Albino Jesuit Assassins … IN SPAAACE!
The Vatican’s chief astronomer has said that belief in aliens is not at variance with Christianity and that any extra terrestrials would form “part of God’s Creation”.
A certain Mr. Tom Flynn writing on the pages for the Council for Secular Humanism (http://www.secularhumanism.org/) does a weird mental backflip. He “reads between the lines” of this article in order to conclude that, in fact, belief in aliens is in variance with Christianity, and that the Pope and his henchmen are trying to do proactive damage control, so the Church will not be embarrassed when real little green men are discovered on Mars, as she was allegedly embarrassed by the discovery of the New World (what the ancients called the “Perioeci”).
Here is the link: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_28_5_1
Digression: Let me explain that obscure reference. The First Century Greeks knew the dimensions of the world from the experiments of Eratosthenes, and calculated that their known oecumene (The word refers to the “House” or inhabitation of mankind, and from it we get our words for economics and ecumenicalism. The ancient Oecumene included Europe, North Africa, and the Near East as far as India) would cover a fourth of that area. They loved the idea of moderation, and therefore supposed the temperate zone was between two uninhabitable extremes: a world of uninhabitable ice as one went north, and a zone of uninhabitable fire as one went south. But, knowing the world was globular, they also speculated that there was a second temperate zone, forever separated from us by the burning and uninhabitable regions of the equator.
They also speculated that there were other continents equally placed in the unexplored hemispheres: a Perioeci which rested (as the name suggests) alongside the oecumene in the northern temperate zone, but in an unimaginable Western Hemisphere; an Antioeci (as the name suggests) opposite the Oecumene but in the eastern hemisphere but in the southern temperate zone, and a land directly opposite our feet, called the Antipodes (as the name suggests), in the southern temperate zone, western hemisphere — still a nickname for Australia. This was the spot where Dante placed his Mount Purgatory in his DIVINE COMEDY, directly opposite Jerusalem.
I merely note that the learned scholars of the Church (since they preserved the writings of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy and Crates, and studied them in Universities–a Christian institution) might not have been as shocked by the discovery of the New World as Mr. Flynn suggests. That the Bible does not mention the Indians of America is no more shocking to the Europeans than the discovery that the Bible does not mention the Indians of India, even though St. Thomas (according to tradition) traveled there, preached, and baptized. End of digression.
Mr. Flynn goes on to speculates that
“.. I think the Vatican’s fascination with astronomy, and its new insistence that its teachings will not be threatened if a genuine ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) turns up, amounts to an exercise in anticipatory damage control. Here’s my best guess: The next time humanity learns (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) that “the universe is much bigger than our prophets said,” Vatican strategists aim to be among the religious leaders who can give the world a thumbs-up and say, “Oh yeah, we were on this all along.”
Um. Riiiiiiiiiight. It is all a conspiracy by the Pope!
“Reading between the lines” is what debaters call “the Straw Man argument.” The Straw Man argument is the simple trick of attributing to your opponent something he did not say, and perhaps did not even imply, and criticizing that.
Since you get to stuff the straw man any way you want, of course, you can criticize whatever you take a fancy in your head to criticize. As long as you are putting words into your opponent’s mouth, you might as well put words as transparently silly or as obscurely sinister as possible.
In this case, the sinister aspect seems to be that the Church would shield herself from criticism by (wait for it!) adopting a position in harmony with what she believes and has always taught. Though the question then becomes: why bother?
Why bother? What Mr. Flynn seems not to notice is that he is talking about an institution that forthrightly states (and holds it as a doctrine that binds the conscience of the believer to believe!) that man, by his unaided reason, can come to deduce the existence of God. In other words, we Catholics take it as an article of faith that Man’s reason is sufficient to confirm an Ontological Argument, or Argument from Design, or some such.
If the Church makes a brazen balls-out statement like that, why would she shy away from having the Pope himself declare that the existence of otherworldly life is no threat to Christian faith, rather than sneak the comment into the world through some back channel?
It is not as if Christians are all that quiet, shy, or reticent about what we believe. We’ve discovered the secret of eternal life, for Christ’s Sake! We want everyone to know what we believe, and we even send missionaries to the Antipodes (see above) or to India (see above) to get the message out. Every single Christians is under a positive duty to spread the Gospel to all living creatures (including the sharks trailing in the wake of the Pequod, I suppose).
Mr. Flynn needs to read some more detective novels to broaden his education: Father Brown could tell him that
It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, thatdeals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story thatcontradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great MrGladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and Iwill be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when firstpresented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room andslapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnosticat all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much morecertain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear;because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.
The only problem with the conspiracy theory that the Pope is secretly prodding the Vatican Observatory to defuse the potential time bomb of the discovery of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence by making public pronouncements now, is… that this is simply not the way the Church has ever acted. It violates the laws of the world I do understand.
Three observations must be made on the psychology of atheism to understand why Mr. Flynn’s speculations seem reasonable to him.
The first is that atheists view the rest of the world with a combination of bafflement and scorn which naturally lends itself, if not to paranoia, at least to a suspension of skepticism about how their fellow men act.
The atheist, from his point of view, lives in a world of lunatics, some violent, some gentle, all of whom believe in Santa Clause or flying unicorns. These lunatics seem like normal people who go to baseball games and vote for school board meetings and watch the telly, but then on the topic of the flying unicorns, they get this glassy stare in their eye, and tell you that the flying unicorns have told them the secret of eternal life (see above), and that Santa Clause will not fill their stockings if they have sex out of wedlock or eat pork on Friday or something.
An atheist defies the entire history and experience of the world when he rejects religion, the one universal of all human cultures. He thinks he is smarter than men like Newton and Copernicus and Thomas Aquinas and Pascal and Descartes, or, at least, the atheist thinks that he has a clearer insight on the issue of religion than these men had, despite their evident brilliance as scientists, philosophers and men of letters.
I am not saying all atheists are conspiracy theorists: but I am saying all atheists must either believe, or entertain the belief, that some fundamental aberration of human thought afflicts all the human race, even the wisest. Only he and his small coterie of “Brights” are immune.
So, if you are an atheist, you are willing and prone to believe human beings, even smart ones, do dumb and irrational acts and believe dumb and irrational beliefs for no reason.
The “Brights” are simply willing to believe unbelievable things about the “Dims”, including the idea that the Pope is attempting to defuse a debate yet to take place centuries from now, not because the Pope thinks Christians should believe Christian doctrine, but simply because the Pope does not want the Church to lose face when the starships from planet Vulcan touch down.
Second, at least some atheists cannot truly believe that there are theists. (I have also met theists who do not deep down really believe that there are atheists). No matter what their heads tells them, in their hearts they think the opposition actually knows its own error, and is ashamed of it, and is taking steps to hide it.
Hence, Mr. Flynn does not speak of whether the existence of extraterrestrial life actually is contrary to Church teaching, nor does he speak of what Christians must believe in order to be true to Christian teaching. He seems merely to assume (and now it is I who am reading between the lines) that the Church is concerned more with saving face than with remaining true to our eternal truths in changing times. He seems to assume we act like people who know we are wrong and take steps to hide it, not like we are people who know more science than he does and that we might have an understandable curiosity about how the various fields of knowledge, that revealed by science and that revealed by revelation, fit together.
Third, the tone of his article is only understandable if the reader assumes that the Catholics are frightened of the findings of science. To a reader not making that assumption, the tone of the article comes across as tone-deaf.
Since he himself mentions that the Vatican Observatory was founded in 1582 (Pope Gregory XIII asked Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius to help reform the calendar), Mr. Flynn cannot support the idea that “The Vatican’s fascination with astronomy” is new or recent. Indeed, since the Vatican Observatory is the oldest in the world, if would be more fair to say that the Church invented modern astronomy, and that the secularists are johnny-come-latelies riding the coat-tails of their Christian predecessors, men like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
One final wry observation: Mr. Flynn takes the time to quote with approval one Jill Tarter. She says this:
“If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it.”
This type of casual arrogance is typical of the Brights.
Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.
The Morlocks, for those of you who do not catch the reference, in the romance of H.G. Wells, are the cannibal troglodytes of A.D. 802701. The vile beasties have the honor of being evolved from the descendants of modern man, the peak of progress. The are the posthumans; the supermen. Nietzsche and Marx and every other believer that human evolution necessarily means progress rather than regress or retardation, is well advised to read Darwin and to contemplate the hungry Morlock.
By no coincidence, I wrote an article for the Catholic Herald of the United Kingdom, prompted by my own thoughts and speculations about Father Jose Gabriel Funes comment (speculations no more grounded than reality than Mr. Flynn’s, I suspect; but then again, I am a science fiction writer, so I am allowed).
Here is the link:
Here is a quote:
Men can indeed lose their faith through a loss of imagination. Many are lost to the faith, merely because the modern and scientific view of the world leaves no room in their imagination for God. The heavens are filled with stars and nebulae, quasars and radio stars, gas giants and black holes, and roaring x-ray sources. Where are the saints and angels? Where are the pearly gates, the streets of gold, and the tree of life?It is not a logical argument, but instead an inability to look behind the tapestry of facts and speculations making up the naturalistic and scientific image of the universe, its appalling size and emptiness, the appalling cruelty and waste of the random Darwinian process of evolution, and to see the Hand of God weaving that tapestry.[…]Yet some writers see this question of extraterrestrial intelligence as a severe challenge to Christianity, even fatal. Bertram Russell, for example, in “The Theologian’s Nightmare” (from Fact and Fiction, 1961) has a pious man in a dream reach the afterworld only to discover, in despair, that the learned but alien librarians there can find no record of the Milky Way galaxy, much less the Solar System or the Earth – in the cosmic scheme of things, the Milky Way is simply too small to come to the notice of Heaven. The inconspicuous motes, called planets, circling one tiny sun out of billions are not of any note, nor are the parasitic mites occupying the surface of one of the smaller ones.Russell proposes that the universe is so wide that man’s pretension that his life, his actions, or indeed his whole world occupies any significance must be dashed. We are less than one grain of sand on the shores of the blind and numberless stars. Herbert Spencer and H G Wells voice the same thought: modern science proves the cosmos is too big for man to be in the eye of God. Man is too small compared to the universe.Other writers are not so worried. Russell’s conceit is dismissed with a smile by G K Chesterton, who remarks: “It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.” (Orthodoxy, 1908)[…]In any case, imagining that God selected a lowly stable for His cradle is no harder and no different than imagining God selected a lowly world for His cradle; the difference is only in the magnitude of what one’s imagination can grasp.Indeed, the larger and older the cosmos seems to get as modern science tells us more of its weird secrets, the larger and grander must, to the Christian imagination, seem the maker of all this glory.The width of the cosmos, the age and majesty of worlds larger than Earth, and stars larger than Sol, the mind-numbing numberlessness of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters of clusters, the titanic immensities of time, the birth and death of young suns and old ones, all these things, unfortunately, can be used by the agnostic imagination to paint our local and tribal gods with the colors of parochial absurdity; but by the same token, all these things can be used by the healthy Christian imagination as a type or shadow to contemplate the majesty, the infinity, and the immensity of a Supreme Being greater and more gracious than any imagination can reach.
Astronomy is useful to show a Christian what it might mean to meet with glory astronomically grander than anything on Earth.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
August 14, 2008 @ 11:25 am
