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Are the World's Religions Ready For ET?
Science_afficionado writes: At the current rate of discovery, astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045. That means, if life is at all common in the Milky Way, astronomers could soon detect it. Realization that the nature of the debate about life on other worlds is about to fundamentally change, lead Vanderbilt astronomer David Weintraub to begin thinking seriously about how people will react to such a discovery. He realized that people's reactions will be heavily influenced by their religious beliefs, so he decided to find out what theologians and leaders from the world's major religions have to say about the matter. The result is a book titled Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, published by Springer this month. He discovered that from Baptists to Buddhists, from Catholics to Mormons, from Islam to the Anglican Communion, religious views on alien life differ widely.
Robert J. Sawyer did a send up of mocking religious people's views on ET in his novel Calculating God . An alien lands on Earth and finds it odd that all the scientists of our planet are trending towards atheism, when his civilization finds the arguments of natural theology convincing. Of course, the god believed in by the alien (and mused on by Sawyer, who I believe remains an atheist) is an unknowable, silent, watchmaker god who sprung up spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, instead of the personal God that Earth's big three monotheistic religions believe in.
C.S. Lewis, Anglican and actually closer to Catholicism in theology, wrote, from 1938-1945, a science fiction trilogy known as the Space Trilogy that explores alien races in the context of Christianity.
I first read the trilogy when I was an atheist, and it helped remove that particular hurdle in my later study of the world religions that lead to my conversion to Catholicism.
Religion is something that an ET might bring. It could be in the form of creation myths, some strange gap they discovered in physics and a religion built up around it. Or they may have always had a religion that drove them to pursue physics with a fanatic's zeal resulting in space travel while not straying from their core faith.
Or even worse, they could be way ahead of us in pretty much every science yet have a fanatical religion where the two options are pretty much to pray to some god or spread out and convert other species.
Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
But if they do come with any religion at all we can all be certain that it will end up with adherents on Earth. Seeing that we have Neo Nazis there is no creed too stupid for some people.
... what do you think would happen if ET did exist, had a spaceship, was feeling a bit nefarious, and manifested itself as a booming voice from the sky? How hard do you think it would be for ET to convince the world's populations that it is in fact god (especially given the technological advantage), then instruct them to do whatever the hell it wants?
What makes you think this hasn't already happened?"
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
...just as an example, the early Christian theologians worked out these questions over 1700 years ago.
What "theologians" think has very little to do with what the rank-and-file religious think. I know plenty of Christians that believe in reincarnation, can't explain the concept of the Trinity, and don't know who gave the Sermon on the Mount. Among my acquaintances, belief in UFOs, alien abductions, etc. is much more prevalent among the religious.
There's a small technical difference between building floaty things out of sticks that can go some distance in a quite hospitable environment and building flying things capable of 100% support of life in extremely hostile high radiation/zero gravity/no atmosphere/low temperature conditions across distances between stars.
The nearest star is just about 2.5 billion times farther than a 10k mile sea voyage.
Anyway, I didn't say I'd just believe what they said. I said I'd listen very carefully, and very politely.
--PM
They are what I term, Tupac-Christians. It's where you wear a gold chain and cross and you talk about 'god' and such, but you've only got a few toes in the pool of faith and you spend 99% of your time contradicting the faith. From my experience, most people that call themselves Christians fit this model, and most people that I would think are adhering closely to Jesus/Bible, would say that those other people are not real Christians.
Let's suppose that in a few years someone discovers definitive proof that there is life a few thousand light years away.
It will be big news for a week or two. People who are into the idea of ETs will be happy; people who aren't comfortable with them will question (or flat out disbelieve) the evidence. Everyone will discuss the possible implications until they get bored with the topic.
After a month or so, it will fade into the cultural background and life will continue as before. With no way to get there and no means to communicate, the fact of the existence of extra-terrestrial life simply won't have much impact on anyone's day-to-day life.
Net effect on humanity: minimal.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Many people who call themselves Hindus believe that. However, Hinduism is essentially a ritual complex that can include both people who believe that and people who do not believe that.
Wikipedia is not a useful source for this particular issue. Perhaps you live in the backwoods somewhere and have not become aware of over a century of problems arising because Hinduism is presented in ordinary reference sources through a Western religious lens? Meanwhile, scholars of comparative religion and anthropologists have always been keen to emphasize the ritual-centered and inclusive features of Hinduism. It is involvement in this ritual complex, combined with a tolerance of other people's beliefs (i.e. it's fine to be atheist, but it's best to keep your belief that your fellow Hindu's object of devotion doesn't exist to yourself) that makes one a Hindu, even if one personally rejects the supernatural.
How is that belief superstitious and incompatible with atheism? It's any atheist's observation of the anthropic principle.