Would Extraterrestrial Intelligence Disprove Christianity?

https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/would-extraterrestrial-intelligence-disprove-christianity/

Sometimes, a person’s faith can be shaken needlessly. This happens when someone erroneously thinks that if a given hypothesis were proven true, then Christianity would be disproven. Similarly, there are nonbelievers who think that, if certain things could be proven scientifically, then Christian faith would be irredeemably contradicted. The existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) or—to use updated nomenclature—nonhuman intelligence (NHI) is sometimes cited as an example. There are those who think that the discovery of intelligent alien life would, in fact, be an insuperable defeater against Christianity.

The seriousness with which the question is being discussed has grown substantially over the last several years and has heated up even more in recent months. An initial boost in interest was fueled by a late-2017 New York Times article1 that discussed government investigations into UFOs or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena). 

Would it really be proof that our religion is false, as some scientists and atheists assert and some Christians fear?

These developments raise the question: If the government and/or scientific community were to claim to have verifiable evidence of nonhuman intelligent life, what would that mean for Catholics and other Christians? Would it really be proof that our religion is false, as some scientists and atheists assert and some Christians fear?

Personally, the question is not concerning to me, but there are people out there for whom the prospect of alien disclosure is a real source of religious and existential angst. To help ease the minds and calm the souls of those who might be struggling, I wanted to point to some respected Catholic thinkers who have investigated this issue much more thoroughly than I have. 

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What happens if we detect alien life?

Scientists have been listening for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations for decades, but what would they do if they actually heard one?

https://www.astronomy.com/science/what-happens-when-we-detect-alien-life-2/

We’ve never heard a peep from aliens. But improved technology is speeding up the search for extra- terrestrial intelligence (SETI), so what happens if today’s silence suddenly gives way to tomorrow’s discovery of alien life? Would the world rejoice in the news that someone’s out there? Would euphoria engulf humanity, as Nobel Prizes are doled out like after-dinner mints?

That’s one view. But many people think the discovery would be hushed up as quickly as a Mafia informant, assuming that the public couldn’t handle the news. Or scarier still, kept secret for fear that an unauthorized response would tell a hostile race exactly where to send their interstellar battlewagons.

That’s melodramatic enough. But has any serious consideration gone into what happens when our efforts to detect cosmic intelligence pay off and we find a blip of a signal in the sea of radio noise that pours into the SETI antennas?

Some think that addressing that question — even in a speculative way — is hubristic at best and wildly pre- sumptuous at worst. After all, SETI scientists have been torquing their telescopes toward celestial targets for more than half a century without ever detecting such a signal. If we haven’t won the E.T. lottery in all that time, why worry about what would happen if we got the winning ticket?

Simple: SETI researchers are buying more tickets all the time, and the chances of scoring the big one keep going up. As computer power improves and new detection technology comes out of the labs, the search is accelerating. Unless the aliens are excessively secretive or simply nonexistent, we could find evidence for their presence within decades.

So, again, then what?

These are all patently good ideas that seem to suggest that everyone would handle a discovery soberly. However, such interesting signals are bound to provoke a response that’s both messy and confused because verification will take many days, at the least.

During all that time, word of the possible detection will surely spread via blogs and tweets from the researchers themselves (there’s no policy of secrecy in SETI). So you can bet that long before any official press conference announcing that we’ve found the aliens, you’ll have heard about it many times over. Indeed, you should brace yourself for plenty of future false alarms caused by signals that — at first blush — look promising. This has occurred in the past and shows the error of those who think that a discovery could be covered up.

Any real detection would be a headliner, everyone agrees. SETI practitioner Paul Horowitz of Harvard University in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, says it would “easily be the most interesting discovery in human history. Journalists would go wild, at least for a month or two.”

A public reaction of initial enthusiasm, and not mayhem, has precedent. Consider the 1996 announcement that NASA scientists had found fossilized martian microbes in a meteorite. That story ran in The New York Times with billboard-sized headlines for three days. The public’s reaction to the possible detection of life beyond Earth? “That’s interesting. Tell us more.”

The meteorite story was a stunted reprisal of astronomer Percival Lowell’s reports of martian canals a century earlier. Again, people were tantalized, but few seemed to panic.

Initial questions

All of that would be tasty fodder for the technically inclined, but everyone else is going to ask an obvious question: What are the aliens saying? That, of course, assumes that they’re saying anything — that they’ve included a message in the signal. After all, the extraterrestrials might withhold commentary if they want us to reply first, per- haps so they can gauge what level of conversation is appropriate.

But let’s suppose that E.T. is trying to tell us something. Just getting the message “bits” could be hard. SETI observations add up incoming static for seconds or minutes to increase the sensitivity to weak signals.

In the meantime, the public would be confronted with the fact of cosmic company. We wouldn’t know what they’re like, nor what we might learn from them, only that they exist. Anthropologist Ben Finney of the University of Hawaii at Manoa has predicted that an “interpretation industry” would quickly sprout — facile pundits who, out of conviction or merely greed, will explain to the masses what contact means and how we should feel about it.

And in particular, how should religions react? Research in this area is lacking, but most mainstream theologians have expressed the upbeat view that our belief

systems could adapt. As Vatican Observatory astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno has said, “If your religion has survived millennia — if it can handle Copernicus, Galileo, and even Darwin — then E.T. should eventually prove palatable.”

Mainstream religion might easily incor- porate the discovery, but fundamentalists will have a harder time. They are less will- ing to accept a cosmic circumstance that’s not found in scripture. And unless you’re inclined to consider seraphim, nephilim, or angels as alien beings, most religions don’t anticipate the presence of intelligent life on other worlds (an exception is Mormonism).

The fundamentalists would likely rail against the discovery, claiming it’s “just Satan, tempting you,” according to sociologist Bill Bainbridge of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.