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My early childhood religion always taught me that man was special, so I think there would be an impact if we were to find intelligent life elsewhere. In fact,

My early childhood religion always taught me that man was special, so I think there would be an impact if we were to find intelligent life elsewhere. In fact, I feel like that idea that man is so special is used as an argument against evolution. They use the 'disgust' of hearing that humans could be related to modern day apes, and thus is not so special. As you said, religion would have to adapt, but that is an impact. I'm more curious what path they would take. As you said, they could deny them full privileges of being sentient...that is they are less than human. Or they could accept them as being on the same level, but that would require a small alteration to their beliefs.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Worst-case for religion, I guess, would be the discovery of obviously super-intelligent beings who claim that belief in God is an evolutionary defect. Seems to me that Judaism is a major world religion that applies for Jewish people, although there are many kinds of people in the world. Christianity is a religion of mankind, hence the need to dehumanize native peoples. The logical progression would be that Christianity would simply follow the lead of Judaism, i.e., Christianity is just for men. Of course, that's a big-picture, long-range guess. One of the reasons Christianity is so resilient is that there are so many versions. What would happen would be a thousand different possible ways forward. Most wouldn't last 200 years. A few would succeed. The "man is special" disgust with coming from monkeys thing is just a limited reaction to Darwinism. It's already dying off. Within another 300-500 years it'll be completely gone. There were similar reactions against Copernicus.