- Argument‹3 of 3
Human religions will appear infantile after contact with advanced aliens.
Contact with superior civilizations with advanced knowledge may produce more sophisticated ideas about where religious concepts come from. We may learn more about our origins, about consciousness, and science in general. Science will turn religious ideas into natural ideas.
The argument
Contact with other worlds will bring many of our cultural beliefs into question. Extraterrestrial beings may well be secular and irreligious. Aliens who are intellectually superior to us are likely to find humanity's religious beliefs primitive. Intelligent aliens may have outgrown our ideas long before humans come into contact. Even if advanced beings do have a religious or spiritual life, it is likely to be so far removed from our own beliefs that it casts doubt on organized religion. Intelligent beings may have a more sophisticated understanding of consciousness, death, and creation. Alien knowledge of the universe will cause a radical shift in human religious life, and even if it does not destroy it entirely, it alters the current understanding of spirituality radically. Alien life will add ammunition to the "God of the gaps" argument; that God fills the gaps where science ends. Whenever science is unable to explain a phenomenon, the supernatural explains it. We will be left with a "cosmotheology", in which nature explains religious concepts. Spiritual concepts are likely to be radically altered by super-intelligent beings with advanced knowledge. This knowledge undermines traditional religion, as we increasingly more towards natural explanations for God.
Context
Communication with advanced intelligent beings will undermine our religious beliefs.
Premises
Counter-arguments
As a planet and a species, we are always evolving. While we might come to find that in comparison to alien races, we are lacking, that in no way removes the fact that we are still developing. If the truth of the matter is that humans are not the dominate species, that does not mean that we must abandon all that we know to conform with these new ideas. Countless times have new religions come forth, believers converting from previous faiths, others leaving as science evolves. These religions were all infantile once upon a time, and yet now they are well known, have followers all over the globe. It might be intimidating at the start to suddenly be around beings with knowledge and faiths far beyond our understanding. This discovery does not have to change human beliefs or religion. For thousands of years, people have not allowed it to change. Not from colonizers and not from war. Extra-terrestrial visitors might challenge peoples faith but they will not destroy it.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Every step is speculation about beings nobody has observed: that they would be more intelligent, that greater intelligence tends toward secularity, and that they would judge human belief primitive. None of the three follows from the others. [Rejecting P2] Difference is not refutation. Encountering an unfamiliar religious tradition has historically produced comparison, syncretism and apologetics rather than collapse, so an alien spirituality unlike ours gives no reason to abandon anything. [Rejecting P3] The god-of-the-gaps point cuts against the premise. Most theological traditions do not rest on gaps in natural explanation, and those that did have already absorbed heliocentrism, deep time and evolution — each of which was expected to end religion and did not.