This Will Rock Your Worldview

Of all the things that have happened recently in the interaction of Science and Religion this one has the potential for making a splash in the popular conscience. Most of us are familiar with the broad outlines of the Drake Equation. In short, the equation takes the stunning number of stars out there and uses a series of probability multipliers to determine the number of civilizations out there that are co-incident with our time. The cat fight is in setting the values for the multipliers.

So yesterday, a space telescope was launched that will spend a long, long time looking at one small patch of sky that is rich in stars. By monitoring the brightness of these stars and determining if the variations are periodic, the astronomers can determine the characteristic of the planets that circle the stars. This is not new but the sensitivity of the methods used have gotten finer and finer. We are now at the point where it might be possible to see Earth like planets pass between us and their primary stars.

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So why will this rock our worldview? Well, I guess it depends on your thinking. This study should give us a reasonable number for one of the probabilities in the Drake Equation (the number of habitable planets capable of supporting life as we know it). This will edge us further into less speculative thinking about life in the Universe other than us. For some of us theists this thinking may be more of a problem than evolution. What would it mean for us theologically if there were life in other star systems and the meaning of the Fall and Salvation? We might have to start thinking about this.

It is interesting that they call the space telescope Kepler after the famous astronomer Kepler who said that in Science "we are thinking God's thoughts after Him". Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo and there are a number of myths surrounding the relationships between Brahe-Kepler-Galileo. But the reality was that Kepler nailed down the Copernican Universe with Brahe's exceptional data (based on ground based, naked eye observations) and math, with no help from Galileo (or his telescope). I dub this name ironic but also prophetic for this space telescope could in the same way nail down a controversy with simple Baconian observation.