Would the discovery of E T cause the collapse of religion

[_LDS truthseeker]

Depends if they believed in Jesus or not?

[_Phillip]

If the aliens are 'made in His image' in a physical sense, then Heaven is going to a lot scarier than I had imagined. Some people are liable to be a bit put off if this guy shows up at the pearly gates to greet them:

On the other hand...

Hmmm... Celestial vs. Telestial glory?

[_krose]

It could throw a wrench into the gears of religions that think the universe is here just for us, as other scientific advances and discoveries already have.

I consider the existence of intelligent life on other planets pretty much a sure thing, just based on sheer numbers. Their existence should not really be a surprise to anyone.

The real issue is how any of them making it here would affect our understanding of the universe. If other beings have figured out a way to travel faster than the speed of light (and survive, no less), and then successfully locate this planet (which would be like finding a specific fish in the ocean), that would be truly earth shaking.

[_Themis]

It could throw a wrench into the gears of religions that think the universe is here just for us, as other scientific advances and discoveries already have.

I consider the existence of intelligent life on other planets pretty much a sure thing, just based on sheer numbers. Their existence should not really be a surprise to anyone.

The real issue is how any of them making it here would affect our understanding of the universe. If other beings have figured out a way to travel faster than the speed of light (and survive, no less), and then successfully locate this planet (which would be like finding a specific fish in the ocean), that would be truly earth shaking.

Most LDS believe that there are other worlds populated with humans that would look essentially like us. Finding intelligent alien life would cause a change in a number of LDS doctrines.

[_KevinSim]

Or if the aliens themselves believed in a Creator. The implicit assumption always seems to be that aliens must be atheists. But who knows? Maybe all advanced races eventually discover that elusive, definitive proof of God's existence and only species in the intermediate stages of development go through an atheist phase.

By now a lot of you probably know who I am. I'm a devout Latter-day Saint who believes firmly in the existence of God, and a lot of the other things the LDS Church teaches. My mother, who had an enormous influence on my thought processes as I was growing up, personally believed that the Second Coming of Jesus would occur during her father's lifetime. As a young teenager I thought the Second Coming was imminent myself; at one point back in the mid 1970s I came to my own personal conclusion that the event was no more than two years off.

But my grandfather died about fifteen years ago, and my mother herself died twelve years ago, and here we are in 2011 and Jesus hasn't come back yet. My little sister, when asked about the (allegedly still imminent) Second Coming, complains that people have been saying it's just around the corner for a long time; she's not expecting it any time soon. I think I share her opinion to some degree; I also don't expect it any time soon.

Still, you'd think it would happen sometime in the next ten thousand years, wouldn't you? Or at the very latest within the next hundred thousand years.

All that said, I have a huge attraction to fiction, reading it and writing it. In particular science fiction. I like playing around with ideas, even ideas that don't reflect at all what I really think is going to happen.

So in one of my science fiction ideas that I'm in the process of putting together, the year is not 10,000 CE or even 100,000 CE, but rather 309 billion years CE. Jesus still hasn't come back. In fact, there aren't any Christians for Jesus to come back to; Christianity as a faith went extinct around nine billion CE, way after the planet Earth He had said He would come back to was completely consumed as its Sun transformed from a hydrogen star to a helium star. Of course by 309 billion the Sun itself had become nothing more than a dark, compact shadow of its former brightness.

Humanity had actually gotten off to an extremely positive start, accomplishing many things for hundreds of thousands of years. But shortly after one million CE, humans began to feel their age as a species. With such enormous amounts of time before their current existence, they had trouble dealing with their history, and stumbled as they tried to determine where to go from that meridian in time. What exactly was their purpose after all those years? What was the motivating force to propel them onward?

Childbirth rates began to plummet. Why have children, if they weren't sure what kind of a future those children would have? For the first time in history, the total population of humanity began to shrink, and in some cases shrink dramatically. Some long-range planners (or at least relatively long-range planners), grew alarmed. Was the human race going to completely die out due to lack of interest?

Those planners found ways to gain influence, and established nine colonies on nine planets, each colony with a population of one million. Their goal was simple: keep the human race alive. They employed the best minds they could find, experts in all scientific fields, but most particularly psychology. At all costs they needed to find out what needed to be done to keep humans wanting to live, work, and reproduce. To some extent they were successful; each human being in the nine colonies reproduced herself/himself before s/he died.

As stated, Christianity died out about 9 billion CE. Islam and Hinduism went extinct about 40 billion and 50 billion respectively. By 309 billion CE the only two of the major world faiths of our time left with adherents were Judaism and Buddhism. Of course by then several new faiths had sprung into existence; but by then it was a small minority who had any faith at all in any deity; the vast majority of the population was made up of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously apathetic.

Around 125 billion CE the heat death of the universe prompted the existing nine colonies to launch ships into space, ninety ships in all, each with a thousand residents, that were designed to spend the rest of time traveling through the myriad galaxies in the universe.

When the story begins, the ninety ships encounter, for the first time in the history of the human race, alien spaceships. The alien race is younger than humanity, by several hundred million years, but is slightly more advanced technologically. They don't look human at all; basically they're large snakes with four arms and two legs each, and two sets of wings, though they can't fly. They have no revealed religion, so the main character suspects they've done as much evolving away from faith in deities as the human race has, over the eons. But it soon becomes obvious that the aliens do have very significant beliefs about God that haven't waned at all for billions of years.

The aliens are largely divided into two groups, one slightly larger than the other. The names for these two groups translate into Espe (which of course I represent as English, since English and Spanish are the only two languages I speak) as the Theist Assembly and the Pretheist Assembly respectively.

The prime article of faith for the Theists is that some good things must last forever. They recognize that for that to happen some intelligent being has to know how to preserve those good things into the eternities, and must therefore be acting to preserve them into the eternities. They call that being Chsee, which the main character translates as God, though he's not entirely accurate, since Chsee is neither strictly omnipotent nor strictly omniscient.

Surprisingly, when the main character translates the prime article of faith for the Pretheists, it's the same: some good things must last forever. In fact, the only difference between the Theists and the Pretheists is that the former believe Chsee already exists, whereas the Pretheists believe Chsee doesn't, and that their consciences require them to bring Chsee into existence.

Eventually the humans and the aliens part company, the former following the general path they had followed before and the latter following their path. But humans were not unaffected; the seeds for both a Theist Assembly and a Pretheist Assembly have been planted among them, and proceed to grow and revitalize the previously cynical ninety thousand.

[_Sethbag]

Kevin, I like the ideas, except for the time scales. Too many billions. We went from exceedingly primitive prokaryotes to human beings and every other species on Earth in under two billion years. The idea that anything even remotely resembling a species from today would exist in much the same form 309 billion years later is untenable.

As to the OP: in the LDS environment I grew up in, it was commonly believed that there were homo sapiens on tons and tons of planets out there in the universe. They looked like us, naturally, because we look like God (created in his physical image - not a metaphor), and we and they are brothers and sisters. I was taught that we were apparently the only planet on which the inhabitants would be so wicked as to crucify their own God (which I now see as crudely anti-semitic).

So, when the saucer lands, and the ramp slides out and the hatch opens and Zoork from the planet Doork steps out and says "so this is what it looks like on the only planet that would crucify Jesus!" I will probably have a lot of repenting to do. At least, if "not believing due to lack of evidence" constitutes an actual sin one must repent of.

If Zoork doesn't look like a human being though, and never heard of Jesus Christ, then I would think a lot of Mormons would have a lot of explaining to do. Not that I really believe that some of them would even let an event like this sway them in their faith.

[_asbestosman]

Kevin, I like the ideas, except for the time scales. Too many billions. We went from exceedingly primitive prokaryotes to human beings and every other species on Earth in under two billion years. The idea that anything even remotely resembling a species from today would exist in much the same form 309 billion years later is untenable.

True, but there's a significant difference between then and now: biotechnology. Even without that, humans have played a huge role in shaping species--domesticated plants and animals. As for the selective pressure in humans, we tend to do much to "correct" the appearance of anyone who has significant differences such as someone born with extra appendages / fingers.

[_KevinSim]

Kevin, I like the ideas, except for the time scales. Too many billions. We went from exceedingly primitive prokaryotes to human beings and every other species on Earth in under two billion years. The idea that anything even remotely resembling a species from today would exist in much the same form 309 billion years later is untenable.

True, but there's a significant difference between then and now: biotechnology. Even without that, humans have played a huge role in shaping species--domesticated plants and animals. As for the selective pressure in humans, we tend to do much to "correct" the appearance of anyone who has significant differences such as someone born with extra appendages / fingers.

I think Asbestosman has a point. Also, in my story I detail some of the ways humans have evolved over the billions of years. I just didn't think it was wise to put too much detail into a post on this forum.

[_Some Schmo]

As for the selective pressure in humans, we tend to do much to "correct" the appearance of anyone who has significant differences such as someone born with extra appendages / fingers.

Amputation does nothing to alter a person's DNA.

However, if your point is that by "correcting" their appearance, it makes them more likely to reproduce and therefore pass on their mutation... well, we'll only get more of that, not less. But this still indicates that we're having a conscious effect on our own evolution, albeit a tiny one, I suspect.

[_Gadianton]

As to the OP: in the LDS environment I grew up in, it was commonly believed that there were homo sapiens on tons and tons of planets out there in the universe. They looked like us, naturally, because we look like God (created in his physical image - not a metaphor), and we and they are brothers and sisters. I was taught that we were apparently the only planet on which the inhabitants would be so wicked as to crucify their own God (which I now see as crudely anti-semitic)

Just to point it out here, you were a Chapel Mormon my friend. Some Internet Mormons might say they heard this and rejected it, but most will lie and claim they've never heard this.