“No independence Day, no War of the Worlds, just Mankind getting stomped.”

Umm, wasn’t the whole plot of those movies mankind getting stomped? Or at least the aliens trying to stomp mankind?

In each one the humans triumph but when I step back, the plots just seem silly. The aliens were clearly superior technologically having achieved large-scale space faring cultures. On Earth, whenever a technologically advanced culture has met a less advanced culture the results favor the advanced culture. Drastically.

Are we really to believe that the aliens didn’t anticipate bacteria (War of the Worlds), or a commando-style mission using captured equipment (Independence Day)?

Good escapist entertainment, yes! Realistic threat assessment, not so much. But it’s not fair of me to criticize those movies for not doing what they were never intended to do.

This is important for 2 reasons..

1. The church is acknowledging some role between science and religion (what be find to be true scientifically can also be explained theologically).

2. The Catholic faith can remain strong new despite scientific discoveries. This open minded approach might actually bring more people back to the fold.

Granted, in the case of an integration of cultures (and I highly doubt this would happen), I am sure that the Christian faith would welcome any alien converts. The far more likely scenario, I would claim, is that any visiting intelligent life would see the futility of efforts towards peace with a creature such as man, and then again see the utility of simply destroying us, something they would likely be completely capable of doing at a whim.

No independence Day, no War of the Worlds, just Mankind getting stomped. So I don’t really think its going to be an issue one way or the other.

Some past writings of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories “The Call of Cthulhu” and “At the Mountains of Madness” may also have helped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F

You can’t deny parts of the Bible old testament and the Koran references to such things as “Book of Epoch” when the 199 fallen angels swept down from the sky to take humans wives, their offspring were giants of their times…… We do have to be careful what is written over the years because a lot of it is left for subjective interpretations.

I don’t know who or what we are seeing is real or illusionary but if we look in a mirror that is what some string theorist say is what you will see from the sightings, us from the future manipulating the past. I have never met an alien, that I know of, but if the future is manipulating the past then I have been blessed by a very close encounter in my youth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=1

This however I do know, in my youth the very close encounter I had changed my life…

… and the plenary session on evolution was held this time last year not “earlier this year” as your article states. Again the proceedings are available from the PAS website.

… and given that the many historians of science – Jaki and Hannam to name but two – have attributed the birth of the modern era of science to the Church there is very little for the Church to “overcome” … perhaps only in the mind of those who read Dan Brown.

If anyone’s interested I did a wee interview with Prof J Lunine – the organiser of the study week – which can be found by clicking on my name (web link) in my blog entry.