The God that we believe in is not sort of a puny, parochial God that's just worried about one little planet in the corner of the universe.

But he's the God who continually creates the whole of the universe and imbues it with his glory and intelligibility.

Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vat the host and the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, speaks about space and religion.

What does Bishop Baron think about his comments?

And what does Catholicism have to say about the universe and the possibility of alien life?

That's what we're going to be discussing today. Before we do though, I am proud to welcome Bishop Baron. Good to see you Bishop.

Hey Brandon, always good to be with you. Now closer to you in Minnesota.

That's right. And today I want to discuss with you a couple of interesting tweets from Elon Musk, so the founder of Tesla and Space and X and again the richest man in the world.

I thought it was good fodder for some of our Word on Fire Show dialogue. Here's what he said.

A new philosophy of the future is needed. I believe it should be curiosity about the universe to expand humanity to become a multi-planet and then interstellar species to see what's out there.

This is compatible with existing religions, he said, surely God would want us to see creation with a capital C.

These tweets, simple as they are, raise lots of interesting questions about religion, creation, space, humanity.

And so I thought we would kick them around a little bit. So let's start with his first claim. He says a new philosophy of the future is needed as Christians.

What's our philosophy of the future?

Well, we have a teleological sense of history. This is an interesting issue when the history of philosophy is how do you read time?

So some read time in a very cyclical way. The time kind of moves around in cycles, repeating itself. Some say time is just drifting. It's not going anywhere in particular. It's just one thing after another.

The Christian view, and it's deeply rooted in the Bible, is that time has a trajectory. It's moving toward a fulfillment.

So there is always a kind of future orientation to Christianity. See, if time is just cyclical or it's going nowhere in particular, then why would you really bother with the future?

Who cares? It's just drifting along or it's just going to repeat itself.

But if you've got a teleological sense of history of time and it's going somewhere, it has a destination. Well, then yeah, you're very interested in the future.

You're very interested in, where is this project going? If you believe in God's providence, that God is moving time and space in a particular direction, yeah, you're very curious about that and open to it.

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