Would aliens be atheists?

Éamon de Valera said:
Ok so you know how Posadists believe that any aliens out there would be communist because otherwise they wouldn't be smart enough to invent space travel? Yeah I believe that but replace a communist society with a pure Catholic society. Either that or they worship the devil and we need space crusades.
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The first sounds sort of like James Blish's A Case of Conscience, about a Jesuit space missionary, dealing with encountering an alien race that has no religion, but operates with perfect morality, and how we might deal with that. Needless to say, the situation turns out much more complicated than that.
 
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Really I it's a fun thing to think about. However, just like humans, aliens will be alien to each other. Just hope it's Star Trek's Vulcans and not Halo's Covenant.
 
Menotaur said:
We will never meet them and they will never meet us.
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Depends what you mean by "meeting." If they listen to all the RF we've been noisily emitting, they might just decide to launch some kind of mega-bomb to blow up the Sun.
 
I feel that religious experiences are hard-coded into human beings, even if they end up replacing God with veganism or animal rights or some other reddit shit. That may just be my point of view but from that point of view, 100% of intelligent species can appreciate the light of God. I guess the only way to test that right now is to breed the average IQ of dolphins up and see if they figure out how to collect tithes. I'll throw my reddit gold in the hat to fund that right away
 
Good question. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they had their own belief systems. Whether they make sense to us or not is another matter. I also wouldn't be surprised if just like us humans they had a variety of religions and ideologies. Maybe the first aliens we meet would only represent one belief system from their world.

We won't know until we meet them. If we meet them.
 
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In Ascendancy (a space "4X" game by the Logic Factory from 1995), there's these somewhat hostile aliens that fanatically worship a black hole in their home solar system.

(they're these telekinetic fungus aliens called the "Frutmaka")
 
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All lifeforms we know of are born from competition for resources, so assuming aliens have this same rule I would expect they would have a religion. However if they somehow live in a world without resource scarcity there is no need to pray to Indra for rain for your crops because they get all the nutrition they need from the sun for example.

Of course, we might never meet a society like that. If you don't need to survive winter with enough food, then you don't need to build agriculture, and you don't need to build more efficient tools to get the most out your farm, and you don't need militias to guard your farm which eventually turn into armies and so on.

A society like that might never even need to invent the tools necessary to contact us so I would expect that any contact we could have would come from societies with resource scarcity, and therefore religion would have be involved at some point in their evolution as their early way of trying to understand how the universe works and to try to give meaning to suffering.
 
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glow said:
All lifeforms we know of are born from competition for resources, so assuming aliens have this same rule I would expect they would have a religion.
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There had to have been a period where they were something between animals and civilized humans, and they were surrounded by dangerous phenomena they didn't understand. If they're like us, not knowing something is cognitively painful, and they would come up with explanations for it outside of what they knew.

That's more or less religion.

Even if they later discovered the cause of most of these phenomena, you'd still be left with the insoluble dilemma of the origin of the universe itself. So while I think atheism might become more popular after that, if the aliens had any sense of tradition like we do, there would probably still be cultural remnants of religion even in secular life, as well as people who continue to practice it.

Of course, this is from a pseudo-Bayesian idea that you can draw inferences from a class of things if you've only seen one of them by assuming it's most likely that the one you've seen has characteristics shared by most or all of the others. That's part of why using math as a method of signaling intelligence and opening communication is the method we chose. Any species capable of even picking up the signal and interpreting it is going to know math because you couldn't even build what you need to detect the signal without knowing it.
 
The illegal alien chained to my sweatshop keeps yelling "María madre de Jesucristo Dios"
 
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