How Would Christianity React to the Discovery of Alien Life?
Great tweet, but I fact-checked this, and it is not true! See the details here.
But … what if there really were other inhabited planets somewhere else in the galaxy, what if we met an alien species, what if there really is a multi-verse where alternative realities exist? How would Christianity address this, could Christianity survive such a discovery, and how would we begin to make sense of such a thing?
That spate of recent UFO sightings certainly does give pause for thought too!
Well, this is not really a new set of questions.
The discovery that we live in a heliocentric solar system and the discovery of the "new world" of the Americas certainly did require something of a reset concerning what people thought about cosmology and the extent of world civilizations, but it was hardly catastrophic. That said, various theologians have pondered the prospect of "other worlds" and Christ's relationship to them.
Two examples come to mind: Third-century Alexandrian theologian Origen and the sixteenth-century English Puritan John Owen.