Why do we believe? And why doesn't God make it easy?

Caraveggio, Doubting Thomas
from Wikimedia Commons

Jesus said unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.” --John 20:29 (KJV)

INTRODUCTION

Monday, July 3rd was the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, more familiarly known as "doubting Thomas".  As the Gospel for the day was read, I recalled an argument against belief in God made in Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture. Carroll, an eminent theoretical physicist, asks (and I paraphrase*): "if God exists, why doesn’t he make it easier to believe in Him?”   I’ll have more to say about the book in a future review, but in this article I’d like to focus on Carroll’s rhetorical question.

If we want to get an answer to “Why God doesn’t make it easy” we have to address two implied issues: 

1. If there is an all-powerful and all-loving God, why does He allow evil?
2. If God wants us to believe in Him, why doesn't he give signs to make it easy to do so?

The first question, why does God allow evil to exist, is one that has occupied theologians and philosophers over the past millenia.  Books and tracts on end have been written on this (theodicy), so I can't contribute anything really new. I've touched on this problem  in two  posts, Suffering--a Jewish | Catholic perspective, and Suffering--Our Great Gift from God,  but I'll not discuss it further here.

First, I want to show that religious faith is part of our nature and not irrational; second, to show that the so-called rational modes of inquiry are imperfect--there are occasions in which they do not achieve truth.

WHY SOME FEAR FAITH

"Pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the only things that produce our creeds."  William James, The Will to Believe

Religious faith is NOT  an affront to the intellect, according to William James, in his essay, The Will to Believe,  (William James was the American philosopher and psychologist who wrote like a novelist;  his brother, Henry, was the novelist who wrote like a philosopher.)   James  explains that those who  do not wish to believe in God do so for fear of committing error:  he cites the 19th century mathematician / philosopher William Clifford as typical:

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." William Clifford, as quoted in The Will to Believe.

This unwillingness to believe anything that might not be true, to be in fear of error, overcomes the satisfaction that would be achieved by belief in a creating, personal God:

"that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.
'It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so'"  the inner quote is from the poet, Arthur Clough.  loc. cit.

But are the methods of so-called rational inquiry--deductive logic, empirical verification--free from error?   I will try to show below that even these bulwarks of rationality will not always yield the truth.    And then we can address the second question, why God doesn't make it easy to believe.


Rational Inquiry--Deductive Logic/Paradoxes and Mathematics

“'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if
it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

One way of knowing is deduction, drawing conclusions from premises we believe to be true, using logical procedures first set up by Aristotle--going from the general to the specific.  Here's an example (with apologies to Gelett Burgess), a “syllogism":

• Major Premise: All cows are purple.
• Minor Premise: This animal is a cow.
• Conclusion: This animal is purple.

If you know the premises to be true, then the conclusion is true. If the premises
aren't generally true (as in this example), then the conclusion may or may not
be true. For example, you could paint a cow purple, or it could be a mutation.
Note the difference between the above and the following:

• Major Premise: All cows are purple.
• Minor Premise: This animal is purple.
• Conclusion: This animal is a cow.

The conclusion clearly need not follow; there might be purple animals other than cows (unless the premise were stated "Only cows are purple"). This type of false logic (fallacy), would be "affirming the consequent

Can deductive logic always yield an unambiguous true or false set of propositions? In his very fine book, Labyrinths of Reason, William Poundstone gives examples of logical paradoxes for which it is difficult to make a truth judgment. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Cretan Liar paradox (see Star Trek, Fooling the Androids Episode):

• "Epimenides the Cretan says, 'that all the Cretans are liars,' "
•  Question: Is this statement true or false?

(If it is true then Epimenides is a liar, but if Epimenides is a liar how can his statement be true?)
There is also the barber paradox,

• "The barber is a man in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves."
• Question: Who shaves the barber?

Both paradoxes invoke self-reference, whence the paradox. Bertrand Russell attempted to deal with the problem of self-reference by his "Theory of Types", which sets up a hierarchy of statements, i.e. statements about statements, statements about (statements about statements), etc.

Deductive logic is foundational for mathematics;  proofs of mathematical theorems depend on sequences of logical statements.    Given premises that are accepted one can draw sound conclusions, as for example:  parallel lines never meet --> Euclidean geometry; or, parallel lines always meet --> non-Euclidean geometry.

Is mathematics complete in itself--no loose ends?   A primitive view of Goedel's and Turing's theorems suggest that this is not so.    The computer philosopher Gregory Chaitin reinforces this opinion in his books The Limits of Mathematics  and The Unknowable:

"What I think it all means is that mathematic is different from physics, but it's not that different.  I think that math is quasi-empirical. [emphasis added]  It's different from physics, but it's more a matter of degree than an all or nothing difference.  I don't think mathematicians have a direct pipeline to God's thoughts, to absolute truth, while physics must always remain tentative and subject to revision [emphasis added].  Yes math is less tentative than physics, but they're both in the same boat, because they're both human activities, and to err is human."  Gregory Chaitin, The Unknowable, pp 26-27

Rational Inquiry--Empiricism: Inductive, Retroductive, Abductive Reasoning

Bee Dance to tell flower location
from Wikimedia Commons

Empirical judgments are based on observations, or reports of observations.   From observations one draws general conclusions in the following ways.

Inductive  Reasoning
Induction is generally regarded as proceeding from particular instances or events to a general conclusion. (I'm not referring in this context to the mathematical method of proof.)

Here's an example. A naturalist notices that bees move their rear ends back and forth in a special way—"dance"--after they have been gathering nectar from a certain group of flowers. The dance is the same for a given group of flowers. The naturalist concludes that this bee-dancing is a communication to other bees about the location of the flowers and receives a Nobel Prize.

There are methods of assessing inductive reasoning propositions by means of probability statements, strength of belief quantification by Bayesian probability analysis.   But it should be emphasized that no conclusion drawn from inductive reasoning can be regarded as absolutely true.   Hempel's Raven Paradox  shows that cataloging all the things that are not black does not yield absolute, 100% evidence that all ravens are black.

Abductive Reasoning

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".--Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four

 One of the best known examples of abductive reasoning is given in the quotation above, indicated by its commonly used name, “Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE)”.    IBE uses given data to infer the most likely explanation of a past event that could have given rise to the data. It is commonly used in the so-called “historical sciences” (geology, paleontology, cosmology) for which laboratory experiments aren't in order. Here's an everyday example adapted from one given in Stephen Meyer's book about Intelligent Design, The Signature in the Cell:

You look out your window and note that your driveway is wet; three explanations occur to you: it has rained, the sprinkler has been set so that it also wets the driveway, your car has been washed. You notice that neither the street nor your lawn are wet, so you conclude that the third explanation—your car has been washed—is the correct one. A pail of water beside your car is confirmatory evidence for that conclusion.

Some philosophers of science put down IBE as lacking certainty and leading to false conclusions. In the past theories proposed as best explanations have turned out to be duds: caloric fluid as heat, ether as a medium for electromagnetic waves. However,  it should be kept in mind that these theories were disproved by additional empirical evidence: caloric fluid by Count Rumford's cannon-boring experiments, the ether by the Michelson-Morley experiments.    So,  new results can sometimes overturn what seem to be entirely reasonable theories.

Retroductive Reasoning
Retroductive reasoning is commonly used by scientists to explain phenomena in terms of a familiar model. A very early example is that in which Galileo proposed that the moon had seas and mountains on it just as does the earth,

Galileo's Moon Sketches
Red arrows indicate direction of sunlight
modified from Wikimedia Commons

in order to explain the differing patterns of light and dark on the moon at different orientations with respect to the sun.    A more recent example is that used to model vibrations between atoms in a molecule, that of the “Simple Harmonic Oscillator“, represented by a weight attached to a massless spring.

In a retroduction, the scientist proposes a model whose properties allow it to account for the phenomena singled out for explanation. Appraisal of the model is a complex affair, involving criteria such as coherence and fertility, as well as adequacy in accounting for the data. The theoretical constructs employed in the model may be of a kind already familiar (such as "mountain" and "sea" in Galileo's moon model) or they may be created by the scientist specifically for the case at hand (such as "galaxy," "gene," or "molecule”).” --Ernan McMullin, “A Case for Scientific Realism. “

McMullin's explanation of retroduction implies that reality does not always mirror the model.   The "seas" of the moon do not contain water;  the vibrations of molecules are more complicated than the simple model of a weight attached to a massless spring.

In general,  the laws of science are descriptive, not prescriptive.   They are our best attempt to give order to the material universe, to put its workings in a mathematical framework.  In her book, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Nancy Cartwright explains why the fundamental equations of physics are not "true", in the following sense:

"The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force."  Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

Faith--Testimony, Revelation

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not
seen.” Hebrews 11:1

Religious faith is based on reports of singular incidents, not replicable as laboratory  experiments might be.  On what then do we base our faith?  Answer: The testimony of others whom we trust to be telling the truth.   However, even in science, it is testimony rather than direct personal observation that almost always serves as evidence.  And the "scientific method" requires that testimony not be that of a single individual,  but of many, yielding equivalent results by different investigators (within experimental error).  So, even though I myself have not directly observed the results of a quantum double-slit experiment, I know what is supposed to happen because so many experiments have been reported about this phenomenon.

Consider these singular occasions on which we base our faith: miracles and accounts  in Scripture.  Some of us believe the testimony given in Scripture, and we believe it to be given by humans inspired by the Holy Spirit, and thus to be the Word of God.   Why do those of us who do believe Scripture, do so?  There are different degrees of belief in Scripture, and many different reasons for belief.   I and others have touched on this in two posts (and comments thereto):  God's Periodic Table... and Evolution and Can a scientist believe in miracles, redux--Is belief in evolution and cosmology heretical?

Let me focus on my own experience in coming to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus.  I've written about this in several posts, but it bears repeating.   Twenty-three years ago (prompted by the Holy Spirit?) I read Frank Morison's, Who moved the Stone, an analysis of the accounts of the Resurrection in the New Testament.    Reading his account, it seemed to me that an impartial jury (not composed of evangelical atheists) would give a verdict of "innocent", that is to say, the  biblical accounts of the Resurrection were true beyond a reasonable doubt.   What struck me even more was that this New Testament bunch of uneducated yahoos--fishermen, tax collectors, women--had managed to out-talk Greek philosophers and Judaic scholars and thereby to spread the Christian faith through the Roman world, undergoing hardship, pain and death in so doing.   Surely they must have been inspired by encounters with the risen Jesus and the inner voice of the Holy Spirit.

So there was a rational component to coming to believe in the Resurrection, but more was required:   to ignore the possibility of error  in order to engage in a more complete and beautiful faith.  Or, as William James puts it so well:

"If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side." William James, The Will to Believe.

WHY GOD DOESN'T MAKE IT EASY TO BELIEVE

Now we come to the crux (literally and figuratively): why God doesn't make it easy to believe.   I've tried to show above that each way we come to believe may be in error, even that which is commonly held to achieve truth--deductive logic.   There are degrees of possible error as there are degrees of belief.  It is common sense to argue, as does James, that to avoid believing because there's a possibility that God doesn't exist, will not put you "upon the winning side".

This argument is a paraphrase of Pascal's Wager, put in a non-quantitative frame.  And what if, in spite of this plea to ignore the possibility you might be wrong in order to achieve a greater good, one still doesn't believe?  Or, as put by the non-believer whom Pascal addresses:

“ I am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?” Blaise Pascal, Pensees #233 (Pascal's Wager)

Pascal's response was essentially, "Fake it until you make it", the Twelve-Step aphorism.   And for some, this might work;  others, not.     And here we come again to behavior:  some will find it easy to believe, some will find it difficult and some will find it impossible.   Why the differences?   Why has God made it possible for some people to believe and others not?

The answer lies in Scripture:  the Fall.   But to explain further, let's see what C.S. Lewis had to say in his wonderful speculative fiction work, Out of the Silent Planet.   There are three sentient species on Mars; their talents and interests are widely different, but complementary.   What unites them is a belief in God; for these species, there has been no Fall.   Only in the Silent Planet, Earth, has Satan managed to work his will and cause God's creation to disobey him.

So it is in the Fall:  God gave Free Will to man, and man exercises this Free Will, to believe or not to believe, to choose good or evil, to choose heaven or hell. This is God's gift to us.    If God did not give us a real option, a truly available choice, then it would not be a gift--we would be his plaything, not free.

NOTES

*Carroll makes this argument, not as a question, but as a proposition using Bayesian probability analysis that proceeds something like this (probability experts, forgive me for making this a “horsies and duckies” explanation); if God did exist He would make it easy to believe in Him; since it isn’t easy to believe in him, one can assume that it is improbable that God exists.

The Theology of Science-Fiction: II Paradise Not Lost?

Yoda, does he have a soul?

"If there are many planets inhabited by sentient creatures, as most astronomers (including Jesuits), now suspect, then `each one of such planets (solar or non-solar)' must fall into one of three categories:

(a) Inhabited by sentient creatures, but without souls; so to be treated with compassion but extra-evangelically.

(b) Inhabited by sentient creatures with fallen souls, through an original but not inevitable ancestral sin; so to be evangelized with urgent missionary charity.

(c) Inhabited by sentient soul-endowed creatures that have not fallen, who therefore

• (1) inhabit an unfallen, sinless paradisal world;
• (2) who therefore we must contact not to propagandize, but in order that we may learn from them the conditions (about which we can only speculate) of creatures living in perpetual grace, endowed with all the virtues in perfection, and both immortal and in complete happiness for always possessed of and with the knowledge of God.' "  James Blish, quoting Gerald Heard, from David Ketterer's Covering 'A Case of Conscience'

WHO HAS A SOUL?

The quote above outlines what SF might say about the theological state of non-human intelligent life, but it leaves questions to be answered.    Certainly one would not try to convert Deep Blue, the computer that beat Gary Kasparov in chess, nor would one (I hope) send a missionary to the local S.P.C.A.     What then is the requirement that one be fallen, saved or in a state of grace?   The quote distinguishes between intelligent life with and without souls ("sentient creatures, but without souls").     But what, when it comes down to it, are the hallmarks of having a soul?  

I'm going to use some quotes from an earlier post, "Would Yoda have a Soul?" that explore this question.

"The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual...soul refers to the innermost aspect of man, that by which he is most specially in God's image:  'soul' signifies the spiritual principle in man...it is because of the spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes  a living, human body;  spirit and body in man are not two natures united but rather their union forms a single nature."  Catechism of the Catholic Church, excerpted from paragraphs 362, 363, 365.

Now that is a complete statement, but it doesn't make the properties of a soul explicit.   What do these properties entail--belief in a deity?   a moral/ethical code?   wonder about the meaning of it all?   As Brother Guy Consulagmo, a Vatican astronomer, put it when discussing alien life:

 "Going back to the Middle Ages, the definition of a soul is to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love or not to love, freedom to make decisions..." 

And here's what C.S. Lewis has to say:

 "By this (rational souls) I include not merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the apprehension of values, the power to mean by 'good' something more than 'good for me' or even 'good for my species'." (from Religion and Rocketry in The World's Last Night)

Finally, what about souls for non-biological entities--computers, robots, biological intelligence implanted into brains?   I'll deal with that issue in the next post on this topic.

As we'll see below,  SF has treated all these categories

PARADISE NOT LOST

Let's start with C.S. Lewis's magnificent "Space Trilogy" (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength).   I won't attempt to reprise the plot or characters (go to the link), but rather focus on the elements that display Lewis's theological construct for his SF universe: a pyramidal theological structure of deity and creatures that seems to be a mixture of mythology and Christianity, as depicted below:

•  GOD (Maledil, and his son--the son of Maledil on Thulcandra--and the Third)
•  Oyarsa  (archangels,  Lords of each planet)
•  Eldila (angels, immaterial beings) 
•  hnau (rational, mortal, material beings)

The Oyarsa, lords of each planet, are very much like the gods of the ancient Pantheon.   The Oyarsa of Mars is masculine (but not male), of Venus feminine (but not female), of Jupiter, multigendered, ...[I call to mind Gustav Holst's "The Planets].   

On earth (Thulcandra) the "bent" Oyarsa, Satan, has fought God and tempted the first humans to disobey God; thus comes The  Fall--Thulcandra becomes the "silent planet", interdicted from relations with all the others and humans become, like Satan, "bent".   

On Mars (Malacandra) there are three intelligent species (hnau)*:   the Sorns (Seroni), who are the philosopher/scientists;  the Hrossa, who are the poet/musician/story-tellers;  the Pfifitiggri, the artisan/engineers.     All three species live together in peace, supplying talents and services that are missing in their own species.  They have a common language and a common theology, believing in Eldila (who are present to them), the Oyarsa of Mars, and the supreme being, Maledil.     They believe in an ordered existence, the rule of God (Maledil) and have no fear of death;  they know when they will die and that they will be transported to a Heaven in outer space.   The quotes below give a better account than mine:   

"And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”  said by a Hrossa,  talking about death.

  “They cannot help it,' said the old sorn. 'There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maledldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair-or one trying to see over a while country when he is on a level with it-like a female trying to beget young on herself.”   said by a Sorn, talking about the state of Hmans (humans).  

The hnau of Malacandra were tempted by Satan, but the temptation was overcome by the Oyarsa of Malacandra:

 "Many thousands of thousand years before this, when nothing yet lived on your world, the cold death was coming on my harandra. Then I was in deep trouble, not chiefly for the death of my hnau - Maleldil does not make them long-livers -but for the things which the lord of your world, who was not yet bound, put into their minds. He would have made them as your people are now - wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it. [emphasis added] Bent counsels would soon have risen among them. They were well able to have made sky-ships. By me Maleldil stopped them." said by the Oyarsa to the scientist, Weston (the villain)

 "Yes," said Oyarsa, "but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace. "  said by the Oyarsa in reply to Weston's comment that they (the Malacandrian hnau) will all die soon. 

Perelandra (Venus) is the Garden of Eden before the fall.   There is a wealth of plant and animal species inhabiting the sea and floating islands, and over them a humanoid queen and king (albeit green).   As in the Garden of Eden, God (Maledil) gives them a paradise but also a prohibition: they may not stay overnight on the one fixed bit of Perelandrian land.   Satan sends Weston, possessed by a demon, to tempt the queen to violate the prohibition.  Weston is overcome by the agent, Ransom, sent by Maledil to prevent the Fall.  After this, there is a glorious dance by the Queen, King and all the fauna and flora of Perelandra to celebrate the coming of a true paradise,     Here's the crucial theological issue: doing what God wills is not only good for us, but also shows our love for Him.  Thus, disobedience in what might seem a small matter--staying overnight on the fixed land, despite His prohibition--is not a small matter, because we thus attempt to assert our better knowledge of how we should act.  Ransom (the hero), trying to dissuade the queen from Weston's temptation, argues why God should be obeyed:

 "I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?” Perelandra, p. 59

In summary, the first two books of Lewis's Space Trilogy stress:

• the rule of God gives us what is good;
• before the fall we would know when we would die, but that we would also know that heaven awaits us, so that "Death has lost its sting";
• we show our love for God by obedience to his commands.

OTHER VISIONS

C.S. lewis's vision  is that of c) in the beginning quote, "inhabited by sentient soul-endowed creatures that have not fallen".    What about a) "sentient creatures, but without souls" and b) "sentient creatures with fallen souls"?    I'll discuss the SF examples of these briefly, because I don't think they make the strong  theological points of the Space Trilogy.

In category a is "A Case of Conscience",  by James Blish.  For plot and further commentary by Br. Guy Consolmagno,  the Vatican Astronomer, please use the link.  It deals with Lithians, a reptilian species who behave according to an inborn, "hardwired" ethical system,  but who have no religious beliefs.   They are visited by a team of scientists, including a Jesuit missionary (whence the judgment of Lithian ethics), The missionary concludes that the Lithians are the work of Satan, created as a convincing argument that belief in God is not necessary in order to behave ethically, as humanists and atheists propose.  Can one imagine intelligent, self-aware beings not wondering about the purpose of their lives, how everything came to be,  putting forth the "why" questions?   Thus the basic premise of the novel does not seem very plausible to me.   And perhaps the injunction given in the beginning quote, "to be treated with compassion, but extra-evangelically", might have been the better course (although destructive of the novel's plot).

In category b are "The Sparrow" and "Children of God", by Mary Doria Russell.   It deals with the interactions of a Jesuit priest (again the Jesuits!) with two alien species who are sentient, but with a faulty moral code.   Critics have argued that the works deal with "faith under fire".  That may be so, but there are no good theological arguments put forth.    Indeed, the Jesuit missionary loses his faith after being tortured and sexually abused by the dominant species; there is no vision of redemption or suffering for Christ.    

There are other instances of alien intelligences adapting or transforming the Christian religion and interacting with the Church, given in references for Part I of this series.   Most have a strongly anti-religious bias.  An extreme example is that given by George R.R. Martin in "The Way of Cross and Dragon".   A huge cephalopod is an Archbishop of the transformed Church, "The One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds", who sends an Inquisitor out to determine whether a cult promoting the "Gospel According to Judas Iscariot" is heretical.    The tone of the short story is anti-religious--the Inquisitor is successful in prosecuting the heresy but loses his faith, becoming convinced that he is the Prince of Liars.

MORE TO COME

The next in this series will deal with: can computers, robots and implanted intelligences have souls?
If yes, what then?

*Images of the creatures in the Space Trilogy can be seen in the following links:
Hrossa, Pfifitriggi, Sorns (Seroni)

For References, please see Part I of this Series

                                    

In His image: Would Yoda have a soul?

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.    Psalm 8, v4-8.

Is there intelligent life on other worlds?  A question invariably asked when I was catechizing minimum security prisoners and adult pupils at "Science and the Church" classes,    And if there is, do such beings have souls?

As far as Yoda goes, most people who have seen the Star Wars epics would probably answer "Yes, of course!"... given that Yoda is a hero, cute, and knows how to manipulate THE FORCE to good ends... but then those considerations do not really take into account what the Church has to say about souls:

"The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual....Man, whole and entire is therefore willed by God...soul refers to the innermost aspect of man, that by which he is most specially in God's image:  'soul' signifies the spiritual principle in man...it is because of the spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes  a living, human body;  spirit and body in man are not two natures united but rather their union forms a single nature."  Catechism of the Catholic Church, excerpted from paragraphs 362, 363, 365.

Now that is a complete statement, but it doesn't make the properties of a soul explicit.   What do these properties entail--belief in a deity?   a moral/ethical code?   wonder about the meaning of it all?   There is another quote, wrongly attributed to C.S. Lewis, but actually from the science-fiction author, Walter M. Miller, Jr. (author of a "Canticle for Leibowitz") that to me is a satisfactory statement (with properties still left undefined), in agreement with the Catechism:

"You don't have a soul.   You are a soul.   You have a body."

And as Brother Guy Consulagmo, a Vatican astronomer, put it when discussing alien life:

 "Going back to the Middle Ages, the definition of a soul is to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love or not to love, freedom to make decisions...

Finally, here's what C.S. Lewis has to say:

 "By this (rational souls) I include not merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the apprehension of values, the power to mean by 'good' something more than 'good for me' or even 'good for my species'." (from Religion and Rocketry in The World's Last Night)

Given that this issue is settled (???), let's move on to the next question: do intelligent extraterrestial beings exist? Are we alone in the universe? The Church as an institution is also interested: in 2009 the Vatican held a week-long conference on the existence of extra-terrestial life.   A number of scientific and religious issues were considered, but no consensus was reached.   We think that alien life would be based on carbon-based biochemistry like that on Earth, but that assumption might not hold.  If it does hold, then to make an estimate we'd need to know how many earth-like planets there are, and then make some estimates of how many of these would develop life, and the probability that such life would become intelligent.  The Drake Equation gives such an estimate for the number of planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, as between a thousand and hundred million (that's quite a big error limit!).  Many new discoveries of "earth-like" planets are reported: a recent estimate of such in our galaxy is a hundred billion, and a hundred sextillion in the universe. So then the critical links are the probability of life originating on an earth-like planet (or even non-earth like) and the probability of such life developing intelligence.  Shown below are pictures (drawings, not scientific images) of the five most earthlike planets.   We want to emphasize that the properties of these planets are inferred from astronomical data; no astronomical images of planets this small have been observed.

And then we have to consider the Fermi Paradox, "where is everybody?", if such life exists. Why is there no evidence of communication--radio, satellites, whatever--that science-fiction portrays in much detail? Or would intelligent life take other paths than technological? (I ignore flying saucer reports--those are legend and myth.)

Well, let's brush the Fermi Paradox under the rug, and assume that somewhere over the rainbow, outside our solar system, intelligent life exists. Would such life necessarily have souls? And what is the attitude of the Church toward such beings? Would the Church have a mission to save them, as it did in the Americas and Asia?   According to one of the Vatican Observatory astronomers, Brother Guy Consolmagno, the answer is "Yes" : "Any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul."
The situation is complex and not to be explained simply by examining the properties of souls listed above.   The most trenchant exposition has been given by C.S. Lewis in his essay, Religion and Rocketry.   Here are the issues to be considered:

• Do these aliens have a rational soul?   Computers, no matter what their degree of artificial intelligence would not.  (I'm reminded of an anecdote, probably apocryphal, about a world famous computer expert who was giving a seminar on artificial intelligence at an academic institution where I was teaching.    Someone in the audience asked him 'would you want your daughter to marry a computer?'  and another voice shouted out immediately "Why not--his wife did.")
• If these aliens have rational souls, are they fallen, or are they like Adam and Eve before the Fall, in a state of innocence and grace?   If they are not fallen, would it be appropriate to send missionaries to them?
• "If all of them (and surely all is a long shot) or any of them have fallen have they been denied Redemption by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ? For of course it is no very new idea that the eternal Son may, for all we know, have been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours." (quote from Rocketry and Religion.) In the first book of his wonderful speculative fiction trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet" Lewis considers such alien intelligent beings that have not fallen, innocent and without Original Sin.
• Lewis considers whether missionary activity to fallen species would be corrupting or  salvational, whether Christ could have appeared to other fallen species, or whether God might have given other forms of Redemption--read the essay from the link for a fuller exposition.

Have we answered the original question?   NO!, but another quote from Religion and Rocketry is apposite:

"If I remember rightly, St. Augustine raised a question about the theological position of satyrs, monopods, and other semi-human creatures. He decided it could wait till we knew there were any. So can this."

Finally, I'll put my own position down--it's exemplified in a fine science-fiction story (science-fiction is my fourth best theological resource, following Holy Scripture, St. Augustine, and St.Thomas Aquinas).   A scientific couple embark on a search through the galaxy for life, any life.   The search proves fruitless, the wife dies, but finally the husband realizes as he is about to die that he is not really alone; in a final epiphany he realizes the truth of Scripture, that the universe has been created by God, and man as the image of God, as in Psalm 8.