> With the way things are going, it's almost guaranteed that religious power will be a thing of the past as soon as we can prove other life/civilizations exist besides the one here on Earth.
OK, I'll bite. Why?
OK, I'll bite. Why?
We are just now discovering that planets are actually abundant and are all around us. A thought that seemed alien just years ago when we thought every other star lacked planets.
While I can't predict what aliens will be able to teach/tell us when they arrive (or when we find them), I do feel that a real "first contact" will change or make a lot of people rethink what they really think they know.
The question now is the reverse - suppose we find nothing? Suppose we find no life even in an environment that should have it?
Also, I'm almost certain there are life in other planets in our solar system. It'll just take a few (relatively speaking) more years to prove it.
And others are not. Individual religions may rise and fall--ironically, the way this happens isn't that much different from biological evolution. But humans have always been religious, and there's no reason that would change, at least not as a result of extraterrestrial life or intelligence.
From a theological perspective, you have to actually make an argument that extraterrestrial life conflicts with doctrine. If you can, I'd like to see you make that argument, because it would be pretty interesting. Plus, theology has a trump card--dogma is always true. And as Quine taught us, it's possible to believe anything as long as you rearrange the rest of your belief system to accomodate it. A man cannot survive inside the belly of a whale, pi is not exactly 3, and the Big Bang and evolution happened--but theologically and philosophically sophisticated religions reconcile these facts with their dogma somehow, and unsophisticated religions pretend the facts are false.