“If you direct your mind to the towns on the moon, I shall prove to you that I see them.”—Johannes Kepler[i]
Bruno’s torturous execution was a terrible injustice, but his involvement in demonic sorcery precludes his celebrated status as a martyr of science. More important to this discussion, it is safe to say that his extraterrestrial beliefs had little to do with his punishment. On the contrary, the principle of plentitude (which basically argued that everything that God could do He would do to maximize His glory) was in place as early as Augustine in the fourth century. But the Middle Ages were the pivot point. Specifically, the inquisitor Etienne Tempier’s thirty-fourth proposition and Nicholas of Cusa’s Of Learned Ignorance rehabilitated faith in the plurality of alien worlds and extraterrestrial life amongst theologians. Ultimately, it was the revival of atomism coupled with Copernican theory that accelerated belief in extraterrestrials to unprecedented levels.
The fifteenth-century rediscovery of the long-buried texts of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius prompted an atomist resurgence. A Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), is credited by historians as the one, “who stands at the apex of the revival of a system of atomism faithful to the principles of Epicurus.”[ii] Given Epicurus’ scathing criticism of theism, he made for an unlikely champion. Nevertheless, Gassendi resolved to rehabilitate Epicurean atomism by removing its naturalistic implications. He corrected that there was not an infinite number of atoms, nor were they eternal, but rather finite in number and created by God. During the next two centuries, the writings of the ancient atomists spread all over Europe, helping to inspire the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In astronomy, the conflict over Copernican’s heliocentric model reached its boiling point in Kepler and Galileo.
When the famous German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) received word that Galileo had discovered four moons around Jupiter, he composed an exuberant letter to Galileo, known as the Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo. Kepler was convinced that Jupiter’s moons were populated with intelligent beings:
Therefore, if four planets orbit Jupiter at different distances and times: one asks to the benefit of whom, if nobody is on planet Jupiter to admire this variety with his eyes? Then, for what we’re are concerned with on this Earth, I wonder; for what convincing reason? Above all, how can they be useful to us who never see them; and we do not expect that everybody can use their eye-pieces to observe them.[iii]
Thus, Kepler reasoned:
The new four [planets] are not primarily for us who live on the Earth but without doubt for the creatures who live on Jupiter.[iv]
He could not conceive that such bountiful real estate might be desolate. His penchant for eccentrics is prominently displayed in his Somnium (“The Dream”), which described a fantastic trip to the moon powered by demonic supernaturalism. The main character, Duracotus, whose mother was a witch, seems to speak for Kepler. Because the grim reaper was calling her, the elderly sorceress decided to preserve her enchanted legacy through her son. She disclosed the surreptitious source of her preternatural powers: her familiar was a demon who lived on the moon. Apparently, during a solar eclipse, the lunar demons travel between the Earth and the moon by way of a bridge of blackest darkness. Kepler explained:
There is no doubt that evil spirits are called powers of darkness and of air. You would therefore regard them as sentenced and, so to say, banished to shadowy regions, to the cone of the earth’s shadow. Hence, when this cone of shadow touches the moon, then the daemons invade the moon in a mass, using the cone of shadow as a ladder. On the other hand, when the cone of the moon’s shadow touches the earth in a total eclipse of the sun, the daemons return through the cone to the earth.[v]
Duracotus decided to make a journey to the Moon, and, after summoning the demon, he was transported to a place called Levania. From this vantage point he was able to see that the Earth, indeed, orbited around the sun. Some of Kepler’s contemporaries took this demonic tale quite seriously and believed that Kepler was divulging his own family history.
According to modern scholars like Carl Sagan, this was the first work of science fiction. Kepler used this tale as a literary vehicle to describe the heliocentric solar system as seen from the moon. However, given that Copernican theory was already viewed as antagonistic to religion, it is perplexing that he set his tale in the occult world of the shadow-land diabolicus. Indeed, many of his contemporaries took it so seriously that his mother was accused of witchcraft and put on trial. They charged that:
Mrs. Kepler could pass through locked doors without opening them; she’d once ridden a calf to death; she could kill babies by blessing them; she had killed her neighbors’ pets and livestock; she had asked the gravedigger for her father’s skull. (That last, it turns out, was true—she intended to have it set in silver as a gift for her son Johannes. She couldn’t see what the big deal was, though—she said she’d heard about the ancient custom of making drinking vessels from deceased relatives’ skulls in a sermon).[vi]
Following her eventual acquittal, a heavy-hearted Kepler added extensive footnotes and explanations to his diabolic fantasy. The bizarre saga of the lunar demons was posthumously published in 1634 by his son, Ludwig Kepler. In some radical, geo-centrist, Creationist circles, the Somnium is still taken literally.[vii] While that seems extravagant, Kepler’s legacy lives on in his namesake space satellite, which is responsible for the recent announcement that billions of planets inhabit the Milky Way galaxy (as discussed elsewhere, “Astrobiology and the Extraterrestrial Worldview”).
At this time, the Vatican Observatory also had its genesis. Roman Catholic historians trace their astronomical heritage back to the Tower of the Winds commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576. The tower, also known as Specola Vaticana and the Gregorian Observatory, is said to be the location where Gregory came to recognize the need for calendar reform based on its highly accurate meridian line that revealed the former calendar’s lack of precision. In addition, there was a separate facility at the Roman College that also began research at the time of Galileo in the late sixteenth century. The Gregorian Calendar, which is still in use today, was developed by the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Clavius at the Roman College and promulgated in 1582. During these early centuries, there was no true observatory as the sky was observed from balconies and windows often with less than optimal conditions. While all of this seems terribly progressive, this was also when the Church infamously censured Galileo.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher who spearheaded the Scientific Revolution. His improvements to the telescope facilitated his astronomical observations which supported the controversial Copernican theory. Consequently, Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy.”[viii] Most educated people accepted the theories of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who held that the Earth was fixed and the sun orbited around it. Copernicus had published his theory in 1543 in a book dedicated to the pope. Copernicus had no physical proof but the heliocentric hypothesis was much better at predicting planetary orbits. Galileo, originally a supporter of Ptolemy’s geocentric theory, became persuaded that Copernicus was right that the Earth really did revolve around the sun.
Using a superior telescope of his own design, Galileo made important new observations about the phases of Venus, and sun spots were consistent with Copernican theory while casting doubt on geocentrism. Galileo took these observations to the Jesuits, the leading astronomers of the day, and they agreed with him that his sightings had bolstered the case for heliocentrism. Even so, such a dramatic change threatened volumes of work and scholarship based on Ptolemy. It is important to note that the geocentric universe was a classical pagan (rather than a Christian) concept. Although Christians accepted it, the Bible does not really teach that the sun revolves around the Earth. The writers of the Bible had a prescientific worldview and they described the way things appear to the naked eye. They used the language of the phenomenon.
Phenomenological language is descriptive of the ways things look and does not necessarily affirm scientific facts. For instance, even today, the weather forecaster speaks in terms of sunrise and sunset. However, no one believes that a trained meteorologist is meaning for us to understand that the sun moves around the Earth. Similarly, unless one understands the use of phenomenological language, one might think that the Bible teaches that the Earth is at the center of the universe. But knowing that the biblical authors describe things according to appearance, we understand that, like the weatherman, the Bible is merely saying that the sun rises because, to our naked eye, it appears as if the sun moves around the Earth. The passages in question were not teaching celestial mechanics.
Even so, there are still Creationists, in their misguided zeal to defend Scripture, that argue for a geocentric solar system. This is an unfortunate form of obscurantism that does nothing but discredit legitimate applications of Scripture. However, it does present an interesting challenge for us who would serve to correct them. One way we can rest assured that the heliocentric model is correct is by the remarkable success of NASA’s satellite missions, like Galileo to Jupiter, which are based on Kepler’s laws of celestial mechanics founded on the heliocentric model. These rockets fly precise trajectories which would inevitably fail if the heliocentric model were not true. Yet, they do succeed, and we have the satellite photographs to prove it, so geocentric Creationism must be false.
Like Galileo’s early work, there is another way to prove heliocentrism simply by observations that can be made from Earth with a basic telescope. In geocentric theory, Venus would never be seen in its gibbous phase (where more is lit than not) because Venus is between the sun and the Earth.
However, in heliocentric theory, Venus can be observed to pass through all phases, due to the fact that sometimes Venus is closer to the Earth than the sun and sometimes further away.
Clearly, Galileo was correct, and those who sought to silence him were misapplying Scripture. Even so, his trial was more the result of poor diplomacy than anything else. When Galileo’s lectures supporting the heliocentric theory were reported to the Inquisition, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine met with Galileo. Although the Church believed the Bible supported geocentrism, Bellarmine wrote:
If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth in the third heaven, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But, as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me.[ix]
Thus, it seems the cardinal was open to examining the evidence and modifying the longstanding interpretations accordingly. However, Tyco Brahe, heralded as the greatest astronomer of the period, found Galileo’s evidence inadequate. Because the evidence was inconclusive, Galileo agreed he would not teach heliocentrism.
After a few years of quiet work, Galileo was encouraged when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII. Interestingly, Barberini was a native of Florence, which has a red lily on its coat of arms and the Malachy prophecy (see our bestselling book, Petrus Romanus) predicting his reign was Lilium et roſa, meaning “lily and rose.” This was a significant match given that it was after Arnold Wion’s publication of the prophecy in Lignam Vitae (1595). Before becoming pope, Cardinal Barberini had fought to prevent Copernicus’ work from being placed on the list of banned books. Even more, Barberini had written a poem praising Galileo as an intellectual hero. With the scientifically progressive Pope Urban VIII in the Vatican, Galileo was emboldened.
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He published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632 and claimed that he had proven Copernican theory. While this was obviously a violation of his agreement not to teach heliocentrism, what made it worse was that a major portion of his argument was false. He argued that the motion of the Earth around the sun created the ocean tides. While it was disputed when he wrote it, we now know that the gravity of the moon causes the tides. He made other scientific blunders like arguing against Kepler that the planetary orbits were perfect circles rather than elliptical. Even worse was the way he presented it. Galileo constructed his argument as dialogue between three men, two philosophers and a layman: 1) Salviati: an intellectual who spoke for Galileo; 2) Sagredo: a wealthy nobleman who sought the truth; and 3) Simplicio: an Aristotelian philosopher who put up feeble arguments for Salviati to refute. What made this especially poor form was that Simplicio, which in Italian means “simpleton,” recited some of the pope’s favorite arguments verbatim. Of course, publically humiliating the pope was poor politics and house arrest was a light punishment. Had he handled himself with more diplomacy, he could have avoided censure entirely.
Given his pop-culture status as the champion of science over religion, it may come as a surprise that Galileo did not support belief in extraterrestrials. In 1613, he wrote his Letter on Sunspots to the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Scheiner denouncing it in no uncertain terms:
I agree with Apelles [Scheiner] in regarding as false and damnable the view of those who would put inhabitants on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the moon, meaning by “inhabitants” animals like ours, and men in particular.[x]
Galileo is not known to have ever mentioned Bruno and apparently his opinion concerning ET never wavered, as a letter written three years later to Giacomo Muti reveals:
I was in a position to prove that neither men nor animals, nor plants as on this earth, nor anything else at all like them can exist on the moon. I said then, and I say now, that I do not believe that the body of the moon is composed of earth and water, and wanting these two elements we must necessarily conclude that it wants all other things which without these other things cannot exist or subsist.[xi]
Thus, contrary to modern opinion, Galileo did not see a necessary connection between Copernican theory and ET life. Stephen Dick concluded, “Exhibiting a mastery of the arguments of Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, Galileo concluded that Scripture dictated that there was only one cosmos, because Moses spoke only of the creation of one world.”[xii] Indicative of the extreme hubris characteristic of Rome, the Catholic Church did not exonerate Galileo until Halloween of 1992 in a public apology by Pope John Paul II. He said:
Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.[xiii]
Of course, we can commend him for finally admitting this, but it was a long time coming. While Galileo was an ET skeptic, his contemporaries were not.
For example, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was a German scholar who published around forty works, most notably in the fields of Egyptology, geology, and medicine. He was fascinated by ancient Egypt and, like Bruno, imagined all sorts of fanciful connections between Christianity and Egyptian mythology that were later revealed to be spurious. He was also the champion for a host of alien beings. According to Catholic astronomer, Kenneth Delano:
The Jesuit father Kircher, a contemporary of Huygens, claimed that everyone on Mercury is merry due to that planets lightsome and mischievous influence, the inhabitants of Venus live as in a pagan heaven on account of Venus’s influence over men’s affections; and on Mars the peoples are rough and warlike, in keeping with Mar’s bellicose promptings.[xiv]
Kircher was on the precipice of an avalanche of such speculation. With the revival of atomic theory, belief in extraterrestrials flourished. Ironically, the Epicurean cosmology, designed to eliminate theism, was now welcomed as an ally.
From 1600 to 1900, there flowed a snowballing torrent of pseudo-scientific theological speculation concerning extraterrestrial life and a plurality of alien worlds. A virtual alien menagerie from every imaginable locale was advanced and promoted by many of the top scientists. For instance, the astronomer who discovered Uranus, Sir William Herschel (1730–1822), asserted that he saw trees, buildings, rivers, streets, and pyramids on the moon. Of course, buildings and roads meant it was populated with lunarians—or lunatics (depending on one’s perspective). More perplexing, he thought the sun was inhabited by solarians (ETs who had evolved to survive the extreme temperatures of the sun at a searing 9,940 degrees Fahrenheit). He seemed equally convinced that all of the known planets were occupied by races appropriately endowed for their climates. While it seems ridiculous to us, the existence of solarians was quite a respectable theory in the eighteenth century.
This was also when the Specola Vaticana in the Vatican’s Tower of the Winds was formally established under the direction of Monsignor Filippo Luigi Gilii (1756–1821). When Gilii died, the Specola was closed and its instruments were moved to the college because of its inconvenient location for students, and the dome of Saint Peter’s obstructed a large portion of the sky. Astronomical work at the college was initially a Jesuit pursuit. They set about confirming Galileo’s work in order to convince the Church authorities, but the Jesuit order was suppressed and disbanded for its pernicious skullduggery by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuits had earned a bad reputation in Europe for political maneuvering and economic exploitation bar none. Widely regarded as greedy schemers, prone to meddle in state affairs through manipulation of the royals, they were deported and banished from many European countries. Even so, the astronomical ambitions of Rome endured. Around 1786, Cardinal Zelada had a 125-foot tower constructed and equipped for observation. A few years later, Pope Pius VII went to watch the solar eclipse of 1804, and subsequently took a personal interest in the facility. In fact, when Pius VII went to Paris to crown the ruthless tyrant Napoleon, he also purchased an expensive telescope and pendulum clock for the facility.[xv]
Another interesting theologian from this era was Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish minister and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman.”[xvi] A prolific author, he is credited with over thirty volumes; some of the most popular were a series of sermons on the relation between the discoveries of astronomy and the Christian revelation, which was published in January 1817. Chalmers debated skeptics like Thomas Paine who asserted that Christianity would be falsified by the existence of aliens from space. He adamantly believed that biblical faith could accommodate a genuine ET reality, but he also saw that the battle for Earth’s dominion was supremely important. Chalmers wrote:
If, by the sagacity of one infernal mind, a single planet has been seduced from its allegiance, and been brought under the ascendancy of him who is called in Scripture, “the god of this world;” and if the errand on which our Redeemer came, was to destroy the works of the devil—then let this planet have all the littleness which astronomy has assigned to it—call it what it is, one of the smaller islets which float on the ocean of vacancy; it has become the theatre of such a competition, as may have all the desires and all the energies of a divided universe embarked upon it. It involves in it other objects than the single recovery of our species. It decides higher questions. It stands linked with the supremacy of God, and will at length demonstrate the way in which He inflicts chastisement and overthrow upon all His enemies. We know not if our rebellious world be the only stronghold which Satan is possessed of, or if it be but the single post of an extended warfare, that is now going on between the powers of light and of darkness. But be it the one or the other, the parties are in array, and the spirit of the contest is in full energy, and the honour of mighty combatants is at stake; and let us therefore cease to wonder that our humble residence has been made the theatre of so busy an operation, or that the ambition of loftier natures has here put forth all its desire and all its strenuousness.[xvii]
While Chalmers believed that a plurality of worlds was possible, he had little doubt that the cosmic conflict between Satan and the powers and principalities over this humble planet Earth were of astronomical, theological significance. The fate of Earth is linked to the ultimate authority of God. As one can readily see, the sorts of ideas put forth in the series you are now reading are not terribly new, albeit the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our age is arguably unmatched.
The nineteenth century picked up where the previous century left off and seemingly cultivated an exponential resurgence in extraterrestrial belief. François Plisson, a French critic of the era’s extraterrestrial enthusiasm, wrote, “Almost all the astronomers of our day, and the most eminent among them, freely adopt the opinions that not long ago were viewed as being able to spring only from the mind of a madman.”[xviii] It seems appropriate that this was also the era of a massive rise in occultism and false religions. Spiritualism, Mormonism, Adventism, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses all advocated various extraterrestrial doctrines. Panspermia (the theory that life on Earth was seeded from space) originated during this star-struck era. One Catholic theologian from Germany contributed much to Rome’s acceptance of alien life.
Joseph Pohle was born in Germany in 1852 and educated in Trier, Rome, and Würzburg. He was ordained to the Roman priesthood in 1878. An accomplished theologian, he also had a great interest in astronomy. His popular book, Stellar Worlds and Their Inhabitants (1884), argues that the sheer size of the universe infers that God would maximize His glory by creating countless intelligent alien organisms dispersed throughout the cosmos: material beings, unlike the multiplicity of angels, whose nature is purely spiritual and immaterial. He wrote: “It seems to be the purpose of the Universe that the celestial bodies are inhabited by beings who reflect the glory of God in the beauty of their bodies and worlds as man does, in a limited way, in his world.”[xix] While God certainly could glorify Himself by creating many populated worlds, given the evidence that deceptive entities have been affecting the modern world in the guise of space aliens, we consider the question of genuine ET life a separate issue. Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning, well-intentioned as it may be, only fertilizes the fields of the coming great deception.
The correspondence between Pohle’s argumentation—and that coming from modern ET apologists like Thomas O’Meara of Notre Dame—is not too surprising given that Pohle contributed many articles to the Catholic Encyclopedia and was a well-respected Roman Catholic theologian whose texts are still in use today. Consequently, his contribution to the extraterrestrial issue was highly influential for the upper echelons of Roman Curia in charge today. In fact, one of the most widely diffused European theology textbooks of the twentieth century, Katolische Dogmatik (1957) by M. Schmaus, promotes the doctrine of a multiplicity of inhabited worlds derivative of Pohle. Yet, it was the rise of Darwinism and its impact on the Roman Catholic Church that bore the strangest fruit of all.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and mystical philosopher who trained as a paleontologist and geologist. He is renowned for his devotion to Darwinism and he famously assisted in the discovery of Peking Man and Piltdown Man, two alleged human ancestors. The Peking Man was said to be a skull from Homo Erectus—an extinct species of hominid that supposedly lived 1.8 million years ago. While casts and written descriptions remain, the original fossils mysteriously disappeared, casting doubt on discovery. Even worse, the Piltdown Man was an infamous hoax entailing fabricated bone fragments misrepresented as the fossilized remains of a “missing link” allegedly collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. In truth, the remains consisted of a dog’s tooth, a hippopotamus tooth, an elephant molar, an Orangutan jaw, and a six-hundred-year-old medieval human skull, albeit the hoax was not exposed for some forty years.[xx] Chardin’s role in this fraud is unclear, but many assert he was also duped.
Chardin conceived of the idea that evolution was progressing to a goal—the maximum level of complexity and consciousness—called the Omega Point (discussed later). Along with the Ukrainian geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, he also developed the concept of Noosphere, a creative term denoting the numinous sphere of collective human thought. During his prime, he was condemned as a heretic because his mystical Darwinian syncretism severely conflicted with the teaching Magisterium of the Catholic Church, particularly regarding human origins and the doctrine of Original Sin. His primary book, The Phenomenon of Man, presented an evolutionary account of the unfolding of the cosmos that abandoned biblical theology for an occult pantheistic monism. Interestingly, extraterrestrials were an inevitable extension of cosmic evolution. Chardin wrote:
In other words, considering what we now know about the number of “worlds” and their internal evolution, the idea of a single hominized planet in the universe has already become in fact (without our generally realizing it) almost as inconceivable as that of a man who appeared with no genetic relationship to the rest of the earth’s animal population.
At an average of (at least) one human race per galaxy, that makes a total of millions of human races dotted all over the heavens.
Confronted with this fantastic multiplicity of astral centres of “immortal life”, how is theology going to react, if it is to satisfy the anxious expectations and hopes of all who wish to continue to worship God “in spirit and in truth”? It obviously cannot go on much longer offering as the only dogmatically certain thesis one (that of the uniqueness in the universe of terrestrial mankind) which our experience rejects as improbable.[xxi]
In light of those millions of alien races, Chardin wrote, “We must at least, however, endeavor to make our classical theology open to (I was on the point of saying “blossom into”) the possibility (a positive possibility) of their existence and their presence.”[xxii] As we will reveal, Chardin’s theological ideas form the epistemological framework for the modernist Jesuit astronomers and even Pope Benedict XVI, himself. With Petrus Romanus having assumed the pontificate (if he truly is Pope #112), ready or not, the False Prophet of the Omega Point is near.
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[i] Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 176.
[ii] Ibid., 47.
[iii] Giancarlo Genta, Lonely Minds in the Universe (London: Springer, 2007), xi.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Translated with a commentary by Edward Rosen, Kepler’s Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 63.
[vi] ChiaLynn, “This Week in Odd History: Kepler’s Mother Arrested for Witchcraft (August 7, 1620),” August 2, 2010, last accessed February 12, 2013 http://www.popbunker.net/2010/08/week-odd-history-keplers-mother-arrested-witchcraft-august-7-1620/.
[vii] For more information, see http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=7026.35;wap2.
[viii] Charles Singer, A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century (London: Clarendon Press, 1941), 217.
[ix] Robert Bellarmine, “Letter to Foscarini” from Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, (New York: Time, Inc 1962), pp. 104-106 as cited by Carl J. Wenning, “The Life and Times Of Galileo” last accessed February 10, 2013 http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/~wenning/galileo/galileo.html.
[x] Galileo Galilei, “Letter on Sunspots,” as quoted in: Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 52.
[xi] As recorded in J.J. Fahie, Galileo: His Life and Work (London: J. Murray, 1903), 135-36 as cited in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 52.
[xii] Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 37.
[xiii] Daniel N. Robinson citing John Paul II in: Daniel N. Robinson, Gladys M. Sweeney, and Richard Gill, eds., Human Nature in Its Wholeness: A Roman Catholic Perspective (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ of Amer Pr, 2006), 169.
[xiv]Kenneth J. Delano, Many Worlds, One God (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1977), 37.
[xv] Sabino Maffeo, S.J. The Vatican Observatory: In the Service of None Popes (Città del Vaticano: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2002), 10.
[xvi] Donald K. McKim and David F. Wright, Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1992), 61; viewable here: http://books.google.com/books?id=MJPsgwN789gC&pg=PA61#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[xvii] Thomas Chalmers, Discourse VI: On the Contest for an Ascendancy Over Man, Amongst the Higher Orders of Intelligence, last accessed February 12, 2013, http://www.newble.co.uk/chalmers/astronom6.html.
[xviii] Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011), 249.
[xix] Joseph Pohle, Die Sternenwelten und ihre Bewohner (“Steller Worlds and Their Inhabitants”), (Kolne, 1906), 457; viewable here: http://books.google.com/books?id=uyIyAQAAMAAJ&dq=Joseph+Pohle%2C+Die+Sternenwelten+und+ihre+Bewohner&jtp=0.
[xx]Richard Harter, “Piltdown Man: The Bogus Bones Caper,” Talk Origins (1996), last accessed February 12, 2013, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/piltdown.html.
[xxi] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution (New York, NY: A Harvest Book, 1971), 232.
[xxii] Ibid., 234.
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