An astronomer at the Vatican Observatory has said, in a very confused way so far as I can tell, that the question of extraterrestrial life is an empirical question. (See Could ET be Our Brother?).
This is old news. In 1277, in what seems to have been a confused encyclopedia of condemnations, Etienne Tempier — Archbishop of Paris, did seem to make the point that we can’t override God’s freedom as a Creator by human dogmas, even if those are derived from the works of the greatest and most authoratative of philosophers.
Some historians think that some, or many, of Tempier’s condemnations were aimed at Aquinas. (There is apparently some evidence that Tempier had prepared a specific set of condemnations of the work of Aquinas and was told to bury it by the Curia.) I would support that major thrust of Tempier’s condemnations while also arguing that Aquinas, with some inconsistencies that greatly upset Pierre Duhem and others, was one of the best empirical thinkers we know of. For a Christian to be an empirical thinker is the same as for a Christian to recognize God’s freedom as a Creator.
The problem is: when we try to understand natural revelations, those found in God’s Creation, we can see not the transcendental God but rather a ‘Zeus’, a Demiurge, a mask, implied by the specific, free-will acts of that true God who lies beyond our perception and even beyond all possible human thought in some sense. (See Proving the Existence of Zeus.) To see the transcendental God, even dimly, we must see Him in Jesus Christ and by way of rising above the immediately empirical to see this world, the story God is telling, in the context of the Son’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. What I’ve seen is humbling. Creation isn’t about us but rather about an act of self-sacrificing love made by the Son in submission to His Father.
And that leads to the real problem in the discussions about this interview with that Vatican astronomer. Some commentators, and perhaps the astronomer himself, seem to think the issue comes down to: if there are intelligent forms of life out there, will they share our redemption? There’s an assumption here that creatures advanced to a certain stage ‘deserve’ to be redeemed and resurrected into life without end.
A little clear thought based on the Gospels should tell us we were offered redemption because the Son of God chose to take up a human nature to His divine Person. We don’t deserve to be redeemed nor do we, as finite and mortal creatures, ‘need’ to be redeemed. Redemption came to us as a totally free gift as a result of a drama, involving mostly the Father and the Son, in which we played a supporting role. At the same time, Christ loved us because He had chosen to become one of us and had first loved His holy mother and then others around Him as He lived His 35 or so years as a mortal man.
Redemption isn’t a prize given at some rung on the ladder of evolution. It’s a matter of Christ taking us up to His Father along with His own human nature. Modern empirical knowledge seen in light of the Good News of Jesus Christ leaves open the possibility that we might one day meet a race more advanced than us in many ways and yet not redeemed by Christ. We might meet a race of god-like beings whose existence ends absolutely at the death of their mortal beings.
Nor is sin a fallen state into which a grace-filled ancestor fell. Rather is sin a state of consciousness in which our ancestors found themselves when they began to realize they were creatures. I can well imagine creatures, some perhaps more intelligent than men, who never come to realize this, perhaps because the Creator never reveals His presence. Why would God reveal Himself to creatures who didn’t share the mortal nature of His Son? He might have a reason, but, then, why would He resurrect creatures who weren’t part of the Body of Christ? Again, He might have a reason, but we’re really out on a thin limb of speculation at that point.
So far as the Biblical questions go, I’d suggest that the Vatican astronomer and many others read Stanley Jaki’s Genesis 1 Through the Ages.