Can the world’s religions survive the existence of aliens?

One of the greatest mysteries of life is whether we are alone in the cosmos. The laws of probability suggest we aren’t, but despite centuries of searching, we have never seen any clear evidence of life beyond our planet. Still, the world’s religious leaders are already formulating how they would respond to extraterrestrial life—and some have more interesting approaches than others.

These discussions took center stage at a Capitol Hill gathering called the Disclosure Forum that took place earlier this year on a sunny day in June. A gaggle of lawmakers, retired military personnel, academics and businesspeople crowded into the Russell Senate Office Building’s Kennedy Caucus Room with me. As I listened, they spitballed ideas on how to handle what they believe are the increasingly likely chances of first contact with alien life.

Several speakers at the event stressed that a revelation that Earth has been visited by intelligent extraterrestrials would raise immediate questions about planetary defense. Others theorized hopefully that there could be enormous economic opportunities.

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There would also be enormous societal impacts: Carlos Eire, a historian and religious studies professor at Yale University, told event attendees that finding out humanity isn’t alone in the universe could shake us to our very souls—religious leaders would need to contain the fallout, he said.

Eire serves on the advisory board for the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit that organized the event and is dedicated to transparency around unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and aliens.

“If disclosure reveals that there are nonhuman intelligences,” Eire told me later in an interview, “it remains to be seen who these intelligences really are and what they do, or what they’re hoping to accomplish, with human beings.”

“There won’t be a single reaction,” he adds. “For some people, it will confirm all sorts of things. For some people, it will demolish certain beliefs.”

Reactions could be split along religious lines—and some belief systems may be better equipped to deal with aliens than others, experts say.

For example, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions that originate in the Global East “have always conceived of the universe as vast, as going through many cycles of existence,” says Jeffery Long, a religious studies professor at Elizabethtown College.

Hinduism, Long tells me, has many deities, some of whom are described in religious texts as traveling through the cosmos on “vimanas”—flying chariots that could, to some, be read as akin to spaceships.

“If you start reading ancient Hindu literature and about different deities and then other species of intelligent beings, it’s very sci-fi,” Long says.

Meanwhile, the Abrahamic religions—the largest of which are Christianity, Judaism and Islam—are largely accepting of the idea that conscious life might exist that isn’t human, but none of these religions are monoliths.

The sheer scope of Christian belief systems makes attitudes to aliens among believers difficult to pin down, Eire says. Some theologians are optimistic: in his 2023 book Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe, which received some NASA grant funding, Andrew Davison, now a divinity professor at the University of Oxford, wrote that he believes Christianity would be more “robust” in accepting alien life than some might think.

Certainly, leaders in the Roman Catholic Church have hinted at being open to extraterrestrials—the late Pope Francis once said he’d happily baptize an alien if they asked—Eire points out that within certain forms of Christianity, such as Protestantism, there can be incredible diversity in beliefs.

“There are Bible-thumping antievolutionists in parts of the U.S. that call themselves Evangelicals, and there are Evangelicals that are damn close to Catholics,” Eire says. “Predicting what Protestants will do is just impossible. The spectrum is so wide and contains so many different kinds of Christianity.”

The Abrahamic religion that may be the most open-minded about aliens, Long says, is also the oldest. Jewish scripture, while making no mention of spaceships, does include repeated mention of angels with a higher consciousness than that of humans. Even the most devout followers would perhaps be accepting of aliens because the religion’s dogma is “more about ethics and living your life here and now than it’s about ‘if you do this, you’ll go to heaven,’” Long says.

Academic explorations of how religious belief might influence attitudes to potential alien life are spotty at best, but that dearth of research could change. Aliens have become less taboo for scientists beyond astrobiology; the possibility of extraterrestrial life is no longer a punch line.

At the June Disclosure Forum, I heard more about how the White House is approaching the issue by setting up an advisory group on UAP, led by Harvard professor Avi Loeb. Loeb said at the event that he hopes the UAP Science Advisory Council will go on to publish scientific findings in reputable journals. That may include research in the field of exotheology—the study of religion and theological ideas related to alien life, Eire says.

“The academic community is readier now than it was 10 years ago for various reasons,” he says. Eire points to the Pentagon’s recent publishing of several tranches of previously classified UAP-related documents and media as a reason for this increased openness.

As to whether a kind of spiritual malaise or panic might result from aliens revealing themselves, that’s unclear. According to one recent poll, a third of Americans believe at least some UAP sightings were actual spacecraft; another poll found about half the country believes aliens probably exist. But drilling down more formally into specific religions is more murky: A 2021 poll revealed that among U.S. Christians, people who said religion was very important to them were less likely to believe that intelligent life might exist on other planets, as were those who attended religious services at least weekly. Belief in alien life also varied by denomination.

Much could also hinge on what kind of alien life is out there. While most people imagine intelligent beings that are in the best case friendly and curious like E.T., or, in the worst case, here to annihilate humanity, like in Independence Day, that’s not what most exobiologists are searching for. Instead they are on the lookout for distant exoplanets that exhibit signs of life closer to Earth’s microbes than humans.

“If there was amoebalike life on other planets, that would be a significant thing,” says Shoaib Malik, a science and religion lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor of the book Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion. But while microscopic life would “definitely show proof of concept,” Malik adds, it wouldn’t fundamentally shake people’s faith.

“I think the real challenge really is if there’s something equivalent or something more advanced than the human being, particularly if you associate human uniqueness with rationality and spirituality,” Malik says.

Other scholars aren’t so sure. David Weintraub, a retired astronomer and author of Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?, says the difference between a microbe and, say, a primate is only a matter of degree.

“I think it would only make a difference to someone who does not believe in evolution, and that’s where we start drilling into the religious aspect of this,” he says. “If you accept evolution as a natural part of the way the universe works, then if you find microbial life of any sort, a possibility exists that that microbial life could evolve into intelligent life someday.”

Although there are no direct comparisons of similar evolutionary situations arising in modern history, says Paul Gutjahr, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the book Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life, there are many examples in human history in which religion and new knowledge of the cosmos has collided. When evolution was an emerging theory, for example, it presented a major challenge to Christianity.

“What you find is that people within that tradition find ways to adapt,” Gutjahr says. “It’s not like everybody becomes a friend of evolution, but there are there are very smart, capable and vocal people that start to think about if evolution is just the way that God worked his magic.”