Religion Needs an Upgrade
Any god big enough for the known universe cannot fit inside our skulls.
Steven Spielberg’s new movie “Deliverance Day” is about aliens revealing themselves to humanity. A recent AP News article asked how religions might respond, should an alien revelation ever occur1.
It is a good question. Astrophysicists now estimate there are 2,000,000,000,000 (two trillion) galaxies in the known universe. Which means there are more galaxies than a human brain has neurons. There are more galaxies than Musk has dollars.
Our own galaxy has 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) stars, of which our planet Earth orbits exactly one. One.
Said differently, humans are physically incapable of allocating even one neuron per galaxy to how big our (presumably God-given) curiosity, and resulting technologies, now know physical reality to be. We live inside Plato’s cave.
Yet, the largest two religions on the planet, Christianity and Islam, plus many smaller ones, teach that we can only be “saved” by believing in a set of stories that are only available on Earth.
It would make for quite a bottleneck on the road to salvation, if you had to find some planet named Earth, and read a particular book, to stand any chance of an afterlife. You could be eternally damned, just for belong to a species that evolved in the wrong galaxy, or on the wrong planet, or in the incorrect era of our 13,200,000,000 year old universe.
Myself, I doubt “God” sucks so bad at engineering.
Any religion which cannot be as true in one galaxy as it could be in the next one cannot claim to be a universal (aka, “catholic2”) faith, just a regional culture, no matter how big the region.
Which is fine, at least in a free country, and good for those who feel into it. Civic cultures can be valuable, particularly in the face of AI. It takes work to maintain our humanity, and it helps to show up for face to face meetings.
But, a civic culture is less than what major religions present themselves to be: as the one way, truth, and life, for all; albeit differently stated, often in conflict, and sometimes enforced with a sword.
This could all be unpacked much further, of course. Religion is a big topic. But, for the purpose of commentary relevant to Spielberg’s latest flick, it seems to me that neither time nor geography could be preconditions to any credible, universal faith. No one, true, monotheistic God worthy of that moniker would demand a faith based in historical events arising from a brief era on a single planet as a mandatory requirement for “his” love.
Any such God would be a bigot.
And, while many have tried, no one has ever convinced me of that.
https://apnews.com/article/ufo-religion-aliens-demons-disclosure-day-500c2280dbdbcedfa09f3d2aa298f338
Origin and history of catholic (adj.)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/catholic