NASA Enlists Theologians To Help Look To Heavens
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – Roughly 2,000 years after wise men went after a star to find and worship Jesus born in Bethlehem, the U.S. space agency hires theologians to look to the heavens, again.
NASA said it enlisted theological experts to assess how the world would react to the discovery of alien life on distant planets.
The agency wants to know how it might change people’s perception of gods and creation.
Details were unveiled as NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope rocketed away on Christmas Day to behold light from the first stars and galaxies and scour the universe for hints of life.
The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope soared from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky.
The observatory hurtled toward its destination 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos, experts said.
THEOLOGIANS REQUESTED
However, with NASA’s eye more or less in place, the agency urged theologians to participate in its Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) at Princeton University.
NASA’s religion-meets-space plan involves experts such as Andrew Davison, a priest, and theologian at the University of Cambridge with a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford.
Davison believes people are getting closer to finding life on other planets. “Religious traditions would be an important feature in how humanity would work through any such confirmation of life elsewhere,” he wrote on the University of Cambridge website.
Not all Christians agree with some Biblical scholars even suggesting that Earth isn’t a planet moving around the sun but hollow.
Deborah Haarsma, who served as professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin University, doesn’t believe the Bible prevents the possibility of finding intelligent life beyond the Earth.
Apostle “Paul writes in Colossians 1:16, ‘For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on Earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him,’” she said.
FAITH, SCIENCE
She leads the BioLogos advocacy group, which claims that “faith and science working hand in hand.” Davison shares to views adding that “Non-religious people also seem to overestimate the challenges that religious people . . . would experience if faced with evidence of alien life.”
Even the Vatican’s chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers” perhaps more evolved than humans.
That seemed at odds with the Biblical assertion that people are created in His image. “In my opinion, this possibility (of life on other planets) exists,” said Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, a 45-year-old Jesuit priest heading the Vatican Observatory and a papal advisor.
However, not all Christian theologians believe the Bible supports the idea of life on other planets.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said about aliens that it is “speculative” to consider intelligent life elsewhere. “We have no reason to believe there is any other story out there. There is nothing in Scripture that says there can’t be some form of life somewhere,” he said in published remarks.
“But what we are told is that the cosmos was created so that on this planet Jesus Christ, in space and time and history, would come to save sinful humanity.”
For now, that criticism hasn’t withheld NASA to spend billions on its search for life there where nobody has found it. Theologians received a $1.1 million grant to help, with or without an open Bible.