Friday, May 12, 2017

Do you think religious people would change their beliefs if the existence of alien life were proven?

I couldn't disagree with that idea more strongly. You have to understand the psychology of belief, that when religion is a deeply-integrated part of a person's identity, they don't change their beliefs when provided with new information; they filter that information through the beliefs they already have and refuse to give up.
I'll give you two anecdotes which I think illustrate how some religious people would react to this (and that's not even considering the people whose religious beliefs are legitimately compatible with the existence of aliens). The first is personal, the second is a public figure. The personal one is myself; I used to be very religious. I remember one time back in those days, I started to watch the movie Paul (by that time, I was cool with R-rated movies despite being very morally conservative). There's a point in the movie where the two guys and the alien run into a fundie Christian, and the alien says his existence "disproves the notion of the Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian God." I actually turned the movie off right then and there, not because it was blasphemous, but because I disagreed so passionately with the assertion that the existence of aliens would disprove my beliefs. Mind you, I didn't have any well-thought-out theological ideas about how the existence of aliens would coexist with the truth claims of Christianity, I basically just thought, "Christianity is obviously true, whether aliens exist or not. The end."
Now, the public figure; Ken Ham. This blog post from AIG gained some mainstream attention when Huffington Post reported on it with the headline "Creationist Ken Ham Says Aliens Will Go To Hell So Let’s Stop Looking For Them." In fact, the main thrust of the post is that aliens obviously don't exist, because the Bible says that people and animals were created by God, not evolved, so there's no reason to think there would be any living organisms on any other planets. He even ludicrously claims that the whole reason scientists are trying so hard to find alien life is to disprove creation so they'll have free rein to rebel against God. That seems to go right along with your theory that if the existence of aliens was proven, religious people would abandon their beliefs, right? But look closer; there is a point in the post where Ham says, "Now the Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not animal or plant life in outer space," and later, "this means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation." So, within this whole rant about how we should stop looking for alien life because aliens obviously don't exist from a Biblical standpoint, he's still not going so far as to claim that the existence of aliens and the truth of the Bible are utterly incompatible. He's essentially making a falsifiable claim, but with the back-door exit already wide open if that claim is ever actually falsified.
If "we" find out that aliens exist, then the first step for fundamentalist religious people will be to simply deny the truthfulness of that claim (just as they already do with evolution, because they believe it contradicts their beliefs as well). When the evidence becomes too strong to deny (like, if aliens live among us), then they'll shift to claiming that their beliefs were always consistent with the existence of aliens, and will even find verses of scripture that they can twist to claim that the Bible (or whatever other scripture they believe in) already told us that aliens exist, so it must be inspired by God because no human could've known that way back then.
Flat-earth theory is a good real-world analogue to show both stages of the process. There are people who still vehemently oppose the idea of a spherical earth, because they believe that the Bible indicates the earth is flat. Conversely, there are people who point to verses like Isaiah 40:22 as the Bible presciently acknowledging that the earth is a sphere, even though the vast majority of translations interpret the word as "circle," which is a flat, two-dimensional shape.
The most ludicrous example I've ever heard of this (a person trying to twist the words of the Bible to make it seem like it indicates foreknowledge of modern scientific discoveries) was from Hugh Ross. He said that the Bible talks about the universe being constantly expanding; my ears perked up when I heard this, because I've read the Bible a few times, and certainly didn't recall seeing that. So then, he read the verse that he claimed supported that contention. It was actually the latter part of that same verse, Isaiah 40:22, which says God "stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in." I'm sorry, do curtains or tents continuously and endlessly expand throughout all time? Of course not, they expand to a certain size and then stop. This verse is obviously not saying anything about the universe constantly expanding. All Ross did was take what we've learned through real scientific discovery and combine it with his dogmatic belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and then interpreted what it says through that framework. There's nothing about the proven existence of aliens that would make it impossible for people like him to continue using that approach.

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