What if your cousins were aliens?
Like space aliens, I mean.
I nearly missed this story about NASA hiring theologians to figure out how the world will react if there’s intelligent life discovered elsewhere. The group will work out of Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry.
(Let’s just get the easy joke out of the way, the one about giving up looking for intelligent life here so by all means, let’s explore other galaxies.)
Personally, I say “cool!”
One of the theologians involved, Andrew Davison, University of Cambridge’s Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences, writes:
In thinking theologically about life elsewhere in the universe, there has been a tendency to pick up mainly on passages from previous theological work where other life has been the topic under discussion. I want to move beyond that, and join the discussion to a much wider range of material and perspectives.
For a really interesting (and long) read on this, go here, to BBC Future.
I have not read the entire Bible cover to cover, but I know you have. I don't think it ever says that the Creation(s) described in Genesis was the one and only Creation, does it? I mean, there's the problem of where Cain and Abel's wives came from -- there must have been another Creation over in the next Garden, right?
I come from the cult of St. Ellie Mae Clampett, personally. Whose devotees embrace all our fellow-creatures as fellow-beings and siblings, and are in no hurry to decide what isn't sentient. (Personally I hold the diapering of non-human fellow-primates to be an early heresy, and not an example to be followed with chimps or with any other creatures.)
But as for predicting how humans will react to obviously sentient extraterrestrials? For humans, it seems an inveterate and unthought routine to assume that difference means wrong and right, inferiority and superiority, natural enslaved persons and natural masters. We don't just do it with animals. We do it with humans from other lands/groups/languages/ways. With humans of faiths other than our own. with children as opposed to adults. With women as opposed to men. With non-binary people as opposed to men, if not as opposed to all binary people. With poor people as opposed to rich people.
So meeting aliens we'd want to deny their sentience. If that were impossible we'd want to establish their inferiority. If that were impossible? I don't know. SF stories in this category posit mass psychological blowouts and Ways We're Secretly Superior Really, variously.
(And how funny to treat the Bible as f it weren't written by humans, classic theology and philosophy as if it centered humans for some more universally fundamental reason than human solipsism and decision.)