Can Tradional Religion Survive Contact with Extraterrestrials

I frequently note that knowledge and science are the enemies of traditional religions, especially Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.  The "holy book" on which they are based are Earth centric and view human kind as the top of the heap in terms of ruling the Earth and creation.  The human genome project has already demonstrated the lie of the Adam and Eve myth - i.e., that they never really existed as historic personages. Now, with new discoveries on Mars increasing suggesting that life may have existed on that planet and the likelihood that out of the billions of solar systems in the universe other life exists, a piece in The Week queries whether these religions can survive the existence of extraterrestrial life.  For the fundamentalist adherents, I personally believe the answer is no.  Their literalism and claims of inerrancy (ridiculous as they may be) set the stage for collapse when objective proof blows away the focus of their myths.  Here are article highlights:

[T]here are now a pair of books — and a number of essays about and reviews of those books — that reflect seriously on how the major religions of the world would respond to first contact with extraterrestrial life.

From this range of writing, a broad consensus emerges.  Buddhism, as a nontheistic belief system, would be largely unshaken by the discovery of intelligent life on other worlds. Among Christians, the Vatican's long history of adjusting itself to the findings of modern science would lead Catholics to be relatively unfazed. More literalistic Protestants — especially evangelicals of various stripes — would have a much harder time of it, while certain sects with origins in 19th-century America (Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons), which already have folk beliefs about the existence of life on other planets, might actually thrive.

I'm afraid I'm skeptical about much of this, too. Yes, Buddhism and other nontheistic forms of spirituality might emerge relatively unscathed from a close encounter with extraterrestrial life. But most forms of Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) would be profoundly shaken by the definitive demonstration that life — let alone intelligent life — exists elsewhere in the universe.

Consider the theological implications of discovering even the most primitive form of microscopic unicellular life on another world (perhaps in the polar ice caps on Mars, or in a subsurface ocean of water on Jupiter's moon Europa). Such a discovery would seem to vindicate the evolutionary hypothesis that life can and does emerge from (seeming) nothingness all on its own, without divine intervention of any kind. And that would raise the possibility — perhaps a greater possibility than ever before in the minds of believers — that precisely the same thing could have happened on Earth.

In order to shoot down this theologically troubling possibility, believers could always leap to the view that God lies behind all life everywhere. But surely that would complicate the Judeo-Christian creation story in ways that go far beyond the usual debates about reading the Book of Genesis literally or allegorically. Wouldn't it have been more accurate for the text to speak of God creating a universe containing many worlds with life on them instead of implying that life on our planet is somehow unique?

But theological adaptation to the discovery of simple extraterrestrial life is one thing. Adapting to the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be something else entirely — and I seriously doubt that most of the world's great theistic faiths could succeed in pulling it off, at least short of a truly radical shift in orientation.

Think of it as a theological Copernican Revolution. Just as the scientific Copernican Revolution destabilized and downgraded humanity's place in the cosmos by substituting heliocentrism for a geocentric view that placed the Earth and its inhabitants at the center of creation, so the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe. And that, in turn, would seem to imply either that God created many equally special beings throughout the universe, or that God cares for us more than he does for those other intelligent beings.

Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?

How believers answer those questions will be a product, in part, of what the extraterrestrials look like. If the aliens have symmetrical body structures — two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — then it may be plausible to assume that they were created in the image and likeness of the same God as we were. But if they look nothing like us at all, the case for separation between "our" God and these alien intelligences would grow much stronger.

But I have an equally hard time accepting that believers would be capable of wrapping their heads around the possibility that God loves all intelligent creatures on all planets equally.

I suspect that these puzzles are so corrosive in their skeptical implications that contact with intelligent life from other worlds would produce a rapid collapse of faith rooted in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Quran, with a rapid spread of atheistic secularism in their place.
But not necessarily. Here are two other options.

One possibility would be a growth in the kind of philosophical theism David. B. Hart defended in his recent outstanding book The Experience of God. This would be a form of Platonism, with God treated less as a person who intervenes and reveals himself miraculously and providentially in history than as the ontological unity of Plato's three transcendentals: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. God in this sense stands behind the scenes, invisibly making possible and sustaining every entity and action in the universe — here as well as on any conceivable alien world — from the beginning to the end of time.

But there is another possibility — one that moves in the opposite direction, toward greater divine anthropomorphism. Here Mormons may be able to offer some guidance. Some Latter-day Saints (including, on some readings, Mormonism's founding prophet Joseph Smith) have claimed that God resides within the universe rather than serving as its transcendent ground, that he began as a human being and evolved into his current state of exaltation, that he has a body, that he didn't create the universe so much as form parts of it from preexisting matter, and that Mormon men and women can themselves evolve into gods and goddesses. Such a view — with its hints of polytheism and suggestion of finite divine power — would seem to be far more compatible than traditional Judeo-Christian monotheism with a vision of the universe populated by a multitude of intelligent beings.

As I said at the outset, I don't think religious believers will ever have to cope with an extraterrestrially inspired theological crisis — because contact with intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe is exceedingly unlikely. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the challenges that such contact would pose, if it were to happen, to the world's religious traditions.

If we are honest with ourselves, there is no tangible, objective support for either Christianity and Islam, both of which springboard off of the Jewish Old Testament that has little archeological evidence to support its most striking claims.  A case in point: Moses.   The newly released Exodus: Gods and Kings, starring Christian Bale, has been condemned by some as not being "historically accurate."  As Wikipedia notes:

The existence of Moses as well as the veracity of the Exodus story are disputed among archaeologists and Egyptologists, with experts in the field of biblical criticism citing logical inconsistencies, new archaeological evidence, historical evidence, and related origin myths in Canaanite culture. Other historians maintain that the biographical details and Egyptian background attributed to Moses imply the existence of a historical political and religious leader who was involved in the consolidation of the Hebrew tribes in Canaan towards the end of the Bronze Age.

While the general narrative of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land may be remotely rooted in historical events, the figure of Moses as a leader of the Israelites in these events cannot be substantiated.

How can there be historic accuracy about someone who likely never existed, or at least not as recited by the Bible?