By 
October 1st, 2014
Credit: Springer International Publishing
Given that the surrounding Universe may be awash in worlds, the expectations of finding ET out there is growing.
If the rate of discovery keeps up its current pace, one estimate has it that astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045.
Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub has written a thought provoking new book: Religions and Extraterrestrial Life. It will be issued next month by Springer International Publishing.
Weintraub decided to find out what the world’s major religions have to say about the matter of ET, detailed in a recent Vanderbilt press release.
Weintraub’s book describes what religious leaders and theologians have to say about extraterrestrial life in more than two dozen major religions, including Judaism, Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, several mainline Protestant sects, the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical and fundamentalist Christian denominations, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Seventh Day Adventism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Islam and several major Asian religions including Hinduism, Buddhism and the Bahá’í Faith.
Public opinion
Public opinion polling indicates that about one fifth to one third of the American public believes that extraterrestrials exist, Weintraub reports. However, this varies considerably with religious affiliation.
Belief in extraterrestrials varies by religion:
— 55 percent of Atheists
— 44 percent of Muslims
— 37 percent of Jews
— 36 percent of Hindus
— 32 percent of Christians
Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub.
Credit: Daniel Dubois/ Vanderbilt
Reincarnated as aliens
According to Weintraub, Asian religions would have the least difficulty in accepting the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Some Hindu thinkers have speculated that humans may be reincarnated as aliens, and vice versa, while Buddhist cosmology includes thousands of inhabited worlds.
Weintraub found very little in Judaic scriptures or rabbinical writings that bear on the question.
The few Talmudic and Kabbalistic commentaries on the subject do assert that space is infinite and contains a potentially infinite number of worlds and that nothing can deny the existence of extraterrestrial life.
At the same time, Jews don’t believe the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would have much effect on them.
Are we ready?
Among Christian religions, the Roman Catholics have done the most thinking about the possibility of life on other worlds, the astronomer discovered.
Weintraub also identified two religions – Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism – whose theology embraces extraterrestrials.
All this and other information in the book leads to the big question: Are we ready?
In answer to that question Weintraub concludes, “While some of us claim to be ready, a great many of us probably are not… very few among us have spent much time thinking hard about what actual knowledge about extraterrestrial life, whether viruses or single-celled creatures or bipeds piloting intergalactic spaceships, might mean for our personal beliefs [and] our relationships with the divine.”
Are the world’s religions ready for E.T.?
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