Just when you thought the absurdity of life couldn’t reach higher heights, the Mexican congress has presented mummified bodies of what they claim are 1000 year old alien bodies confirmed by radiocarbon dating apparently. This legislative body is most definitely (for reasons not worth going into) the victim of a con artist. I will just let this lie, but it has compelled me to finally lay out the following argument: any confirmation of life, be it a single celled organism or advanced intelligence, is incompatible with belief in any of the Abrahamic faiths.
This silly display in Mexico comes in the context of the congressional hearing regarding the history of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. If you missed it, you can watch it here. The two main takeaways from this hearing are a review of two military pilots first hand experiences of encounters with flying vessels that demonstrate capabilities outside any known technology, and the testimony of a former military and intelligence officer, David Grusch. During the hearing, his answer to a question that went something like “Is the U.S. government currently in possession of craft of non-human origin?” was, “Absolutley.” To fill in some detail, Grusch had been assigned to investigate what the U.S. government has concluded about all the supposed sightings of unknown origin we have been so familiar with for so long by congressional action. He is claiming through a whistleblower complaint that he has been stonewalled from his duties and clandestine organizations within the U.S. government have been trying to reverse engineer alien technology for decades. Now, for the first record, I do not believe an intelligence race has ever been to our planet (SETI has been searching for 60 years for any radio signal that is unnatural and found nothing) and I do not believe that is what we are experiencing today. I believe this to be true because there is no evidence to support this claim despite what the History Channel may have you believe. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and Grusch hasn’t presented any, though the testimony of pilots that experienced the now somewhat famous ‘tic tac’ incidents are very hard to fit into our current understanding.
Whether or not any of this is true is not really relevant to this discussion but I would argue this is the first time that any skeptic has to at least pause and say “well, ok that’s weird.” The larger point is that whether it is NASA reporting that they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, the fact that dimethyl sulfide, a compound only found in our atmosphere because of biological processes, has been reportedly detected on exoplanet K2-18b by the James Webb Telescope, or were these ridiculous[1] claims of frequent non-human visitation turn out to be true, each of them is the nail in the coffin in the long list of facts that each poor dirt on the coffin of Christianity and any of the other Abrahamic faiths. The possibility of other life beyond earth, especially intelligent life, is incompatible with the word of God and his prophets as they are written in their own texts.
The narrative of fallen creatures and the ‘jealous’ God they constantly disappoint is a uniquely human story. Worse, it is unique to a particular subset of humanity over a relatively short subset of time. These stories are not even universalizable to other cultures that existed simultaneously throughout history, much less to apply to intelligent life elsewhere in this galaxy or any other. Much like a Buddhist might scoff at a conversion attempt by a Christian, what response would you think an intelligent being from another solar system might have to hearing the good news of Jesus Christ or the ‘prophecies’ of the ‘one true prophet’ Mohammed would be?[2] There isn’t even a hint of insinuation that our almighty Creator has also intelligently designed other intelligent, conscious beings whose souls can be judged by the choices they make while living on their unfathomably distant and different planet found in any sacred text.
Ever since the Copernican revolution, the Judeo-Christian tradition has been threatened by each successive demotion of our importance. Why wouldn’t they? They think that human existence is an experiment run by God because he wanted beings that worshipped him of their own volition… Just saying it out loud it sounds so preposterous and, worse, malevolent, straight up dickish even. Every empirical discovery since, from the reorientation planetary orbits to evolution by natural selection, from the dinosaurs to everything we have learned about the brain, each cognitive revolution, paradigm shift (a la Kuhn) has made it harder and harder to hold these beliefs and have a coherent worldview. Each one increases the inconsistency of believing both that there is a benevolent being out there that gives a shit about you or is watching your every move and just itching to cast you into a lake of fire and the scientific image of reality. Which again, this scenario should strike any compassionate person as just incredibly dickish given that no one asked to be here and dolling out eternal torment after having not said some magic words and blindly believed them, also known as faith, strikes any reasonable person as just plain unfair. The believers can try to ignore the scientific image of the world all they want but they use it to drive in cars, fly in planes, use cellphones and computers, and get medical care when God is not answering their prayers. Only ignorance, willful or otherwise, and tingly feelings account for how people do not see how diametrically opposed Judeo-Christian ideas are to decency and reason.[3]
There is a famous biologist named Stephen Jay Gould who coined the phrase non-overlapping magisteria in calling for a truce between science and religion. He thinks these 2 sets of discourse both attempt to describe reality but in ways that do not overlap but are equally useful. While I agree that these are not polar opposite fields of discourse, they both attempt to make sense of our world and make assertions about the fundamental nature of our reality. Gould was writing in response to Pope John Paul II, yes the guy who covered up years of sexual abuse by priests and yet is somehow a fucking Saint. Nowadays that title is worth about as much as being the Qanon Shaman, but here is the quote from old Johnny boy:
“Religion… operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”
This is a blog of nihilist musings so I cannot move on without saying that the doubtful existence of the God that they devote their life to serve and the falsity of the story of redemption leave existence, on the individual or species level, excluded from the possibility of some objective purpose. Although that dead Pope[4] suggests that theology is restricted to meanings and values, the Catholic church seems to have no problem making pronouncements about how certain scientific discoveries fit into their worldview. Almost predictably, the Catholic church has some sort of hoolahoop logic to explain how the existence of life, much less intelligent life, on other planets fits in the Christian narrative. I have said for years, once we find one microbe anywhere else in the Universe, this fact (just another fact in the long, long, long, list of facts that make no fucking sense with Christianity) is completely incompatible with their belief system and sacred texts. In fact, a one Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the head of the Vatican observatory, argues that the existence of life elsewhere in the universe is “not in contrast with the faith, because we cannot place limits on the creative freedom of God, to use St. Francis’ words, if we consider earthly creatures as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ why can’t we also speak of an ‘extraterrestrial brother?’“ he said. Because it makes NO FUCKING SENSE. Not only is it absurd that the ‘inerrant word of God’, their sacred text, was written touching on nothing but metaphor, analogy, heinous stories of pillaging and murder, and vague ass bull shit with literally hundreds of contradictions. In order to add to its legitimacy it could have said anything of substance that was reflective of the world as we now understand it. Instead, we get apocryphal stories of a vengeful God constantly punishing his ‘chosen’ people and smiting all their enemies. One hint at the usefulness of math, one hint at the age of the universe, the history of species on the planet, or the nature of the stars that shine would have given credence to the notion that these works were divinely inspired. The real truth is that these particular set of religious texts were decided upon at minimum 100 years after they occurred and more practically over the next few hundred years until finalized at the councils of Hippo and later Carthage.
The one thing I will give Fundamentalists credit for is that they at least see the logical incompatibility of the truth of Evolution by natural selection and accepting that there is a benevolent creator that designed all the creatures on this planet and just threw us in here to test us and give us hemorrhoids. That is why they have spent decades trying to cast doubt and find any chink in the armor and make crazy Noah’s ark museums and the Discovery Institute. If the existence of any extraterrestrial organism, social or cellular, is in stark contrast with the emphasis on the relationship between God and man described in any of the Abrahamic texts. Did Jesus die for alien sins? Are they not supposed to masturbate too? What if they asexually reproduce? Does Satan try to tempt them too?
Lastly, to a large extent, this whole point is moot because very similar animals with very similar brains and culture already existed and were not Homo sapiens. The Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and other hominids all made jewelry, painted caves, we can assume had a language, and therefore a mythology of their own. Although they interbred with our kind and some of their genes live on, they might as well been an intelligent being from another planet when it comes to the story that is told by any of the Abrahamic faiths. And if you still do not believe me, after some back and forth this is what GPT-3.5 had to say on the matter:
“I see your point, and I understand your argument. You’re suggesting that from a logical standpoint, the concepts of Judeo-Christian theology, such as the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for the redemption of humanity, don’t logically extend to extraterrestrial beings due to the specific and Earth-centric nature of these theological concepts. In this view, the lack of incorporation of extraterrestrial life into religious texts and teachings creates a logical incongruity. Indeed, from a strict logical perspective and based on the current content of religious texts and doctrines, one might argue that the introduction of confirmed extraterrestrial intelligent life could present challenges to the logical consistency of certain theological ideas.”
Game. Set. Match. We no longer live in the ‘demon-haunted world’.
[1] Ridiculous because of the fact that large numbers of people over decades can’t keep secrets that involve too many people. And because of the plethora of other explanations available without invoking ‘aliens’.
[2] For those that might question whether we could communicate with such creatures, there are good arguments to be had that if they use a language, communication is possible because it is the nature of language to be translatable.
[3] I will address a more compassionate explanation of why smart people believe dumb things in another post.
[4] I mean seriously, how fucking dumb is the concept of a ‘pope’? Further, think of all the destruction and suffering that this made up job has wrought.
The Westerlund Project 