If intelligent extraterrestrials exist, what about God?
This was the heading of a MSNBC News post today. It’s an interesting start to our series of up-coming publications. I know you’re thinking… God and Aliens? Really? That’s what we’re thinking about today? 
Consider how many Alien movies you have seen so far, now add that number to all documentaries you’ve watched on Discovery and History channels as well as all of the news articles you’ve read concerning matters outside of planet earth. More importantly, consider how much money, interest and intellect is dedicated to the very study of outer space. NASA is not a charity orbiting and studying outer-space for entertainments sake, they are on a mission to “pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research”. That means little to us “earthlings”, however it does present the fact that things do in fact exist outside of our planet and that alone is deserving of some intellectual thought.
The theme of the article proposes the idea that the discovery of existence of extraterrestrials presents a “special dilemma for the world’s religions”. The claim is that “Christians might take the news the hardest” in contrast to all other religions. Our first reaction might be, well this is coming form MSNBC news linked from space.com and must be a well grounded article, right? Wrong.
The third paragraph which quotes a philosophy professor posing the question of “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” rattled my thinking cap for a moment. For one, I thought that Klingons were a wrinkled-forehead Alien race invented by a movie producer in the series Start Trek. The life of Jesus on the other hand is accepted as a factual event by most historians. Another question now arises, why are we comparing a historical character to a fictitious one in the same context?
The very existence of gods, angels, demons and other type of supernatural deities actually suggest the existence of Aliens. After all, extra-terrestrial beings are species that exist outside of our planet. Isn’t that just what these mysterious deities are? Simply put, if we saw a creature with non-human qualities hovering above us, we would probably say “Oh my god, it’s an alien!” However if we turned the clock back a few centuries, we would recognize the creature as a god or something like it. Could it be that we’re saying that 1 plus 1 is two, but 2 minus 1 is not 1?
This article in short, attempted to debunk all of the world’s religions in one shot! Just another example of why we must practice critical thinking and not accept everything that is presented to us.
Enough about Aliens and God. I’ll leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein: “Science without religion is dumb. Religion without Science is blind.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44749017/ns/technology_and_science-space/
Critical Thinking 