Will Permission for Dirty Dancing Be Next?
Apparently a Vatican official has stated that its OK for Catholics to believe in extraterrestrials.
Of course, the interesting part was the rationale:
[The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory] said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom.Uh-oh . Wasn't imposing limits rather the point of the whole enterprise?
posted by New England Guy @ 11:57 AM
1 Comments:
Since Catholics have never been forbidden to believe in aliens, this hardly seems earthshaking.
Besides, the Catholic understanding of the Church's magisterium is that the Church has no authority to teach about science, politics, or economics, except insofar as they are connected to matters of faith and morals. So the Church could teach the statement that "If aliens exist, they were created by God just as we were", but not "Aliens do / do not exist."
But the "putting limits" comment is silly. Although I'm not sure that I understand your rebuttal to it.
It should also have been pointed out that a comment to a newspaper by the chief Vatican astronomer has no actual magisterial authority for Catholics. But the headline writer needs to simplify, simplify, simplify....
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