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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way.

E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)

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"organised Abhrahamic religion"

Non-abrahamic religions like Hinduism,Jainism, Buddhism, believes in existence of world systems other than current one.

Buddhism is especially is accommodative in terms of acceptance, of evidences that refutes Buddhist world view[0].

[0]http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/carl-sagan-the-dalai-lama...

Not quite. At the very beginning of the first chapter in the Quran: https://quran.com/1/2

The Catholics address the question every so often.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/14/po...

Not just us Catholics; I think the real big takeaway from that article is this: “Three years ago, a paper for the Royal Society found that roughly 90% of believers did not think they would suffer a crisis of faith should intelligent extraterrestrial life be discovered, though two-thirds of them believed other religions would have a crisis.”

Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.

> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.

I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)

Expanding on this idea, it is unlikely that another inconsistency between a belief system and reality is going to change a believers mind when there are so many inconsistencies (in every belief system) explained away already. This is the nature of belief - it persists despite all evidence to the contrary, because it is belief, not reason. E.g. belief in flat earth persists, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I know most people on hackernews think this but how do you categorize the following

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQrT84kjc4

> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.

I doubt it.

If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that no amount of evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they want to believe in.

The same God that created life on Earth could have done so on any number of other planets for the same effort.

Humans began in the Garden of Eden, but that's only one species, albeit an important one.

It is easier to square religion with life on other planets than it is to square the odds of evolution happening in a similar way on multiple planets.

> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.

I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.

Or, accept in a greater sense. Like, "God is so great, he created all these planets, and the Garden of Eden is representative of that creation everywhere." That's what I would hope for, anyway. Certainly in the event that the aliens turn out to be ones that do sexual reproduction.

Easy. No need to claim the Garden of Eden is on Earth.

Except the Genesis account pretty clearly establishes that it is.

The garden of Eden story isn't even consistent with the other creation story in Genesis, though; if a literalist can accept it as true on faith despite that, they can do so despite any inconsistency with mere sense data, which unlike the conflicting text in the Bible they don't hold to be infallibly accurate as a matter of religious doctrine.

> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever

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