story here.
Taking this thread into account, maybe Vatican just covers its bases? Or they know something…
We are allowed to post *some *of the text.
Is this a bit spookily timed before the NASA announcement due today?
I’m always pretty suspicious of anyone that doesn’t at least accept that it’s overwhelmingly likely that the universe is teeming with life. Smacks of self-importance to me… 
Believing in aliens is fine (their existence is likely, given the size of the universe).
Believing they’re here, now regularly picking up yokels from the deep south of the US and giving them anal probes whilst mutilating cattle isn’t (lots of stories doesn’t equal evidence).
If it’s OK to believe in GOD, I should fucking hope it’s all right to believe in aliens.
I really don’t know if the church realizes the incredible rational difference in a belief in the two things. Someone has to realize it, right?
It’s not the best comparison. Assuming that there is life in the universe isn’t a failure of logic as we our ourselves examples of it - mathematicaly, given how large the universe is the chances that it occurs somewhere other than Earth has got to be almost certain (please no hyperbolic attacks with fomulae on this one - I simply can’t believe that in a universe with potentially countless billions of stars in it not a single one has a planet around it supporting life, even if it isn’t intelligent).
However there are no examples of God existing in the world that we can verify, so believing there is one is entirely an act of faith.
Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
With no pertinent data, you are quite unable to assess the likelihood of life elsewhere simply on the basis that there are a lot of places where it could have happened, so you are indeed engaging in “entirely an act of faith” when you say “I simply can’t believe {that there could be no aliens}”.
Btw, this isn’t something new. Vatican scientists & astronomers have been saying this for decades.
No I’m not - I have data of the likelihood of life in that it is all around me, I have proof that life exists. Whilst I have no proof that it exists elsewhere, I have proof that it exists, and the jump between it existing here and it existing elsewhere (even in the most basic form on the other side of the universe) is not that big given the size of the universe and the variety and scope of life itself. You can call it an act of faith, I would call it a hypothesis.
I have no proof (or specific evidence) that god exists, and in the absence of that all I can have is belief/faith.
Sorry to turn this into a debate.
Well, that’s the point really - you have a sample of exactly one planet in the whole universe and you cannot simply appeal to the size of the universe based on an unknown probability. It’s perfectly possible that the probability of life spontaneously arising is many orders of magnitude too low for a mere 10[sup]x[/sup] stars in the universe to be anything like enough for it to have happened more than once.
Doesn’t surprise me a bit. Guy Consolmagno (mentioned in Cliff Stoll’s second book) is in the Vatican observatory. Guy was Honseck at the MIT Science Fiction Society when I was there.
The interesting thing to consider is the state of their salvation. Paging C. S. Lewis. Paging James Blish.
Sure, the Vatican says it’s now OK to believe in aliens. But what if the aliens use birth control?
Slight thread hijack, and I know that it’s pointless saying this…but hey this is MPSIMS.
I saw a UFO once. And if I’d been carrying a camera at the time I think it would have been one of the most spectacular UFO photos of all time.
For years I explained it as probably being a transparent, illuminated blimp. But subsequent investigations have found flaws in this explanation. So now…I really don’t know what I saw.
Not that I’m saying we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials.
Merely that some of those yokels that claim to have seen weird stuff in the sky may neither be lying nor deluded.
I believed in aliens. It’s ok to believe in aliens.
Ah, this is phase two of the master plan.
First they come up with this whole god thing and create a cult, second part they say “hey, aliens are A-OK, you can believe in them”; that means that the third phase is closing near, when the pope will be revealed to be a reptilian shape shifter from Eta Carinae 9 that came to Earth over 2000 years ago to enslave all humanity.
Of course we can believe in aliens, the Gelgamecks have been part of the chruch for years!
I just want to say, thanks, Indian, for posting that. I actually got a little teary reading it; because I have never seen belief in a Creator & the possibility of alien life as being mutually exclusive. (though actually, I’m an animist.)
Then again, maybe I wept for Giordano Bruno.