Saturday 25 June 2022

Danger To Religion If Life Found Elsewhere

The Curiosity Rover found that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support living microbes and the Perseverance Rover which has been trundling around the Martian landscape since 2021 has not only discovered proof that the rocks on the Red Planet interacted with water multiple times over the eons, but they also contained organic molecules.
The Perseverance Team are quick to temper expectations that organics is not a confirmation that life once existed and there are both biological and non-biological mechanisms that create organics and they won't know for certain until the samples are returned and studied here on Earth, in 2030, but it does throw up some very interesting questions, especially for those of a more religious persuasion.
For centuries the domain of the church has been chipped away at as Science challenged the events of the Bible, people such as Copernicus and Darwin, and religion has had to adjust itself to try and stay relevant but at some point in the future we will discover life on other planets, or it will discover us.
With advances in telescopes, space exploration and the discovery of even more exoplanets which could sustain life, it is only a matter of time before we find evidence of life elsewhere amongst the trillions and trillions of other planets which should prove uncomfortable for the God squad.
The likely answer would be the religious leaders would 'find' the answer written in their holy texts somewhere but if the other life is intelligent enough to have it's own theories how how and why they are there, it could get interesting.
Science has done its best to show religion for what it is, a man-made concept to explain things they did not know how to explain at the time, but the discovery of life in the other reaches of the Universe should be yet another body blow to religion on it's way to becoming something that future, enlightened generations will look back on as a curiosity.

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