Since in all likelihood they do exist, I see no reason why they would not have a belief system. Whether or not that system includes a deity is an open question.

We will know when we meet them.

I enjoy these speculative conversations as much as anyone, but, with all due respect, to predict anything about what “we will likely find” regarding the philosophical and religious feelings of any intelligent extraterrestrial organisms is to assume a whole lot.

I guess it seems a little bit like us wondering what an alien species’ favorite color will be. Idiots might guess that aliens will like blue, or red, or black or whatever. With a little more thought, it occurs to one that they should have a diversity of opinions about colors, just as we do. In fact, we don’t have any reason to think that they percieve color AT ALL. And I don’t mean “our colors.” I mean, even *if* they percieve some bandwidths of light in some way, their way of interacting with the world may not involve “vision.” Even if we could communicate verbally, we might have an extremely difficult time explaining just what “color” is or why anyone might have a favorite.

The reality is that, even when you understand that real aliens almost certainly won’t look like humans (with cranial ridges), you’re not done deparochializing your viewpoint.

Let alone God/Spirit/Divine Magic/Creatorism, we don’t even know if they are capable of belief in things like:

- heirarchy
- reality/unreality
- personal pain or desire
- the future
- morality
- decision
- us

To put it bluntly, we don’t know if our hypothetical aliens believe . . . at all.

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Why? My take is that if we had a sensitive enough receiver, pointed in the right direction, we would already know of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, perhaps even in our galaxy. Ie, why only one intelligent race in a bowl, 13 billion light years across? Besides, I imagine that it won’t be hard to find evidence for ETs after the fact. The scriptures are easy to reinterprete.

Second, I’m not confident that an alien species will or won’t be multicultural. After all, look at the massive decline in the diversity of languages in the past century alone. Most of the human race can speak at least one of a few very prevalent languages. A very few cultures dominate huge portions of the human population.

My take is that this process might eliminate most human culture over a few millenia unless something (ie, space travel) occurs to create new diversity again.

Even if I’m completely wrong, it is possible that most cultures will never leave Earth. So we might end up with an extremely diverse homeworld and a space-faring civilization that is far less diverse in culture.

I’m reminded of this scene from “Enemy Mine:”

Davidge: “If one receives evil from another, let one not do evil in return. Rather, let him extend love to the enemy, that love might unite them.” I’ve heard all this before… in the human Taalmaan.

Jeriba Shigan ‘Jerry’ (Drac): Of course you have. Truth is truth.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a redemption-based religion much like Christianity within (or within the history of) an alien civilization.

We have only one model of sentient self-aware people to extrapolate from, so of course this is just a guess. But it just seems obvious that an intelligent race would be able to visualise the ideal, note how they are deficient from that ideal, and then seek redemption through some form of sacrifice. Religions like that were found all over the world in ancient times.

The once-for-all-time sacrifice of a messiah figure is the logical progression of that.

We could expect the details to be different. Things like the virgin birth, miracles, second comings, and even the existance of an after-life might all be quite different.

Something like Buddhism, with or without some of the details of reincarnation, would also seem to me to be an obvious path for the religious evolution of a spiritual civilization.

There might also be some rather uncomfortable hybrids.

If we were to come into contact with an alien civilizatin I’m sure there would be people in every religion stretching to find some commonality with alien religions.

Tob