It may seem that the existence of life on other planets is incompatible with faith in God. However, as the BBC Future columnist writes, many theologians admit the possibility of the existence of aliens.
In 2014, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $ 1.1 million grant to the Center for Theological Research (an ecumenical research institute located in New Jersey) to study "the social aspects of astrobiology."
This infuriated some. The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which advocates a clear separation of churches and the state, demanded that NASA withdraw the grant, threatening to sue.
Representatives of the foundation justified this demand by their concern about the overly close interaction of state and religious organizations, but also made it clear that they consider the granting of a waste of money.
"Scientists should not be concerned about how advances in science will affect beliefs based on faith," they said.
However, all the arguments of the foundation can crumble to dust if humanity has to somehow react to the news that aliens exist.
Such a discovery would raise a number of questions, the answers to which lie outside the boundaries of science.
For example, when we think about what life is, are we dealing with a scientific question or a theological one?
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The themes of the origin of life and the future of all living things are very complex, and they need to be studied in a complex, within the framework of several disciplines at once.
The same applies to the reaction of mankind to the establishment of contact with aliens.
This is not just idle curiosity: today, many scientists argue that the discovery of life outside of Earth is just a matter of time.
There are several reasons for such confident statements; the main one is due to the speed with which scientists began to discover planets outside the solar system.
In 2000, astronomers knew about fifty of these "exoplanets". By 2013, there were already 850 of them, and more than 800 planetary systems.
According to David Weintraub, associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University (USA) and author of the book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, by 2045 the number of such open planets could reach a million.
"There is every reason to believe that soon the number of known exoplanets, like the number of stars, will become countless," he writes.
Of the planets discovered so far, more than twenty are comparable in size to the Earth and are in the "habitable" zone in the orbit of a star, including the last of the discovered planets - Proxima b, which revolves around Proxima Centauri.
The more closely we peer into space, the stronger the confidence in us that not only our planet is suitable for life.
With rare exceptions, all talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is usually conducted within the framework of the exact or natural sciences. But the implications of this activity extend far beyond biology and physics, to the humanities, philosophy, and even theology.
As Carl Sagan pointed out in his book The Cosmic Question, which can now be found only in a second-hand bookseller, "space exploration is directly related to religious and philosophical issues."
We will have to decide whether there is room in our belief system for these new creatures, or whether the fact of their existence could fundamentally undermine our faith.
The study of these issues can be called "exobotheology" or "astrobology" - these concepts were introduced by the professor emeritus of theology of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary Ted Peters to designate "reasoning about the theological meaning of extraterrestrial life."
Peters, by his own admission, was not the first nor the only one to use these terms - they were invented at least 300 years ago and are found in a treatise published in 1714 entitled Astrotheology, or Demonstration of the Essence and Distinctive Features of God from the vision of heaven”(Astro-theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God From a Survey of the Heavens).
Are we so unique?
So what questions may arise before us in the event of the discovery of an alien intelligence?
Let's start with the question of our uniqueness, which tormented both theologians and scientists.
As he explains in his book Are We Alone? (Are We Alone?) Paul Davis, the search for extraterrestrial civilization is based on three principles.
The first is the principle of the uniformity of nature, based on the fact that physical processes occurring on Earth are found throughout the Universe. This means that the processes that result in the origin of life operate in a similar way everywhere.
The second is the principle of abundance, according to which everything that is possible will happen someday.
From the point of view of the search for life on other planets, this means that in the absence of obstacles to the origin of life, this very life will surely appear, or, as the author of this term, the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, put it, "no true potential of being can remain unfulfilled."
According to Sagan, this is due to the fact that "the origin of life on planets suitable for this, apparently, is embedded in the very essence of the universe."
The third - the principle of mediocrity - states that the Earth does not occupy any special place or position in the universe. This can be a major stumbling block for the mainstream Abrahamic religions, which teach that humans were created by God on purpose and therefore are in a privileged position over other beings.
In a sense, the modern scientific world is built on the recognition of our mediocrity, as David Weintraub noted in his book Religions and Alien Life:
"When in 1543 A. D. Copernicus declared that the earth revolved around the sun, the subsequent intellectual revolution […] swept the pitiful remnants of Aristotle's geocentric model of the universe into the dustbin of history."
Copernicus' theory, which was later recognized as revolutionary, set in motion a process by which scientists like Davis were able to conclude that the Earth is "a typical planet orbiting a typical star in a typical galaxy."
Sagan says about it even more colorful: "We realize that we live on an insignificant planet orbiting a banal star, lost in a galaxy in some remote corner of the universe, in which there are more galaxies than people."
But how can believers reconcile this claim with their belief that man is the crown of God's creation?
How can people believe that their creator loves them like their own children when the planet they inhabit is only one of billions?
The discovery of intelligent beings on other planets can make the same revolution in human self-awareness. Would such a revelation cause believers to feel insignificant and therefore doubt their faith?
I would say that this concern is contrived. Believing that God interacts with and worries about people has never required the Earth to be at the center of the universe.
The psalms, which both Jews and Christians honor, say that God gave names to all the stars. --Psalm 147: 4.
As the Talmud says, God flies around 18 thousand worlds per night. Followers of Islam believe that "what is in heaven and on earth" belongs to Allah (as it is written in the Qur'an) - that is, His dominion extends far beyond the boundaries of one tiny planet.
The same texts explicitly say that people have a special meaning for God, but He Himself is quite capable of doing several things at once.
Secondly, the word "special" refers not only to inimitable, unique, separate phenomena.
As Peters argues, if life is found elsewhere, it will not diminish God's love for the inhabitants of the earth, "just as the love of parents for their child does not diminish if he has a brother or sister."
If we really believe in God, why should we necessarily proceed from the fact that He is able to love only some of His children?
Revelation
But is the possibility of the existence of life outside the Earth mentioned in the religious texts themselves?
"The very foundation of religion," writes the Catholic priest and theologian Thomas O'Meira, "is the affirmation of a certain contact within and at the same time outside of human nature."
For Jews, Christians and Muslims, this presupposes some kind of revelation in writing, although it is due to the specific historical circumstances in which it was originally passed on by word of mouth.
The best theologians recognize the limitations associated with this, but some tend to take the texts quite literally, and for those who follow this interpretation, the discovery of aliens may seem like a threat to the foundations of the faith.
According to Weintraub, the difficulties in accepting the search for life on other planets may be experienced by members of the Evangelical Church, for whom the main source of doctrine is the Gospel (in fact, the only authority on matters of faith and practical life, Evangelical Protestant Christians recognize the entire canonical Bible, and not only the New Testament - Ed.)
Even during the Reformation, Martin Luther stated that “only Scripture” (Sola Scriptura) is needed to understand God's plan for salvation. Preacher Billy Graham stated in an interview with the National Enquirer in 1976 that, in his firm belief, God created life on other planets "in deep space."
Such people believe that all other written sources or ideas put forward should be evaluated and judged in accordance with the Bible.
If you ask one of these Christians if he believes in extraterrestrials, he will probably first turn to the biblical account of the creation of the world. Not finding there any evidence for the existence of life outside the Earth, he, following the creationist Jonathan Safarty, can come to the conclusion that humans are the only intelligent beings in the universe.
“The Scripture clearly implies that there is no intelligent life anywhere else,” Safarti wrote in his article in Science and Theology News.
Perhaps a Christian is capable of accepting the fact of the existence of alien life if it is established, but for this he will need to radically revise his understanding of divine revelation, humbly admitting the incompleteness of his knowledge.
In addition, he will have to seriously reflect on the concept of the Incarnation - the Christian dogma that God was fully present in a man named Jesus Christ who lived in the first century AD.
Christians believe that salvation is possible only through Christ and that all paths to God lead through Him. But what does this mean for other civilizations that live in distant corners of the universe and do not know anything about Christ?
Thomas Paine addressed this issue in his famous 1794 Age of Reason, which discusses the possibility of multiple worlds.
According to Payne, believing in an infinite number of worlds "means making the Christian religion both shallow and funny and scattering it like fluff in the wind."
As he argues, it is impossible to assert both at the same time. Isn't it foolish to think that God should “leave the care of everyone else” in the worlds he created and appear to die in this one? Payne asks.
On the other hand, “should we assume that each of the worlds in infinite space” was also visited by God [to save its inhabitants]?
In short, if salvation in Christianity is possible only for those beings in whose world the Divine Incarnation took place, this means that God only does his whole life that visits many worlds scattered in outer space and quickly dies there on the cross and is resurrected …
Such a view seems absurd to Paine, and this is one of the reasons why he denies Christianity.
But this problem can be looked at in another way, which Payne did not think about: perhaps the incarnation of God and the sacrifice of the Cross in the history of the Earth apply to all creatures in the entire universe.
This point of view was put forward by a Jesuit priest and former director of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, who explored the problem in his book Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and the Theological Implications, published in 2010 year.
“How could He, being God, leave the aliens in sin? God chose a very special way to save people. He sent to them His Only Begotten Son - Christ … Did He do it for the sake of the aliens? In Christian theology … the concept of the universality of God's salvation is deeply rooted - the concept that all creation, even inanimate, participates in salvation in one way or another."
There is another possibility: salvation itself can be an exclusively earthly phenomenon.
Theology does not force us to believe that original sin has defiled all intelligent life throughout the universe. Perhaps humans are the only corrupted creatures.
Or, in religious terms, perhaps the Earth is the only planet that had no luck with the first people - Adam and Eve.
Who said that our alien brothers and sisters are morally flawed and in need of spiritual redemption? Perhaps they have already reached a higher stage of spiritual development than we?
As Davis notes, for spiritual thinking, a living creature needs self-awareness and "the achievement of a level of development of the mind, which presupposes the ability to assess the consequences of their actions."
On Earth, this degree of cognitive development is at best several million years old.
If there are living beings anywhere else in the Universe, it is very unlikely that they are at exactly the same stage of evolution as we are.
And given the huge lifetime of the Universe, perhaps at least some of the extraterrestrial civilizations are older than ours, which means that they have advanced further along the evolutionary path than we do.
Thus, as the scientist concludes, "we can expect that we are among the least spiritually developed beings in the universe."
If Davis is right, then contrary to such popular literary works as Mary Russell's fantasy novel The Little Bird, it is not people who will tell their alien brothers and sisters about God, but quite the opposite.
Note that this possibility does not negate the right of religions to claim to receive divine revelation.
There is no need to imagine that God equally reveals the same truths to all intelligent inhabitants of the universe. It is quite possible that other civilizations know God in myriad other ways, and they all resonate with each other.
Originality
But what about the differences between religions? How could such a discovery affect the identity of certain faiths?
With his story “Still We Have a Rabbi on Venus!”, Published in 1974, the writer Philip Klass, working under the pseudonym William Tenn, invites Jews and all believers to reflect on this issue.
The story is set in the future: the Jewish community on the planet Venus is holding the first in the history of the Universe Neo-Zionist Interstellar Conference. Among those present are intelligent extraterrestrials of the Bulbs, who flew from the distant star Rigel.
The appearance of the bulbs, covered with gray spots and tentacles, leaves the assembled Jews perplexed. They come to the conclusion that Bulbs cannot be considered human in any way, which means they cannot be considered Jews.
In order to decide what to do with the unusual aliens, the rabbi meets. Its members are pondering what will happen if one day humanity is faced with creatures who want to be Jews. "Should I tell them that they are not quite right for us?"
The rabbis conclude that this is not a very good option, and give the Venusian Jews a paradoxical answer: “There are Jews, and there are Jews. Bulbs belong to the second group."
An additional comic narrative is given by the image of a kind of intertribal hostility, which, as we have to admit, is inherent in religion. Any proclamation of identity can divide the world into groups: them and us.
But when it comes to religion, this division often takes on cosmic proportions: they are us and God is on our side.
This has always been one of the main problems of intercultural interaction, which sometimes boils down to negotiating existing boundaries instead of trying to eliminate them.
Perhaps this problem is more common in Judaism and Islam than in some forms of Christianity, which devote less attention to everyday ritual than in other religions.
Take, for example, Islam, whose followers are prescribed to perform certain bodily practices throughout the year.
Unlike Christianity, whose Founder eliminated the need to be present in a particular place to practice his faith, Islam is a religion very closely related to location.
Prayers are said five times a day, at a certain time, facing Mecca and are accompanied by certain body movements: bowing and kneeling.
At a certain time, it is necessary to observe a strict fast, and all Muslims who can do this should take a trip to Mecca.
In Judaism, there are also fasts and the concept of pilgrimage (which, however, is not mandatory) - taglita - to the Holy Land. However, in modern Judaism there is no such strong attachment to the locality as in Islam, given the tragic history of the expulsion and dispersal of the Jewish people.
What is required of an alien to be considered a representative of earthly religion? What will he have to do? Praying five times a day?
And if their planet does not rotate like ours, and the days there are much shorter - will he still be obliged to pray as often as Muslims on Earth?
Will he have to be baptized? Communion? Build a shrub for Sukkot?
But if we imagine that aliens are physically arranged in about the same way as us, this does not mean that they actually have a material body. Maybe he is not. Will this affect their ability to convert?
These thoughts may seem like just frivolous exobological reasoning, but the essence of the question does not change from this: all our distinctive religions are adapted for planet Earth.
And there is nothing wrong with that (of course, if we do not try to reduce the universe to our ultimate reality).
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky puts it this way: “Religion is a human, social reaction to transcendence […] The Code of Judaism opens up a wonderful, time-tested path to sanctifying our mind, character and body, to ennoble humanity, to improve this world, to linking your life with the infinite God on our finite Earth”.
And what conclusion does he come to? "I am Jewish. God is not."
This rabbi's theory can help us think about our fellow man in outer space and our fellow man on our own planet.
If religion is a human response to the divine - even if God himself proposes and promotes this response - it is obvious that the response will differ depending on the circumstances in which it is formed.
If Western Christians can learn to respect the religious feelings of aliens who are benevolent and responsive to God in their own way, perhaps they can apply the same principles by learning to live in peace with Muslims on Earth - and vice versa.
“In a billion solar systems,” writes O'Meira, “the number of forms that love, created and uncreated, can take, will be unlimited. The incarnations of the divine life will not contradict each other or the created world."
End of religion?
If tomorrow morning we suddenly learn that humanity has come into contact with intelligent aliens, how will religion react?
Some believe that after such a discovery, we will embark on a path whose goal is to outgrow religion.
One illustrative study by Peters found that the number of non-believers who believe that the discovery of extraterrestrial life could end earthly religions is twice as high as among believers (69% and 34%, respectively).
However, believing that religion is too weak to survive in the same world with aliens would be wrong from a historical point of view.
As Peters notes, such a claim is built on an underestimation of "the degree of adaptability that has already taken place."
With a few notable exceptions, including violent fundamentalism and attitudes towards same-sex marriage, religion has often demonstrated the ability to quietly adjust to the changes that are taking place.
And, of course, its ingenuity and adaptability testify to the fact that there is something in religion that resonates with the very foundation of the human soul.
As O'Meira notes, some aspects of religion will need to be adjusted, but not completely rejected.
"If being, revelation and grace descend into other worlds, and not only to the Earth, this slightly changes the Christian identity" (and, as one might add, any religious identity).
However, as the theologian continues, "for this, nothing needs to be added or subtracted - you need to take a fresh look at the basics."
In many religions it is customary to believe that God gave names to the stars. Is it an exaggeration to think that He gave names to their inhabitants?
And, quite possibly, they all call God Himself in different ways …
Brandon Ambrosino