A British priest and theologian is helping advise the American space agency on what it should do if alien life is found. Reverend Dr. Andrew Davison says the prospect of finding life on another planet is becoming more and more real.
The Cambridge University theologian, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Oxford, works for NASA and has published his own book, due out next year.
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He was one of 24 religious experts who participated in a NASA-sponsored program at the Center for Theological Research at Princeton University in New Jersey to assess how religions would react to news that life exists in worlds beyond our own.
In Dr. Davison’s Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, he analyzes the big questions:
- Could God have created life elsewhere in the universe?
- Could he have sent a savior to die for the sins of an alien species?
- Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life require religions to rewrite their creation stories? Or would it be easily accepted by religions?
- If you believe that a god or gods created all creatures, great and small, why not apply this to the entire universe?
The Bishop of Buckingham, Rev. Alan Wilson of the Right, Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain of the Maidenhead Synagogue and Imam Qari Asim of the Makkah Mosque in Leeds told The Times that they agreed that Christian, Jewish and Islamic teachings would not be disturbed by the discovery of alien life.
Carl Pilcher, head of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute through 2016, said NASA wanted theologians to “consider the implications of applying late 20th century science tools [e início do 21] to questions that have been considered in religious traditions for hundreds or thousands of years.”
He said it was “inconceivable” that Earth is the only place in the universe that harbors life. “This is simply inconceivable when there are over 100 billion stars in this galaxy and over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”
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