Oh god, here we go again

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able, nor willing? Then why call him God?

--Epicurus

Cool commentary on NPR tonight about the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its implications for terrestrial opinions.  I couldn't help but wonder if the vatican had long ago commissioned some supersecret commission of scarlet-garbed clerics to ponder the philosophical implications of what that would mean and how they would deal with it.

But that got me thinking.  Seriously, what would be the implications?  I'm a committed empiricist now (I don't like the term atheist so much, since it implies a certain level of activism), so were life to be discovered on, say, Mars, I would just be thrilled.  But what would it mean to Christianity?  Or Islam?  Or Judaism?

At least the latter doesn't have the notion of original sin and the fundamentally flawed nature of man (from what I have learned), since they don't put much stock in the Eden story.  But christianity certainly does -- one could even say that Genesis is the very basis of christian belief.  Without original sin, mankind doesn't need the sacrifice of the christ.  And given that, how else could one interpret the passage that "God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth" as a kind of limit on a christian's dominion -- what about cattle creeping about on mars?  And for that matter, does a christian have the right to step upon the "second light," the moon?

I'm sure that this kind of stuff was dispensed of long ago by religious academics.  You know, in the same way that catholics dispense with questions like "if two catholics are stranded in the desert but neither is a priest, how do they perform the mass" question.  I forget what the answer to that one is, but I do remember that it's a fairly stock question that has an easy answer.

Anyway.  I think I'll go pop "Inherit the Wind" into the DVD player and fall asleep to it.