“The Theological Implications of the Discovery of Alien Intelligence in View of Members of Seventh Day Adventist Church”
The attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings is not anything new in the scientific world. Since 1960 there is this kind of initiative, the main is the SETI Project. However, this discussion got more importance after the results of NASA’s Kepler mission, which, since 2010, has identified thousands of extra-solar planets. These findings increase the enthusiasm about the possibility of existence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI), which has the potential to be the greatest discovery in human history, supposing that finally the question will be answered: Are we alone in the universe?
Roman Catholicism has discussed whether intelligent beings would have suffered the consequences of original sin, if they would need redemption and how God would act to save them. Judaism encourages its faithful to maintain a relationship with the God of the whole universe but offers its rules only for humans. Islam accepts the existence of ETI on other worlds, and this is declared in the Koran itself, and all the creatures of the universe are accountable to Allah, however, the religion of Muhammad is to humans on Earth, what means that the ETI should have their own prophets. Evangelical Christians have enormous resistance to the idea of contact with ETI since for most of them, humanity is the central point of the creative and redemptive power of God and that if God had created other intelligent beings in the universe, it would be declared in Genesis. However, some Christian fundamentalists have more easily incorporated the existence of ETI in their cosmology. Seventh-day Adventists, for example, believe that current humans are descendants of the first couple and that all humans inherited original sin. This group also believes that there are extraterrestrial beings in several other planets scattered through a vast universe. These beings, however, are not descended from Adam and Eve, and therefore did not inherited original sin and are considered “not fallen beings”.