Contact with alien intelligence would be a breathtaking event. Depending upon what guise this contact took, the consequences for society could be profound. With religion foundational for many cultures around the world, it’s critical that we consider how faith would be affected should there be news that we are not alone. Even if you yourself are not religious, it’s clear that a crisis in any of the world’s major religions would be a major concern, causing societal strife for many people.

Cynics have often declared that the discovery of aliens would be the death knell for earthly religions. In his book Contact With Alien Civilizations (2007), Michael Michaud wrote that “the more anthropocentric our religions are, the more they may be challenged by contact.” The American 20th century philosopher Roland Puccetti suggested in his book Persons (1968) that our religions would not survive the implications of an inhabited cosmos. And theoretical physicist Paul Davies has specific concerns for Christianity, stating in a previous interview with this writer that he “doesn’t see how you live with [the knowledge of alien life] and retain the core of Christian belief.”

Rising to the defence of religious belief in the face of extraterrestrial contact is Lutheran theologian Professor Ted Peters. 

“Paul Davies and I debate this a lot,” says Peters, with good humour. Though the pair disagree, Peters clearly gets much out of the discussion. 

To try and finally answer the cynics, about 15 years ago Peters sought to find out whether religion really would be in danger should contact occur. Working with research assistant Julie Froehlig, he conducted a survey among people who identified themselves as religious (specifically either Buddhist, Jewish, Mormon, Orthodox Christian, Protestant or Roman Catholic; Hindus and Muslims were also asked, but Peters and Froehlig didn’t receive enough replies back to draw any conclusions about those religions). The survey questions focused on whether the respondents felt the discovery of alien life would undercut their personal faith, whether it would place their religion’s wider traditions into crisis, and whether they felt other religions would be negatively impacted by contact.

The results showed that people who answered the survey did not think that their religion would be challenged by the discovery of extraterrestrial life, although some did think that others might have a problem with it.

“From my point of view, I don’t think the results were surprising,” says Peters.

Not that everyone necessarily agrees. “Some of us are a bit hesitant about the conclusions of Ted’s survey,” says Shoaib Malik, who is a chemical engineer turned philosopher in the subject of Islam and Science, and who is taking up a post at the University of Edinburgh this August to lecture on science and religion. “The problem is that he did not differentiate who the participants were. I have a feeling that the clergy will generally not have a problem [with alien life], but I don’t think that translates to being representative of religious folk at large. I think there’s a huge disparity between the laity and the academic elite.”

Peters acknowledges that the survey isn’t perfect, but is bullish about it. “In the survey people self-identified with a religious tradition, there was no measurement of degree of fidelity or passion, and I don’t claim this is the best survey that could be done, but I’m going to stick by the survey. I’d rather have this set of evidence than none.”

Christianity revolves around the fall, the incarnation and redemption, as portrayed in the story of Christ. If one believes, then this was a very specific event two millennia ago that is fundamental to the Christian religion. However, can we expect there to have been (or at least be myths of) a Christ on every inhabited planet in the Universe, or was Christ reserved just for humanity? If the latter, it would seem a somewhat arrogant perspective.

Lucas Mix, who is an astrobiologist by training and is currently project manager and co-director of the Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science program at the University of Durham, UK, thinks that how Christians will respond to contact with alien life will depend on what they see to be the core of their Christian faith.

“If someone’s core commitment to Christianity is about the exclusivity of Jesus’ action, then [the existence of aliens] could be very threatening to their faith,” says Mix. “But for many of us, the central idea of Christianity has to do with this love of neighbour, and that becomes harder with aliens because they are alien. So I don’t think contact will be an intellectual challenge, but it could be emotionally challenging.”

Other religions such as Islam and Judaism could perhaps adapt a little more easily to contact because they don’t have to explain how Christ must have been reincarnated on every inhabited world. That doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be stumbling blocks; any religion that teaches about the uniqueness of humanity would have to face up to a new paradigm where we are not unique. Furthermore, Malik has encountered individuals who cannot engage with the idea of aliens because there is no mention of them in the Quran. Similar quandaries have been grappled with by Christian theologians too: the Bible did not mention the people of the New World, or Copernicanism, but Christianity adapted (albeit slowly and painfully, particularly for the indigenous people of the Americas) to the reality of each situation.

Malik thinks the main problem would be humanity being pushed down the hierarchy of beings. 

“Here I see theological issues emerging, because in Islam and Christianity I do see some backing to the idea that perhaps we are the apex of God’s creation,” he says. “This concept of theological anthropocentrism might be shattered by the emergence of extraterrestrials.”

If extraterrestrial intelligence exists, then it is likely much older than we are. The logic behind this is that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old and there has been plenty of time for life to arise on other worlds. Humanity, on the other hand, are newcomers to the scene having arrived only around 100,000 years ago. And if ET can beam powerful signals across interstellar space, or perhaps arrive here in spacecraft from across the stars, their scientific knowledge must be far advanced than our own.

“That would mean that their intellect is far superior to ours, and I think we would be very worried by the implication that there is a smarter species than us,” says Malik.

Any atheistic scientists reading this shouldn’t feel too smug. The discovery of extraterrestrial life with technology and scientific knowledge far in advance of our own could be grim for our own scientific endeavours. In his book The High Frontier (1976), the Princeton physicist Gerard K O’Neill posited that “it has seemed to me overwhelmingly probable that the first effect of the discovery [of aliens], as soon as the excitement and the novelty have worn off a little, would be to kill our science and our art.” O’Neill added that “if a civilization now radioing to us is as many thousands of years ahead of us in knowledge as we are from the Neanderthal, why continue to study and search for scientific truth on our own? Gone then the possibility of new discovery, or surprise, and above all of pride and accomplishment.”

O’Neill is saying that should aliens bequeath us with their knowledge, or even just display their technology for us to figure out, where does the imperative for us to figure out the Universe for ourselves go? If we have a scientific question, we can just refer to what the aliens say. We might also discover that some of our cherished scientific notions are wrong, but we wouldn’t learn that through our own endeavours, we’d be told it like a child being scolded by their teacher. It would no longer be scientific discovery; we’d be spoon-fed information, stripping us of all motivation to learn for ourselves.

Similar feelings of inadequacy could be felt by religions. Suppose that aliens arrived armed not only with faith, but with proof of God, whether a God of this Earth or another God entirely, and therefore were closer to that God than any of us. Or, what if they came to us with scientific proof that God doesn’t exist, demonstrating it by showing the inner workings of the Universe without divine intervention? Would such information be ignored the way that some religious people ignore evidence for evolution or the Big Bang? Or would being shown that the object of our faith does not exist bring with it a profound trauma that people could not recover from?

Religions will try to adapt, but despite Peters’ survey, one can make a case that it’s still an open question as to whether religions will survive the encounter. The 1960 Brookings report for NASA on the Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs included a two-page section about the consequences of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. This stated that “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the Universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behaviour.”

Granted, how things go down would depend on how we were made aware of the reality of extraterrestrial life. Finding microbes on Mars would be very cool, but most people who aren’t astrobiologists would just shrug their shoulders. The detection of a radio signal, perhaps indecipherable, from hundreds or thousands of light years away would be headline news for a few days, and then forgotten about by the general public who would just get on with their everyday lives. A signal that can be deciphered from a planet within 10 or 20 light years of us, close enough to enable communication back and forth, would be a different and serious matter, and should the aliens turn up in their spaceships landing on the White House lawn, then all bets are off.

One way that religions may try to survive the repercussions of alien contact is by retroactively fitting the aliens into the words of their Holy books. It is kind of an Ancient Aliens approach admits Ted Peters, and it is not an approach that he personally encourages, quite clearly stating that “The Bible does not mention aliens.” Shoaib Malik, however, describes how there is a precedence for this in how Islamic teachings integrated western science in the 1980s. 

“There were two very interesting but diametrically opposed attitudes when it came to modern science,” says Malik, who has edited a new book, Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life (2024), which is the first English language book on the topic. “One of these attitudes was called the Islamisation of Science, which was somewhat suspicious of modern science that was being imported from foreign lands. And the other one was called Scientific Miracles of the Quran, which is this idea that modern ideas in science were actually anticipated in the Quran, and so they used this as an apologetic maneuvers to support the divine origin of this text.”

One can imagine that were alien life to be discovered, sections of the Quran, or the Bible, or the Torah, could be reinterpreted by some theologians as describing extraterrestrials. Malik says that Islam already has a ready made alien proxy, called the jinn. Whereas Christianity has angels and demons, which are fallen angels, Islam has angels and the jinn, which are not fallen angels but a distinct category of their own.

Jewish scripture has similar resource for aliens. The American Rabbi and writer, Avram Mlotek, has suggested that there are passages in the Hebrew Bible (and hence the Old Testament for Christians) that could be implied as referencing aliens, such as in Genesis, Chapter 6, which mentions entities called the B’nei Elohim (Children of God) who took humankind’s daughters as wives and that this coincided with a time when some people called the Nefilim (fallen ones) were on Earth. Is this alluding to angels and demons, or something more ‘alien’, asks Mlotek?  

And what of atheists? Will their position be shaken by the discovery of extraterrestrial life? If aliens have their own religions, or a broader spirituality that perhaps makes more logical sense to atheists, would they remain atheist or take up the religion and spirituality of the aliens? Speaking as an atheist, I have to concede that I don’t know. None of us knows how we will react to the news that we are not alone in the Universe, and how we do react may well depend on how we learn we are not alone. If you are a person of strong faith, it’s very easy to respond to a survey about a hypothetical situation and say that your faith would not be shaken. Actually coming face to face with that situation would be very different; we’d no longer be confronting a hypothetical question on a survey, rather we’d be confronting cold, hard reality.

We can be guided a little bit by history, as pointed out by the Brookings report, which at best suggests that for all our cultural tentpoles, including religion, an encounter with the alien could be a tough ride.

That’s why it’s important that these discussions are happening now, so that we can at least prepare ourselves. It’s also why those who persist on insisting that they be allowed to transmit loudly into the heavens to alert anyone out there to our presence, are playing with fire. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the aliens intentions will be in response; what will matter will be the reaction of all our cultural, societal and scientific institutions, and this could potentially pose the greatest danger.

There’s a core belief in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that alien civilizations with greater technology than us will also be more advanced in a moral sense too, and that they will have the solution to all our problems on Earth – climate change, war, famine, disease, you name it – and be willing to share those solutions with us. Carl Sagan for instance, posited that an alien message “may contain detailed prescriptions or the avoidance of technological disaster, for a passage through adolescence to maturity.” Frank Drake, in his book Is Anyone Out There? (1991) co-written by Dava Sobel, suggests that “immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials,” which would see them become highly safety conscious with no warfare so that they can avoid death through non-natural causes, and to protect themselves from war with other worlds, they “would help other societies become immortal too” – including us.

It all seems loaded with quasi-religious imagery – immortal, powerful, other-worldly beings acting as our saviours by bringing peace and prosperity to humankind. 

“There’s this interesting response among some folk that they believe aliens will also be the salvation of humankind, because if they’ve reached a certain critical point of intelligence, they’ve also reached a point of civilisational intelligence, and they’ve eliminated bickering and wars and discourse,” says Malik. “We’re kind of depositing the messiah complex on these aliens.”

The quasi-religious speculation of SETI scientists unfortunately conflates technological advancement with being morally or ethically advanced, but connections between the two are highly debated. Just because a civilization has great technology does not automatically make it wise or altruistic.

In light of the alien, we come back to what Lucas Mix spoke about with regards his faith, and the imperative to ‘love thy stranger’. It remains to be seen whether we can relate to, or find companionship, with an alien species, but perhaps the discovery of alien life can at least bring humanity closer together, as we find greater kinship in our neighbors than we had before when we thought we were alone in the Universe. 

Alien contact could potentially bring with it many ‘shiny new things’ that could be disruptive to human societies. In some ways this will be no different to the introduction of our own disruptive new technologies, from the spinning jenny to the combustion engine and the Internet, or to integrating new scientific ideas into society such as A.I. or evolution. 

In response, the whole of human society, encapsulating the religious and the non-religious, will be forced to adapt or else flounder. We may lose some of the foundations of our culture in the process, but strengthen others. As Arthur C Clarke wrote in The Exploration of Space (1951), “a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.” Though perhaps Ted Peters’ survey indicates a certain in-built robustness to faith that will triumph against the odds.

Whatever contact brings, good or bad, it would be a time for humanity to come together and hold fast to the credo encouraged by so many religions to love thy stranger. Perhaps it will make us appreciate our differences better, and force us to learn that it doesn’t matter how we say the prayers as long as we find the good in each other. By sticking together, we will stand the best chance of emerging on the other side of a contact event in a better place.