photo credit: PPDIGITAL

I’ve often found myself shaking my head in wonder whenever I hear a religious group claim that the Earth is actually only 7 thousand years old, (give or take a few billion.) Or that the discovery of intelligent life outside of our solar system would wreck havoc among the worlds’ relgions. Or worse yet, that mankind is the soul intelligent life form because God created us.

Finally, some words of reason from an unexpected (at least for me) source. Did you know that the Catholic Church has a Chief Astronomer? I sure didn’t. In any case, the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory has published his views on Science and Religion. Surprisingly, Funes was quoted as saying,

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere? Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an extraterrestrial brother? It would still be part of creation.”

It eases my mind to know that at least someone in the religious community has given serious thought to the matter without obscuring things with dogma. Personally, I believe that if God exists, this entity is most likely to be similar to our own research scientists. How can a scientist be expected to conduct an experiment on life using only one petri dish? And if the experiment consists of more than one petri dish, would we expect the life contained within the two dishes to be aware of each other? The scientist would pay keen attention to the experiment, but certainly couldn’t be expected to focus all of their attention on just one dish.

So whether you believe in God or not, it seems only logical that intelligent life must exist beyond our tiny little petri dish, either due to divine creation, or simple odds of probability. Maybe God is too busy conducting various experiments to be bothered with the needs and requests of every bit of life in every single dish. This would explain why prayers go unanswered, bad things happen to good people, and why life can be such a struggle.

Maybe there have been unending petri dish experiments, of which we are only one. Perhaps some of the earlier experiments were failures. Maybe there is a chance that organisms from different petri dishes will inadvertently get mixed together and “discover” one another. Or maybe they will be purposely exposed to one another as part of the big experiment.

In any case, if this cross-contamination ever occurs, I hope that we can co-exist peacefully. But then, we are having trouble co-existing within our own petri dish, so maybe now isn’t the time to add another aspect to the experiment.