It’s been just revealed that NASA is planning to know how to deal with potential alien-related announcements. The space agency recently funded a program to learn this.
Futurism.com notes that NASA brought together 24 theologians at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton for a year-long program called “The Societal Implications of Astrobiology” in 2016, The Times reports.
According to the notes, the group was tasked with addressing how exactly religions would respond to the discovery of alien life.
Futurism.com noted the following:
“It’s a worthwhile task — especially when you consider that billions of people all over the world subscribe to a religion in one form or another. How would alien life change their perception of God? How would it impact things like the biblical creation story? Would religions have to change their doctrine?”
Here’s what Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, an Anglican priest and theologian at the University of Cambridge who took part in the program, said in a new book about the initiative titled “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine.”
“The headline findings are that adherents of a range of religious traditions report that they can take the idea in their stride.”
Making sure how the world would respond to alien life evidence
Davison also made sure to highlight that the non-religious community at large tends to “overestimate the challenges that religious people” would encounter if we ever discovered evidence of alien life.
The same online publication mentioned above also noted that it’s pretty interesting that NASA would gather a group of religious leaders to talk about aliens. But they also said that it’s low-key telling of how confident NASA is about discovering alien life in the near future if the agency has taken such a step.
More than that, the same online publication also said that it makes sense the fact that the space agency wants to make sure that everyone will be fine with the idea of discovering evidence of alien life.
