How Will the Church Respond to Discoveries about the Universe?

In 1543, Copernicus published his major work arguing that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the reverse. The Catholic Church required modifications of his conclusions and placed Galileo under house arrest because he endorsed the idea of a heliocentric solar system. When Benjamin Franklin proposed erecting lightning rods on buildings, the Pastor of the Old South Church in Boston declared that there is no point in trying to resist God’s wrath in the form of lightning. And, when William Scopes taught science in a Tennessee high school in the 1920’s, he was prosecuted for violating a ban on teaching evolution, which had been passed at the urging of religious conservatives. Far too often, organized religion has been at odds with scientific discoveries because they conflict with religious doctrine. Rather than modify doctrine, the church attacks the scientists and their discoveries.

Science will continue to tell us more about the universe, and the church must decide how to respond. For example, a new book, The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets, by Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution, suggests that there may be 100 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. If any of them have liquid water, they are likely to have some type of life. A recent computer model developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland estimates that at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in our galaxy alone since the Big Bang. Across the universe, the model estimates that there are thousands.

Star Trek episodes have made us think that we can zip from one inhabited planet to another in a few days. However, if we stick with realistic assumptions about rocket ship speeds, traveling beyond our solar system to the nearest star would take about 100,000 years. Even if we develop the technology to make the trip, would we go? The trip would last about twenty times as long as recorded human history. The same limitations apply to other civilizations, which mean their inhabitants are not likely to come here either.

What are the implications of all this? Perhaps some day, we will hear a radio message from a distant planet that has traveled thousands of years at the speed of light to reach us. For practical purposes, however, we are alone in the universe, not because a supreme being created us as a special species, but because the distances in the universe are so vast that we will never be able to interact with other intelligent life. If our species becomes extinct, the Edinburgh analysis suggests that advanced civilizations will continue to flourish in the universe.

It would be helpful if organized religion could help us understand the significance of these findings and find a conception of God that is consistent with them. The odds are, however, that the church will urge us to ignore today’s scientists and mathematicians and to rely on the accounts in Genesis, which were written by people who thought the earth is flat and the sun goes around it.