Between heaven earth, where does extraterrestrial life fits in? This is a question NASA has been hoping to be answered by theologians.
As indicated in a New York Post report, the space agency is hoping theologians, specifically at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, New Jersey, has the answer to the question, in a recent initiative to understand how humans are going to react to reports that "intelligent life" does exist on other planets.
As reported by The Times United Kingdom last week, Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, a University of Cambridge religious scholar who holds a doctorate in biochemistry at Oxford, is one of the 24 theologians enlisted to take part in the project.
Davison said in a recent statement on the Faculty of Divinity blog of the University of Cambridge said his research, thus far, has already seen just how often theology-and-astrobiology has been a constant topic in popular writings during the past one and a half centuries.
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A Joint Spiritual Exploration Between CTI and NASA
The theologian's upcoming book dubbed, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, due to come out in 2022, will cover part of this joint spiritual exploration between CTI and NASA, in which his most important question is how theologians would react to the idea of "there having been a lot of incarnations of Christ" in the universe.
It has been the most recent report to come in an alliance between the American space agency and the religious organization.
Back in 2014, NASA awarded a $1.1 million grant to CTI to examine the interest of worshippers in openness to scientific quest known as the Societal Implications of Astrobiology research.
Studies have found associations between religiosity or spirituality and belief in extraterrestrial intelligence. Research published earlier in Scientific American showed that people who have an ardent desire to find meaning, although with low adherence to a specific religion, are more likely to believe that extraterrestrial life exists, specifying that faith in any of the theories is coming from the same impulse of humans.
The Possibility of Detecting Extraterrestrial Life
With support from NASA, Will Storrar, director of CTI, said they had hoped to find "serious scholarship" being printed in both journals and books, to come out on the subject, providing answers to the deep wonder, as well as mystery and implication of finding microbial life outside the Earth.
As this report said, the book of Davison has noted that a large number of people would depend on their religious traditions "for guidance" if extraterrestrial creatures were discovered and what that would mean for the "standing and dignity of human life."
Detection of extraterrestrial life might come in 10 years or only in the future hundreds of years or probably never at all, although if or where it does, it will be helpful to have thought through the implications ahead.
Report about this NASA-CTI initiative is shown on Google News's YouTube video below:
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