). Just to make a complete muddle or to demonstrate that a Jesuit education today is clearly deficient in both theology and science, he adds,

"we could think that in this universe there can be 100 sheep, equivalent to different kinds of creatures. We, belonging to human kind could be precisely the lost sheep, the sinners that need the shepherd. God became man in Jesus to save us. In that way, assuming that there would be other intelligent beings, we could not say that they need redemption . They could have remained in full friendship with the Creator."

"But if they were sinners?" L'Osservatore's journalist asks.

"Jesus became man once and for all. The Incarnation is a single and unique event. So I am sure that also they, in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God's mercy, just as it has happened with us human beings."

Where to begin with this confusion? Let us first note that the Pope removed his predecessor, Jesuit Fr George Coyne, for being an overly aggressive defender of Darwin. Having discovered that Darwin lacked Catholic credentials, the Jesuits are evidently now turning to Bruno. But are prelapsarian aliens really consistent with Catholic theology, much less with modern science? I doubt it.

To begin with, Catholics already believe in intelligent extra-terrestrial beings--they're called angels, demons, seraphim and cherubim. Why then this astronomer makes their existence hypothetical is exceedingly strange for a devout Christian. And then to follow up their hypothetical existence with hypothetical pre-lapsarian innocence, he adds to the confusion because demons are pre-lapsarian lapsed intelligence, and seraphim / cherubim are post-lapsarian unlapsed intelligence, for whom Christ did not come to save.  But then he says Christ was a unique event, and thus His salvation must apply also to these hypothetical, non-biblical, intelligent beings. Well, if that were so, why are there still demons in Hell? That is, if Fr Funes still believes in Hell.

And this is the whole point of this intentional confusion, of this dragging Bruno back into the limelight, for it is not his view on extraterrestrial life that was so heretical, but his view on terrestrial death.

Am I reading too much into the poor Fr Funes' interview? No, I think it is a continuation of the Fr Coynes' struggle with the Pope but at a slightly more esoteric level. Here's what Funes the astronomer has to say about evolution.

the priest said he saw no real contradiction between evolutionary science and the Christian faith, as long as evolution does not become an absolute ideology.
"As an astronomer, I can say that from the observation of stars and galaxies there emerges a clear evolutionary process," he said.
He said that in his opinion the big-bang theory remains the best explanation of the origin of the universe from a scientific point of view. Above all, it's a reasonable explanation, he said. As for the biblical account of creation, Father Funes said it was wrong to expect a scientific explanation from the Bible.
"The Bible is not fundamentally a work of science," he said. "It is a letter of love that God has written to his people, in a language that was used 2,000-3,000 years ago. Obviously, at that time a concept like the big bang was totally extraneous."
He said he was convinced that astronomy was a science that can open people's minds and hearts and bring them closer to God. The idea that astronomy leads to an atheistic view of the universe is a myth, he said

Note how Fr Funes is trying to defend himself from his predecessor's fate by claiming evolution is not an absolute truth.  Yet the idea that biological evolution can be learned from astronomy is pure, unadulterated, horse hooey. The only similarity is the word used to describe a star's decline, unless Funes wants to join the astrologers and assign life to these balls of ionized plasma.

Further, to deny the Bible any scientific authority is to beg the question of where authority comes from. If it comes from science, then it is indeed a second and competing source of truth, which potentially can be, and practically is, in conflict with faith. Calling that conflict a myth, like calling the creation account a myth, doesn't make it go away.

Finally, if indeed God used language to talk to his people 3000 years ago in Genesis, and since He would know a little about the Big Bang, why then is He not allowed to talk about it--as if He needed Fr Funes permission to teach astronomy? And this is my major complaint with the whole miserable string of Jesuit astronomers going back to Galileo's and Bruno's adversaries: the unbridled arrogance that undercuts their claim to humility. (Or why else did the Jesuits punish all these men?)

What exactly is arrogance? Being certain of things ephemeral, and uncertain of things eternal. It is our theology that should be held as solidly as a rock, none of this nominalism allowed in our relationship to God, whereas it is our science that should be as grasped as hypothetically as a cloud, as fleeting as a vapor. We cannot afford to change our metaphysics more than once per generation, painfully reconstructing the scientific house of cards based upon this foundation, whereas our physics should be as changeable as the weather. Fr Funes has it exactly backward.

Yes, we might find evidence of biological materials in space, and in fact, we already have. But no, this is not evidence nor even hope for extra-terrestrial intelligence. We already have plenty of evidence for extra-terrestrial intelligence, so that part isn't even hypothetical. To misquote Jesus, if they don't believe in angels and demons, what sort of evidence would convince them of another alien intelligence?

But bugs in space do not intelligence make. I excerpt some paragraphs from my recent e-mail exchange with David Warren.

a) Your skepticism about life outside the Earth is reasonable under the 20th century paradigm that life miraculously began on Earth once, and has remained here while we perfect our rocket ships for colonizing the Moon.

But this paradigm is wrong on two accounts. There is no evidence that life began on Earth first (see mine and critics earlier e-mail), and lots of evidence that it came to Earth from elsewhere as soon as the Earth was inhabitable. Secondly, there is no reason to believe that life isn't adapted for space itself, after all, if all it takes for life is sunlight and water, then every comet around every star in our galaxy will be a good environment for life (see The Cometary Biosphere). And if you add up all that great real estate, say, a trillion comets around each of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, you have a biosphere far larger than our third rock from the Sun.

b) Darwinists all secretly believe in ET. This is because Darwinists think that evolution isn't just a good idea, it's the law, so once we get over the hurdle of making the first life form, why destiny can't wait for Einsteins to pop up everywhere. The only reason for the hurdle, they explain, is that Darwin's "pseudo-purpose" which he calls "natural selection", is only supposed to work on living things, making it awkward to invoke pseudo-purpose for the first step of life.

However, we know a lot more about life today than Darwin did, and can quantitatively calculate the amount of information involved in a single step of evolution's natural selection. The answer is, that it is just as great or greater than the information required to make that first cell. Complicated things are like that, the probability doesn't go linearly, like adding apples to your grocery cart, but exponentially, like the ways in which you can order the apples in your cart. Thus going from a single cell to a the trillion or so that make up your brain, is much, much more than a trillion times harder.

As a consequence, even if every pond on every planet around every star in our entire galaxy were involved in growing bugs, you would still be exceptional. So the idea that because life is likely to exist elsewhere implies that intelligence is likely to exist elsewhere, is a non-sequitur. (In fact, one could better argue the inverse, that if non-cellular intelligence was once required to create life, then that same intelligence is likely to be ubiquitous today.)

c) The most likely scenario, is that the galaxy is rife with bugs (cyano-bacteria to be precise), but we are the only intelligent life. Giordano Bruno and the current Vatican astronomer are both wrong both then and now, we are unique in a universe full of life.

(Which causes me to quip: it may not take a village to raise a child, but it certainly took a galaxy to raise a man.)