Jimmy Akin on UFOs and Extraterrestrial Life
vs Daniel O'Connor and his book "Only Man Bears His Image"

...knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe. §32

It is not only a question of knowing when and how the universe arose physically, or when man appeared, but rather of discovering the meaning of such an origin: is the universe governed by chance, blind fate, anonymous necessity, or by a transcendent, intelligent and good Being called "God"? §284

The universe was created "in a state of journeying" (in statu viae) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it.  §302

God alone created the universe, freely, directly and without any help. §317

... when Christ, lying in the tomb, reveals God's great sabbath rest after the fulfillment of man's salvation, which brings peace to the whole universe. §624

"The eternal Father, in accordance with the utterly gratuitous and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness, created the whole universe and chose to raise up men to share in his own divine life," §759

Christ, King and Lord of the universe §786

... There is one Father of the universe, one Logos of the universe, and also one Holy Spirit, everywhere one and the same; there is also one virgin become mother, and I should like to call her "Church." §813

The King of the universe §992

The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed, "so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just," sharing their glorification in the risen Jesus Christ. §1047

...the material universe itself will be transformed ... §1060

Life extends over all beings and fills them with unlimited light; the Orient of orients pervades the universe, and he who was "before the daystar" and before the heavenly bodies, immortal and vast, the great Christ, shines over all beings more brightly than the sun. §1165

The dominion granted by the Creator over the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be separated from respect for moral obligations, including those toward generations to come. §2456

He takes them and offers praise and glory to the Father of the universe §1345

• Matt says a vocal minority ["not a lot"] of Catholics are "pushing back" against UFO's saying UFOs are demons, UFOs don't exist, the Catholic Church does not allow for the possibility of aliens.
• Jimmy responds with a straw man argument that UFO are real because there are flying objects that have not been identified.
• Jimmy says Daniel O'Connor asserts that (unexplained) UFOs are demonic because:

  He has read the Catechism contrary to the intention of the Pope, who promulgated it, against the interpretation of the pope who released the Catechism and I find that a mistaken hermeneutic strategy... [Daniel says] "well the pope may be open to extraterrestrials but here he wrote something and if you read it just the way I want you to read it it actually contradicts what he [the pope] said and therefore the church doesn't allow this when the pope plainly allowed it". That's just a mistaken course of hermeneutics. ... What the passage in the Catechism was talking about is creatures on Earth. ...

• He claims the "universe of discourse" is not trying to address the subject of ETs therefore we cannot use the text to speak to the subject.
• He asserts that prior excommunications and papal statements about ET belief predate the scientific revolution and therefore no longer apply, like the condemnations of Galileo.
• He then introduces another straw man comparing rejection of ET belief to medieval Church belief in Geocentricism with the stars as shells in the sky. He fails to mention the nutty ET beliefs of the 1800s that every planet in our solar system was teaming with little green men.
• Jimmy says "There's been so much revolution in our knowledge of cosmology that now there are options that Catholics can think about and endorse today that they didn't have a basis for in the past.
• Jimmy discusses his apologetic exchange with Evangelical scholar/astronomer Hugh Ross who holds that unexplained UFOs are demons. Jimmy is a staunch critic of Catholics (or Evangelicals) who suggest that unexplained UFO sightings and abductions are the work of demons. He takes the position that "... the devil isn't behind every little thing in this world, ya know".
• Matt asks if there could be a Mother of God on every planet, to which he says:

  Now someone might say that the deposit of Revelation that He [God] has given us establishes that our Virgin Mary is the highest anywhere in any timeline in any cosmos, in which case, ... if there are other mothers of Jesus out there then well then they wouldn't be as high as our Mary. ...I think ... the people who formulated these statements about Mary we're not even contemplating that.

• When Jimmy is asked point blank by Matt Fradd whether he believes in aliens, Jimmy Akin says he has a hierarchy of belief in ETs:
  1. Confident there is unintelligent life on other planets
  2. "Guesses the answer is yes " to intelligent life elsewhere
  3. Open to "exotic explanations" (extraterrestrial, interdenominational, extraterrestrial, time travel) for unexplained sightings and abductions on earth.
• Jimmy says there are some debunked sightings and abductions, but some are difficult to debunk, such as the 1950's abduction in Brazil where a man says he was used as a "stud" to breed with an alien.
• Matt asks "Is it moral to have sex with an alien?"
• Jimmy says:

  it could be possible for a human to marry a rational non-human with suitable biological apparatus. Well maybe, but it's not established. It partly depends on the analysis that you're using on what is a human if you define human in the classic way of man is a rational animal then a rational alien is an animal and it's rational so it's going to count as a human even if it's very different from us biologically. So you could marry a Vulcan or a Klingon or whatever if it's a rational animal. It's going to count as a human under the classic philosophic definition of what a human is. On the other hand if you mean it needs to have a genome that is sufficiently close to be able to breed with us so that it's of the same species. If that's what you mean by a human then no, you wouldn't be able to marry them because you're lacking even the possibility of procreation... So it's going to depend on how you define human whether you define it in a classical way or if you define it in a more modern biological way.

Matt Fradd: We're seeing a lot of people now pushing back in the Catholic space, maybe not a lot of people, but more and more vocally it seems against UFOs saying that:

• UFOs are demons
• UFOs don't exist
• The Catholic church does not allow for the possibility of UFOs and specifically aliens

Jimmy Akin: ...Saying there are no UFOs, properly speaking, is just factually inaccurate ... there are unidentified things that we don't know any kind of conventional technology that it represents.

Does it have to be demons? ... I consider Daniel O'Connor to be something of a friend. I've had positive interactions with him in the past but I think he's taken a passage from the Catechism and read it contrary to the intention of the Pope, who promulgated it, and so he's reading a text against the interpretation that the pope would give it in fact the same Pope who released the Catechism and I find that a mistaken hermeneutic strategy.

I don't think you can say "well the pope may be open to extraterrestrials but here he wrote something and if you read it just the way I want you to read it it actually contradicts what he said and therefore the church doesn't allow this when the pope plainly allowed it".

That's just a mistaken course of hermeneutics. ... What the passage in the Catechism was talking about is creatures on Earth.

One of the things you've always got to do when you look at a passage is say what's the universe of discourse that this text is talking about. If it's not trying to answer the question of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos then it's not addressing the issue of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

If it's talking about here on Earth, man's the only rational thing well, yeah okay ,but that only talks about Earth it doesn't tell us anything about elsewhere.

Matt Fradd: In addition to as you said recent popes being open to the possibility. Is there elsewhere a condemnation of the possibility of extraterrestrial life from popes .

Certainly not from an ecumenical council and certainly nothing definitive um and there has been a discussion of in fact.

I've got a huge big thick book on this on the history of the Extraterrestrial question down through history. There have been rejections of individual thinkers like Rola who proposed many worlds with other inhabitants on them and he got condemned ..but he also got condemned for other stuff he was he was he had a bunch of problematic theological ideas but just because even if you have a condemnation in the past that doesn't mean that condemnation applies today look at Galileo.

So even if you had an opinion that was expressed in the past and got condemned that was of that had a scientific bearing and this all happened before the Scientific Revolution the church isn't hanging on to opinions that it hasn't articulated in hundreds and hundreds of years so there is a form of doctrinal development that occurs where ideas that used to be common like pic cosmology where the Earth is at the center of the universe and it's surrounded by these Crystal shells that the planets orbit on and the sphere of the fixed stars is just beyond the orbit of Saturn.

Well that used to be a common opinion and some people like Galileo even got condemned for calling that into question in ways that were deemed problematic but that doesn't mean the Church is stuck with all that. In the same way there's been a revolution in cosmology to where we don't view the universe as a series of concentric Crystal spheres ending just beyond Saturn.

There's been so much revolution in our knowledge of cosmology that now there are options that Catholics can think about and endorse today that they didn't have a basis for in the past .

I have an episode of mysterious World on is it always alien demons and in that one I go through a bunch of evidence proposed by the Evangelical scholar or astronomer Hugh Ross who supports the demon alien hypothesis

Matt Fradd: Catholics often refer to Mary as the greatest creature in heaven. Higher above the angels in Grace this sort of thing if it were the case in Grace

Jimmy Akin: If there were a civilization elsewhere in the stars and they fell and there was a redeemer. Aquinas says that God could become incarnate God the Father could become incarnate or if the Franciscans are right and Christ would have come regardless maybe he has already come to a planet among unfallen beings then presumably or at least hypothetically theoretically you've got a mother of God on another planet r.

Matt Fradd: That's a possibility it's possibility they might not have Sexes though well or they might have more than two. ... if this is possible then it's possible that there are now two mothers of God . What does that mean like could mean that some alien Mother of God is above our mother of God in Grace .I mean that that's where it starts to get weird for me well it but it should be weird because we're talking about aliens so I suppose it's appropriate.

Jimmy Akin: ... we don't have any data here because God hasn't told us. At least I don't think God has told us. Now someone might say that the deposit of Revelation he's given us establishes that our Virgin Mary is the highest anywhere in any timeline in any cosmos, in which case, ...so if there are other mothers of Jesus out there then well then they wouldn't be as high as our Mary.

On the other hand I think it's more plausible to again consider the universe of discourse. What are these statements about Mary are they envisioning the possibility of Marys on other planets and I don't think they are. I don't think that was on the mind map of the people who formulated these and so if you want to say that our Virgin Mary is the highest creature in the order of Grace because she has been more graced than any of the Angels or any other human beings that's fine, but I don't think that tells you anything about hypothetical creatures out in the cosmos because the people who formulated these statements about Mary we're not even contemplating that.

Matt Fradd: Do you think aliens exist?

Jimmy Akin: I have a spectrum of confidences.

Unintelligent Life:

I think that life in some form at least primitive unintelligent life probably exists off of Earth in fact I did a two-parter about life on Mars we've actually got good evidence for life may very well exist on Mars in A Primitive form um things that are equivalents of plants and fungi um there are structures on Mars that appear cyclically with the passing of the Martian Seasons that look like fungus and look like trees from orbit um so and and the Viking life test that was done in the 1970s passed it. It verified the existence of life and then they changed the criteria after they saw the results which is bad science you don't change your validation criteria after you've seen the data. I have to bet life of some form exists elsewhere and I think that's consistent with god making such an enormously Big Universe you know which way beyond what you would expect to need to just have us in it.

Intelligent Life:

Does intelligent life exist? I would guess that the answer is yes but that's more of a guess based on the sort of things I've looked into as far as UFO sightings is. I think we would have reason to believe intelligent life exists elsewhere I would guess the answer is yes but I'm not as firm on that there are arguments that even though life may be very common intelligent life may be very rare and so I I I don't presently have an opinion about are those arguments conclusive or not um and even if it would be exceptionally rare on naturalistic grounds well that doesn't tell us what God did you know there's some like this is one of Hugh Ross's arguments that oh uh the odds of intelligent life are so low it shouldn't exist anywhere in the universe at all and therefore we have evidence that God designed our solar system to have intelligent life in it mhm okay suppose that's right suppose he's right it's so rare it should not exist in the universe yeah but God did it here well if God did it here God can do it elsewhere so just because you've got an argument that this is naturalistically so uncommon it shouldn't exist doesn't mean you've disproved that it exists any number of times if God chose to go against Natural odds and make life intelligent life here on Earth he could have done it the next solar system over it's entirely up to God at that point and you'd have intelligent design Arguments for aliens just like you would earth based on a Creator who's in control of everything so I don't think you could even if the naturalistic arguments for the Rarity of intelligent life work the fact that it's here means god did it at least once yeah so he could do it elsewhere and those naturalistic arguments th are not conclusive u.

Are we being visited?

Maybe... I don't know. I recognize there are things that are flying around out there that are unidentified and that are hard to explain in terms of conventional technology. Therefore they could have an exotic source meaning extraterrestrial, interdimensional, cryp, terrestrial or time travel. All of those four I would consider exotic sources so there the UAPs that are flying around may have an exotic Source I don't know. I have studied and covered on Mysterious World a number of UFO encounters, some of which I think have natural explanations like Betty and Barney Hill. I don't think that abduction was a real abduction. I think that it was a misunderstanding of what their experiences were by Betty and Barney Hill.

The evidence I have supports the idea that the Roswell UFO crash was not extraterrestrial there was something that crashed but it wasn't an extraterrestrial craft it appears to have been a product project Mogul balloon chain um that was designed that was a classified project at the time and was designed to sense nuclear weapon testing in the Soviet Union which is why it was classified because we didn't want them knowing we were spying on them. There have been others that are harder to explain in conventional terms but I have yet to encounter one that absolutely convinces me that it has an exotic explanation so I'm open. I don't have a firm opinion .

I think life in some form probably exists elsewhere , extraterrestrial intelligence may well exist elsewhere but I'm not as convinced I'm open to are we being visited but I'm not convinced we're being visited .

There are stories of alien abductions in other countries. In fact, the very first alien abduction story in the modern era was from Brazil. There was a guy named named Antonius vas boas who was is basically working as a farmer at the time.

He reported being abducted by a group of extraterrestrials and then being required to engage in conjugal activity with a female of their party. He compares himself to being used as a stud, in the sense of an animal like a stud horse. That was actually the first one that was in the late 1950s but it didn't become well known here in the US for some time afterwards.

Matt Fradd: Is it moral to have sex with an alien?

Jimmy Akin: That has not yet been settled by Catholic moral theology. The argument that it would not be acceptable is sex is only supposed to be done inside a marriage the question is can you marry an alien?

Also, sex must be able to be possible inside marriage because if you're not able to have sex you can't get married per antecedent perpetual and incurable impotence is an impediment to marriage that blocks it from coming into existence so you've got to be able to have have uh conjugal relations in order to be married and you've got to be married to have conjugal relations. so could you um and um oh procreative yeah so Thursday is suggesting procreative capacity is also needed actually that's not true um you can have couples who are so old that their past childbearing years they can still get married right you don't have to have procreative capacity you just have to be able to perform the sexual act yes so um would it be possible for a human to marry a rational non-alien a non-human with suitable biological apparatus. Well maybe, but it's not established. It partly depends on the analysis that you're using on what is a human if you define human in the classic way of man is a rational animal then a rational alien is an animal and it's rational so it's going to count as a human even if it's very different from us biologically yeah so you could marry a Vulcan or a Klingon or whatever if it's a rational animal it's going to count as a human under the classic philosophic definition of what a human is. On the other hand if you mean it needs to have a genome that is sufficiently close to be able to breed with us so that it's of the same species, if that's what you mean by human then no you wouldn't be able to marry them because you're lacking even the possibility of procreation... So it's going to depend on how you define human whether you define it in a classical way or if you define it in a more modern biological way.