I think it's very important to explore the intersections of science and faith.

And I try to do it in my own talks in several ways.

One is to give profiles on scientists who also were religious,

either actually religious like priests and brothers and sisters and so forth,

but also people who have done work who are practicing Catholics or Christians or Jews or Muslims,

whatever, and to profile those people to counter the notion that somehow science and faith are contradictory aspects

of human psyche.

That's not the kind of talk I'm going to give tonight.

The talk I'm going to give tonight is more along the lines of exploring the implications of a

very interesting problem in science for Christian faith or in general monotheistic faith,

but I am going to focus on Catholicism in particular.

And I'm not a theologian.

I'm a scientist, so when we get to the part about Thomas Aquinas,

hopefully people who are better educated

in areas of theology and prosby will step in and turn this from a lecture into a discussion.

So what I'm going to do first is to talk about some of the misconceptions that we kind of hear about

whether there is an abundance of other life in the cosmos, almost a cultural meme to think

of aliens as being everywhere in the cosmos, and to explain why we don't really know that at all.

We have no constraints on that whatsoever.

And then I'll talk about ways that we might begin to approach answering that question,

both indirectly and directly, and then I'll talk about the implications for Catholicism.

So the question that motivates the scientific search for life elsewhere is whether we're

...