SETI's Challenge to Religion

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Are we alone in the universe? This is one of the oldest questions that humans have asked. For centuries it remained confined to religion and philosophy, but fifty years ago this past April, it became part of science when a young American astronomer, Frank Drake, began sweeping the skies with a radio telescope hoping to pick up a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. Thus began SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which is now a multi-million dollar international enterprise. So far, all the astronomers have to show for their efforts is five decades of eerie silence. Does that mean that there is nobody out there? Or might we be looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place?

Scientists agree that SETI is a needle-in-a-haystack search, without any guarantee that there is even a needle out there. At this time, there is zero evidence one way or the other for any life beyond Earth, let alone intelligent life. Even if there are other civilizations in the galaxy, they are likely to be thousands of light years away. A major flaw in radio SETI is that such far-flung civilizations would be very unlikely to beam signals deliberately at Earth. Because nothing can go faster than light, beings located a thousand light years away would see Earth as it was a thousand years ago, long before any technological society. If they could not possibly know we were on the air, why would they bother signaling us?

Even in the absence of a specific radio signal, we might nevertheless obtain evidence of alien technology by spotting, for example, signs of large-scale astro-engineering. Suppose that, one way or another, we did uncover incontrovertible evidence that intelligent alien beings exist or have existed. What sort of impact would the discovery that we are not alone have on modern societies?

I chair a curious body known as the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, a collection of scientists and journalists, along with a handful of science fiction writers, lawyers, and a theologian. It is our job to deliberate on the consequences if ET should call. If we did receive a deliberately crafted message from aliens, then all bets would be off. The disruptive effect of humanity’s suddenly being in contact with a powerful cosmic intelligence, perhaps willing to confer startling new scientific and technological secrets, is impossible to assess.

Much more likely, however, is that we will simply stumble across indirect evidence for an advanced alien civilization. The impact of such a discovery would be comparable to Copernicus’s announcement that the Earth is not at the center of the universe. Knowledge that our planet is but one among many did not affect daily life, but over the centuries it transformed humanity’s worldview. In particular, it changed the way that humans understand their place in the universe. The effects of finding indirect evidence for ET thus would be mainly philosophical rather than practical.

Religion is the one area in which an immediate impact would be felt. All the world’s major religions were founded in a pre-scientific era. The sacred texts and the various creation myths were formulated long before humans had a good understanding of the natural world or the nature of life. More importantly, they are directed specifically at human beings and human society. Knowledge that we share the universe with myriad other sentient beings would inevitably diminish the sense of human specialness that most religions foster.

Christianity is particularly vulnerable in this respect, because of the supposedly unique nature of the Incarnation and salvation. Christians believe that God took on human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind. He did not come to save the chimpanzees or the dolphins, nor even presumably the Neanderthals, however noble or deserving those creatures may be. And he certainly did not come to Earth to save the proverbial little green men on the far side of the galaxy.

So long as people believe that Homo sapiens occupies the pinnacle of creation in the form of the most advanced intelligence in the cosmos, this species-specific salvation might remain credible, but it would immediately crumble if we were to discover that there exist other species that are not only far ahead of us scientifically, technologically, and intellectually, but also ethically. Are these beings not to be saved?

This awkward conundrum was confronted head-on by theologians several centuries ago, resulting in a lively debate. Some advocated multiple incarnations scattered around the universe; others insisted that the Word was delivered to humans alone and that it is our cosmic destiny to spread it to other planets, even if the aliens are incomparably wiser than we are. At least one theologically minded scholar, William Whewell, Master of Trinity College Cambridge and the man who gave us the word “scientist,” cited the uniqueness of the Incarnation as an argument that aliens do not exist. As he wrote:

"God has interposed in the history of mankind in a special and personal manner . . . [W]hat are we to suppose concerning the other worlds which science discloses to us? Is there a like scheme of salvation provided for all of them? Our view of the saviour of man will not allow us to suppose that there can be more than one saviour. And the saviour coming as a man to men is so essential a part of the scheme . . . that to endeavour to transfer it to other worlds and to imagine there something analogous as existing, is more repugnant to our feeling than to imagine those other worlds not to be provided with any divine scheme of salvation,"

In our own time, most Christians are in denial about these difficulties. The few contemporary theologians who dare to pronounce on the subject usually shrug it aside with the comment that the existence of intelligent aliens would not pose a problem for Christianity. But it would pose a problem, and a huge one at that. The Church would do well to take it seriously and to fundamentally revise its salvation narrative ahead of any discovery. Unlike Darwin’s theory of evolution, the implications of which could be factored in slowly, over decades, evidence that we are not alone might come suddenly, at any time. If the eerie silence were abruptly broken, or even if astronomers merely spotted unmistakable signs of alien technology in another star system, the cosmic nature of life and mind would instantly be affirmed. No religion focused on one species and one planet could retain credibility.

There is a broader spiritual message buried here, however. In our present state of ignorance, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that we are indeed alone, that life is a chemical fluke confined to Earth, a bizarre aberration that just happened in one tiny corner of the universe, of no significance in the grand sweep of cosmic evolution. But the discovery of intelligent alien beings would reveal instead a universe in which life and mind are deeply embedded in the natural order of things. An intrinsically bio-friendly universe is one in which human beings need not feel like freak extras. It would be a universe in which we could truly feel at home.

Paul Davies is a physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where he is director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. The latest of his many books is The Eerie Silence: Renewing our Search for Alien Intelligence.