…with the James Web Telescope looking for sources of artificial light to identify potential intelligent life, and the news this week of Perseverance searching for microbial life on Mars it feels like we are getting closer to a major discovery. But what - if anything - would it mean for the religions on Earth if life is proven to exist out there?

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I think at least with Christianity it would be similar of changing the everything orbiting the Earth to Earth orbiting the Sun. They’d just declare that it is all God’s creation and be done with it.

      • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        You can’t really prove negatives. Especially not when something is also constantly adapting and changing over the time. If anything it would use this very fact to disprove it, because it usually claims to be so absolute.

        • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
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          1 year ago

          Sorry to disappoint you, but the only thing it disproves is that their creation myths aren’t to be taken literally.

          Actually, in the case of Judaism and Christianity, not even that. An accurate translation of the very first sentence in Genesis is in the perfect tense: “In the beginning, God had created the Heavens and the Earth.” Only starting from the third verse does it switch into the narrative tense. As such, the Big Bang by itself wouldn’t be sufficient evidence against taking the Judeo-Christian creation myth literally (obviously, other advances in science take over from there).

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Christianity doesn’t really change. They still think that the banana is our worse nightmare and since peanut butter has never evolved into a monkey evolution is false.