…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?

  • Raphael@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • crazystuff@discuss.online
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      1 year ago

      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

      • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • crazystuff@discuss.online
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          1 year ago

          Very interesting, thanks. What you reckon would an eventual response from the Pope be in case of irrefutable alien evidence?