…with the James Web Telescope looking for sources of artificial light to identify potential intelligent life, and the news this week of Perseverance searching for microbial life on Mars it feels like we are getting closer to a major discovery. But what - if anything - would it mean for the religions on Earth if life is proven to exist out there?
I don’t know why the existence of aliens would rattle anyone’s belief. Unless you can find a way to take away their threat of dying, they’re going to believe in God.
It is a strange situation for me. I know that one day it will be it for me. A billion eons and a single second will be the same. For the theist they are facing a chance at magical underground fire place. Wouldn’t painless non-existence be so much better than infinite torture? I won’t even know that I no longer exist because there will be no I to know. If they invented the afterlife to feel better about death why even a chance that it can go wrong? I would invent heaven but not hell.
Is OP implying there are religions that deny the existence of aliens? Most religions of a spirit realm, hidden realm for supernaturals, etc. I also don’t see the connections…
Hi! I was listening to a podcast awhile ago that stuck with me and they discussed a book I am struggling to remember the name of. In it, a religious man travels to a planet of intelligent alien life to make first contact.
All the aliens live peacefully, in harmony with the enviroment. There is no crime, poverty or muder. Everyone is kind to each other. But not a single being on the planet has ever heard of God, or made contact with any divine being. This troubles the protaganists conscious as they found an perfect balance of life without any guide. When he returns to Earth, he is told that the Devil must have invented the aliens to test his faith.
Thats all the details I can remember but it was a fair and unbiased story and it came to mind with all the recent news nentioned above. Thats all.
Me personally, I think God created all of our planets and all of our stars and whatever life lives in the universe, even outside of Earth. People who believe the same way would just stay the same and would praise God more for how great he is.
For the others though (iykyk)… well, they’re gonna be like all the other flat-earthers or they call these aliens devil spawn or whatever.
You are not. You believe that there is a being infinitely better than you watching your ever thought and action ready to punish you for the slightest deviation from acceptable behavior. Where acceptable is ambiguous and unavoidable.
Anyway I am sure you have better things to do as a sky-daddy follower than write rhetorical questions. Like oppress some minority. You theists are good at that.
First of all, not all theists, in my experience, believe in the exact same things. Me, I don’t think God would punish people for the ‘slightest deviation from acceptable behaviour’.
Second of all, don’t generalize. I’m aware that there are many self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ who oppress minorities, but not all. So please, no ad hominem :)
Your Bible disagrees making you a heretic which according to the bible makes you worthy of death.
Secondly I will generalize whatever I want whenever I feel like it. Especially considering by sheer numbers Christianity had the highest murder count and is active threat to me, my family, and friends. I don’t care about your True Scotsman unicorn Christian that is totally not made up.
Hey remember when your Pope Pat Robertson said this
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
If Christianity vanished from the world tomorrow the only loss would be bingo games for the elderly.
Have a nice day, praise Satan, and remember that God is dead.
In general I think it would just give religions a new group to hate. They would be “Creatures not of God, but of the Devil Himself” in the same way that Christians think of other religions as born of the Canaanites and influenced by Satan.
Did you know the Big Bang is called that because Adam was banging Eve?
No, it wasn’t. Science has long proven that religion is a pure hoax, that’s why many studious individuals were burned to death or persecuted throughout human history.
It may have disproven the claim that some creation myths are to be taken literally (and even that is questionable if you assume a trickster deity), but it’s impossible to disprove religion itself.
Ancestor worship for example is wholly unconcerned about how exactly the world came into existence.
Most denominations of Christianity just take the Judeo-Christian creation myth as primarily who created the universe, and not really how, and a categorisation of things and beings.
Most religions primarily make claims about what happens to the self after death and whether one’s life influences that. Unless science opens a portal to an actual afterlife somehow, that is not something science can answer, and religions will continue to exist.
I think OP picked ‘aliens’ because it would be an event where the whole world has to acknowledge that they exist and it would also contradict probably most of the current religions
I’d argue the opposite. Most religions don’t care about aliens existing or not (ancestor worship, Shinto, all Dharmic religions as far as I know, animism, etc.). Others have already made arguments why aliens should exist according to their religion (argued by at least one catholic “saint”), while others would find it difficult but not impossible to fit aliens into their belief systems.
Similarly, the Big Bang at best disproves the literal nature of a religion’s creation myth, if such a myth exists to begin with. An ancient Greek would just tell you that obviously the Big Bang or its aftermath is Chaos, from which the first gods came. An elf in Tolkien’s legendarium would tell you that obviously that was the beginning of Ea (the universe), sung into existence by the first notes sung by the Maiar. A Hindu might say something about Brahman being split into smaller existences.
I think at least with Christianity it would be similar of changing the everything orbiting the Earth to Earth orbiting the Sun. They’d just declare that it is all God’s creation and be done with it.
You can’t really prove negatives. Especially not when something is also constantly adapting and changing over the time. If anything it would use this very fact to disprove it, because it usually claims to be so absolute.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the only thing it disproves is that their creation myths aren’t to be taken literally.
Actually, in the case of Judaism and Christianity, not even that. An accurate translation of the very first sentence in Genesis is in the perfect tense: “In the beginning, God had created the Heavens and the Earth.” Only starting from the third verse does it switch into the narrative tense. As such, the Big Bang by itself wouldn’t be sufficient evidence against taking the Judeo-Christian creation myth literally (obviously, other advances in science take over from there).
Sorry to disappoint you but they were taken literally by people in the Bible and religious leaders throughout history. If the creation myth didn’t literally happen there is no original sin. No original sin and no Easter miracle. No Easter miracle and as Paul himself noted there is no Christianity.
sighSomeone seems to be emotionally invested in believing it is this easy to disprove a religion.
Sorry for the rant I’m about to go on, but during my general linguistics studies I took Old Hebrew as one of my two required non-Indo-European languages. I eventually dropped/replaced it because it was less about the language than about the literature/theology, but some of that information is useful in discussions like this where people’s views are just embarrassingly simplistic.
First of all, the Big Bang has no relevance to the original sin story. Genesis 1 (where the Big Bang does have relevance) is written in a different style from Genesis 2 (they use different words for God, for example). These were separate oral stories collated into 5 books. You can also see this in how Genesis 2 seems to retread part of what was already said in Genesis 1.
Second, the original sin story doesn’t need to be completely literal, it only needs to convey a message. How exactly humanity got original sin and developed the concept of morality is irrelevant to the arguments and beliefs building on it. What is relevant is whether the results are true. Do you really think someone for whom this is part of their identity wouldn’t just say “so what if it wasn’t an actual fruit?” It’s not even logically inconsistent.
Good thing you dropped Hebrew. Hey I took it as well. Do me a solid and read the part of the OT where the brothers are confronted by their father for massacring the town that circumcised themselves and explain the tense structure. The problem should just jump right out at you.
Your argument is that it isn’t relevant and that is your opinion not mine and not Paul’s.
Also, going from no original sin to no Easter is quite the logical leap. The only connection that story has with Easter is that Christians consider part of its ending to be one of several predictions of Easter.
Even the concept of original sin itself isn’t a requirement for Easter. At best it’s a warning to not think Easter is irrelevant to you because you are a good enough person on your own.
According to Paul Jesus needed to be killed and come back to life because of original sin. Original sin that entered the world via the literal Adam and Eve story. Maybe read the bible.
Pray tell, at which point did I claim any religion as my own? I just get annoyed when people use baby’s first atheism to make simplistic claims they can’t back up. As if it were that easy. In another branch of this comment tree you refer to a story way later in Genesis. As far as I can tell, the reference to that story was an appeal to emotions rather than logic. You could use it as a reason why someone might want to reject the religions that include it, but not to prove logically that those religions must be untrue. Do better.
Anyway, my point, that the level of literalness of the original sin story is irrelevant to the theology building off it, stands. What matters to people who believe in it is that it tells them about original sin, not whether or not a literal fruit and snake were involved.
Christianity doesn’t really change. They still think that the banana is our worse nightmare and since peanut butter has never evolved into a monkey evolution is false.
Bold of you to extrapolate from the subset you personally know to the entire concept. That’s like saying Germanic languages haven’t changed in a significant way because the only Germanic language you know is Icelandic (obviously not the case because you’re writing in English, but it’s just a simily anyway).
I recall reading or hearing a rumour that the Vatican had a sealed scroll somewhere which is “to be opened in the event of positive extraterrestrial contact or proof”.
Given secrets of that type don’t often stay secret, it amounts to something like: “God made all life and the creator is in all living creatures” (handwaving).
In other words, the major religions already have their shit prepared.
Given secrets of that type don’t often stay secret, it amounts to something like: “God made all life and the creator is in all living creatures” (handwaving).
Imagine being a pope when alienz arrive and with shaky hands, opening that “sealed scroll” and going, “sigh, it’s all that same GODDAMN crap again…”
Religions are unlikely to change substantially, I imagine they’ll just find some way to explain the existence of aliens that fits their existing scriptures and world view.
There will be new religions that pop up as a result though, for sure.
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I don’t know why the existence of aliens would rattle anyone’s belief. Unless you can find a way to take away their threat of dying, they’re going to believe in God.
It is a strange situation for me. I know that one day it will be it for me. A billion eons and a single second will be the same. For the theist they are facing a chance at magical underground fire place. Wouldn’t painless non-existence be so much better than infinite torture? I won’t even know that I no longer exist because there will be no I to know. If they invented the afterlife to feel better about death why even a chance that it can go wrong? I would invent heaven but not hell.
Unless of course it is just a means of control…
Or… They can be atheists.
If they’re already atheists than they’re not religious and the post doesn’t apply to them
Earthlings or the aliens? 😀
I would imagine the existence of aliens rattling atheists more than religious people.
Than you really don’t know anything about atheists.
I am an atheist and monthly donor to SETI. This would just be confirmation for me.
Is OP implying there are religions that deny the existence of aliens? Most religions of a spirit realm, hidden realm for supernaturals, etc. I also don’t see the connections…
Hi! I was listening to a podcast awhile ago that stuck with me and they discussed a book I am struggling to remember the name of. In it, a religious man travels to a planet of intelligent alien life to make first contact.
All the aliens live peacefully, in harmony with the enviroment. There is no crime, poverty or muder. Everyone is kind to each other. But not a single being on the planet has ever heard of God, or made contact with any divine being. This troubles the protaganists conscious as they found an perfect balance of life without any guide. When he returns to Earth, he is told that the Devil must have invented the aliens to test his faith.
Thats all the details I can remember but it was a fair and unbiased story and it came to mind with all the recent news nentioned above. Thats all.
If anyone has an idea of the book title, I would be interested to know!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Conscience?wprov=sfla1
Its called ‘A case of conscience’ from 1958!
(Sorry for the late reply I’m at work)
I read that, decades ago. By James Blish, who turned many of the first Star Trek episodes into books. That was probably why I read it.
spoiler
An entire planet is excorcized.
No worries, thanks a lot!
Me personally, I think God created all of our planets and all of our stars and whatever life lives in the universe, even outside of Earth. People who believe the same way would just stay the same and would praise God more for how great he is.
For the others though (iykyk)… well, they’re gonna be like all the other flat-earthers or they call these aliens devil spawn or whatever.
There is no god. You are free.
Am I not free for believing in him?
You are not. You believe that there is a being infinitely better than you watching your ever thought and action ready to punish you for the slightest deviation from acceptable behavior. Where acceptable is ambiguous and unavoidable.
Anyway I am sure you have better things to do as a sky-daddy follower than write rhetorical questions. Like oppress some minority. You theists are good at that.
First of all, not all theists, in my experience, believe in the exact same things. Me, I don’t think God would punish people for the ‘slightest deviation from acceptable behaviour’.
Second of all, don’t generalize. I’m aware that there are many self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ who oppress minorities, but not all. So please, no ad hominem :)
Your Bible disagrees making you a heretic which according to the bible makes you worthy of death.
Secondly I will generalize whatever I want whenever I feel like it. Especially considering by sheer numbers Christianity had the highest murder count and is active threat to me, my family, and friends. I don’t care about your True Scotsman unicorn Christian that is totally not made up.
Hey remember when your Pope Pat Robertson said this
If Christianity vanished from the world tomorrow the only loss would be bingo games for the elderly.
Have a nice day, praise Satan, and remember that God is dead.
In general I think it would just give religions a new group to hate. They would be “Creatures not of God, but of the Devil Himself” in the same way that Christians think of other religions as born of the Canaanites and influenced by Satan.
Did you know the Big Bang is called that because Adam was banging Eve?
No, it wasn’t. Science has long proven that religion is a pure hoax, that’s why many studious individuals were burned to death or persecuted throughout human history.
It may have disproven the claim that some creation myths are to be taken literally (and even that is questionable if you assume a trickster deity), but it’s impossible to disprove religion itself.
Ancestor worship for example is wholly unconcerned about how exactly the world came into existence.
Most denominations of Christianity just take the Judeo-Christian creation myth as primarily who created the universe, and not really how, and a categorisation of things and beings.
Most religions primarily make claims about what happens to the self after death and whether one’s life influences that. Unless science opens a portal to an actual afterlife somehow, that is not something science can answer, and religions will continue to exist.
I think OP picked ‘aliens’ because it would be an event where the whole world has to acknowledge that they exist and it would also contradict probably most of the current religions
I’d argue the opposite. Most religions don’t care about aliens existing or not (ancestor worship, Shinto, all Dharmic religions as far as I know, animism, etc.). Others have already made arguments why aliens should exist according to their religion (argued by at least one catholic “saint”), while others would find it difficult but not impossible to fit aliens into their belief systems.
Similarly, the Big Bang at best disproves the literal nature of a religion’s creation myth, if such a myth exists to begin with. An ancient Greek would just tell you that obviously the Big Bang or its aftermath is Chaos, from which the first gods came. An elf in Tolkien’s legendarium would tell you that obviously that was the beginning of Ea (the universe), sung into existence by the first notes sung by the Maiar. A Hindu might say something about Brahman being split into smaller existences.
Very interesting, thanks. What you reckon would an eventual response from the Pope be in case of irrefutable alien evidence?
Big Bang already contradicts ALL religions though.
But I see your point.
But it doesnt…
Big Bang is called that way because Adam was banging Eve.
But that’s just a theory!!!
Sorry. I couldn’t resist. It’s just fun to act stupid sometimes.
A Game Theory!
I think at least with Christianity it would be similar of changing the everything orbiting the Earth to Earth orbiting the Sun. They’d just declare that it is all God’s creation and be done with it.
Same for the big bang someone here claims to be a proof that all religions are false.
You can’t really prove negatives. Especially not when something is also constantly adapting and changing over the time. If anything it would use this very fact to disprove it, because it usually claims to be so absolute.
You mean disprove. And you can disprove a negative it is just hard to do beyond the most trivial.
Yeah, sorry. It was 1am.
It is proof that the Abrahamic ones are false.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the only thing it disproves is that their creation myths aren’t to be taken literally.
Actually, in the case of Judaism and Christianity, not even that. An accurate translation of the very first sentence in Genesis is in the perfect tense: “In the beginning, God had created the Heavens and the Earth.” Only starting from the third verse does it switch into the narrative tense. As such, the Big Bang by itself wouldn’t be sufficient evidence against taking the Judeo-Christian creation myth literally (obviously, other advances in science take over from there).
Sorry to disappoint you but they were taken literally by people in the Bible and religious leaders throughout history. If the creation myth didn’t literally happen there is no original sin. No original sin and no Easter miracle. No Easter miracle and as Paul himself noted there is no Christianity.
sigh Someone seems to be emotionally invested in believing it is this easy to disprove a religion.
Sorry for the rant I’m about to go on, but during my general linguistics studies I took Old Hebrew as one of my two required non-Indo-European languages. I eventually dropped/replaced it because it was less about the language than about the literature/theology, but some of that information is useful in discussions like this where people’s views are just embarrassingly simplistic.
First of all, the Big Bang has no relevance to the original sin story. Genesis 1 (where the Big Bang does have relevance) is written in a different style from Genesis 2 (they use different words for God, for example). These were separate oral stories collated into 5 books. You can also see this in how Genesis 2 seems to retread part of what was already said in Genesis 1.
Second, the original sin story doesn’t need to be completely literal, it only needs to convey a message. How exactly humanity got original sin and developed the concept of morality is irrelevant to the arguments and beliefs building on it. What is relevant is whether the results are true. Do you really think someone for whom this is part of their identity wouldn’t just say “so what if it wasn’t an actual fruit?” It’s not even logically inconsistent.
Good thing you dropped Hebrew. Hey I took it as well. Do me a solid and read the part of the OT where the brothers are confronted by their father for massacring the town that circumcised themselves and explain the tense structure. The problem should just jump right out at you.
Your argument is that it isn’t relevant and that is your opinion not mine and not Paul’s.
Also, going from no original sin to no Easter is quite the logical leap. The only connection that story has with Easter is that Christians consider part of its ending to be one of several predictions of Easter.
Even the concept of original sin itself isn’t a requirement for Easter. At best it’s a warning to not think Easter is irrelevant to you because you are a good enough person on your own.
Easter miracle. Do you know your own religion?
According to Paul Jesus needed to be killed and come back to life because of original sin. Original sin that entered the world via the literal Adam and Eve story. Maybe read the bible.
Pray tell, at which point did I claim any religion as my own? I just get annoyed when people use baby’s first atheism to make simplistic claims they can’t back up. As if it were that easy. In another branch of this comment tree you refer to a story way later in Genesis. As far as I can tell, the reference to that story was an appeal to emotions rather than logic. You could use it as a reason why someone might want to reject the religions that include it, but not to prove logically that those religions must be untrue. Do better.
Anyway, my point, that the level of literalness of the original sin story is irrelevant to the theology building off it, stands. What matters to people who believe in it is that it tells them about original sin, not whether or not a literal fruit and snake were involved.
And with this, I’m done with this discussion.
Christianity doesn’t really change. They still think that the banana is our worse nightmare and since peanut butter has never evolved into a monkey evolution is false.
Bold of you to extrapolate from the subset you personally know to the entire concept. That’s like saying Germanic languages haven’t changed in a significant way because the only Germanic language you know is Icelandic (obviously not the case because you’re writing in English, but it’s just a simily anyway).
Yes because The single most famous apologetic speaker on earth does represent anyone.
The pope literally got rid of limbo.
Call me when he admits the Jesus crackers are a metaphor.
Nothing. As long as people are scared of dying and other people are willing to profit from it, religion has a home
Same as every other times when science have disproven religions fairytales. They adapt. God also made those lifeforms
With new worlds to deliver The Word to? Nah they wouldn’t change, but they’d get serious about space travel.
Religion is all fantasy anyway so they’ll just retcon it.
If one of those aliens turns out to be Jesus, I might have to become a Christian.
“Hey, JC. Where have you been? Lots of people here have been waiting for you to return.”
“Oh you would not believe the traffic jam I was stuck in at the Horse head Nebula.”
I recall reading or hearing a rumour that the Vatican had a sealed scroll somewhere which is “to be opened in the event of positive extraterrestrial contact or proof”.
Given secrets of that type don’t often stay secret, it amounts to something like: “God made all life and the creator is in all living creatures” (handwaving).
In other words, the major religions already have their shit prepared.
Imagine being a pope when alienz arrive and with shaky hands, opening that “sealed scroll” and going, “sigh, it’s all that same GODDAMN crap again…”
Did they have to write it on a scroll :/
It isn’t official until it is written on a scroll.
Religions are unlikely to change substantially, I imagine they’ll just find some way to explain the existence of aliens that fits their existing scriptures and world view.
There will be new religions that pop up as a result though, for sure.
Or say that science is lying again :p
If they’re more intelligent than us but with the same morals we’re doomed, so we might have not time to adapt our religions.
Facts have never stopped religion before. Why would it change now?
Yea im not too optimistic that this would do anything for most true believers
Nah, it’ll just be another, “Gawd werks in mysterious wayz!”