by Simon Wright

Created on: October 11, 2010

It was to the stars that mankind looked when religion first came into being. Man sought explanations for powerful phenomena that we now understand to be natural but which to early man seemed miraculous. Consequently, gods such as Thor (god of thunder) and Ra (one of many sun gods) burst forth. Religious belief systems, however, are a shifting beast and the old gods are now consigned to history books, whilst new monotheistic gods have risen to take their place, as evidenced through the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

These modern religions have postulated that there is just one God and that he created all life on Earth. It is also commonly held that our blue planet is the only planet that he decided to imbue with life and that all the other “dead” planets were presumably just thrown into the mix for their aesthetic quality. It is interesting, therefore, to speculate on what the effect would be if science was to prove that there is life on other planets?

In considering this question, it’s important to realize that religions aren’t uniform. If we take Christianity as an example, it has splintered into countless sects who interpret the central Christian God message in different ways. And the attitudes that these distinct groups have adopted to other important scientific discoveries probably provides the biggest clue as to how the confirmation of extraterrestrial life would be greeted by religious groups.

When Christianity was formed, its rules and guidelines were laid down through a series of scriptures which came together in a book that became known as the Bible. For centuries, Christian religious observers believed that everything that was written in both the Old and New Testaments was “gospel truth” and not to be questioned. Of course, over the centuries mankind’s knowledge of our world has increased substantially. Scientists have now proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Earth is not flat, it’s not the centre of the universe, and all organisms on earth are as they are today because they have gone through a process of biological evolution.

Galileo Galilei, often referred to as the Father of Modern Science, was tried for heresy for advocating that the Earth was not fixed (as the scriptures said) but rather rotated around the Sun. Much later, another scientific great, Charles Darwin, was ridiculed when he published his Theory of Evolution. However, whilst Christianity initially vehemently

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