…with the James Web Telescope looking for sources of artificial light to identify potential intelligent life, and the news this week of Perseverance searching for microbial life on Mars it feels like we are getting closer to a major discovery. But what - if anything - would it mean for the religions on Earth if life is proven to exist out there?
It may have disproven the claim that some creation myths are to be taken literally (and even that is questionable if you assume a trickster deity), but it’s impossible to disprove religion itself.
Ancestor worship for example is wholly unconcerned about how exactly the world came into existence.
Most denominations of Christianity just take the Judeo-Christian creation myth as primarily who created the universe, and not really how, and a categorisation of things and beings.
Most religions primarily make claims about what happens to the self after death and whether one’s life influences that. Unless science opens a portal to an actual afterlife somehow, that is not something science can answer, and religions will continue to exist.