Sapient aliens that evolved without religion

How would they be likely to react to discovering it in a first contact scenario? The main two options I see are seeing it as a mental illness or devoting considerable time and resources to studying it.

How humanlike are the aliens in their psychology and social dynamics?

It seems to me that an alien might be so, well, alien to us that their reactions could be very varied indeed.

If the aliens are somewhat humanlike, it might be worth examining the ways in which they differ from humans, and how those might affect their response.

Now, as far as the aliens are humanlike (if at all), a few thoughts come to mind:

First, do the aliens have any elements in their culture(s) that are analogous in any way? If so, those might be used by them as touchstones.

Second, how do the aliens generally react to ideas that lie outside of their world-view? Are they accepting and curious? Hostile? Something else?

And finally, how do they respond to explanations of such ideas? Do they consider them, perhaps even take them on? View them as curiosities, but of no value to themselves? Examine them with curiosity? Something else?

One could argue that an intelligent, self-aware species may inevitably develop some form of belief or superstition as a way of explaining natural phenomena that they don't know the true cause of. It's why so many different human cultures developed religions even when they had zero interactions with each other. It's possible that I'm being too anthropocentric but I do think it's likely for an intelligent mind to question "how" and " why", especially since some research seems to suggest that smarter animals like pigeons develop superstitions and rituals.

Edited by Kaiseror on Jan 4th 2022 at 2:21:33 PM

You might consider reading the Uplift saga, particularly the first two books, because they touch on the specific issue of humans stumbling their way into a vast galactic civilization composed of thousands of species. They view our religions as quaint and silly but have their own unifying belief system in the worship of "Progenitors" — mythical beings who uplifted the first sapient species, who in turn uplifted more species, etc.

Also, humans, by not showing any signs of having been uplifted, throw that galactic culture into a bit of a tizzy.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 4th 2022 at 4:32:15 AM

"How would they be likely to react to discovering it in a first contact scenario?"

Well, they might convert. There are any number of stories based on that premise.

It really depends, but I think religion would most likely be viewed as a curiosity. Like how "oh ants can make rafts out of their bodies to cross water when they need to do that" "oh, humans sometimes perform elaborate rituals to show membership in certain communities and claim those rituals invite future fortunes onto them."

Though, assuming the Aliens are reasonably human-like, it would be pretty hard for them to not develop some kind of religion. Ancestor worship and luck rituals (some of the most basic forms of religion) may have developed even before modern humans evolved.

That reminds me, there was once an alleged alien abductee who claimed aliens had told him Christianity was not exclusive to Earth. If I remember the guy's name I'll share it. According to him, one or more advanced alien species considered Earth a kind of holy land and wanted to live here, but didn't to prevent conflict with human beings. That could be the basis of a pretty cool story.

It is actually impossible. An entity that is incapable of forming a belief system is not sapient, as abstract thinking and pattern recognition will inevitably result in it

Edited by janlor1996 on Jun 27th 2022 at 4:08:13 PM

The OP specified "Religion", not belief systems in general. And sentience merely requires a sense of awareness of self and surroundings.

What's the difference between religion and a belief system outside the context of science?

Common sense and evidence.

"Religion" has neither of them.

Edited by TitanJump on Jun 27th 2022 at 7:47:46 PM

Common sense isn't common. At best it's the prevailing beliefs at the time. Evidence is hard to come by as the tools required to find the truth take centuries to develop. As a result, most belief systems are cludged together from whatever patterns and observations are available at the time along with the need to teach something that resembles ethics.

A belief system is any set of beliefs that go together. A religion is one example, but so is a political ideology, a moral philosophy, or any similar culture bound system.

The problem is trying to draw hard distinctions between any of those in a way that you can excise "religion" without any of the others. Any quality you can say is definitive to a religion, I can almost guarantee there's a religion that doesn't have it and/or a non-religion that does. (To start with the obvious: religion can't just be defined by a belief in god, because that would mean Buddhism, Satanism, and Unitarian Universalism are non-religions.)

My (weak) belief, for example, is that religion is an emergent behaviour derived from two advantageous traits: humans are social animals with a neurology strongly adapted to model each others' thoughts based on behaviour, and humans are omnivores who rely on environmental sensory cues to identify whether something is safe or valuable. If you use the very accessible people-modelling neurons to interpret phenomena that are not people, you anthropomorphise the environment and start trying to negotiate it with it in your own favour, and tell your friends about it when it works, which is sufficient for basic religious ritual behaviour - so any species which is both social and analytical is highly likely to develop religion. Moreover, both traits are necessary for science as we know it, so a species without the psychology to develop religions should definitely be unable to develop sciences.

^ I'd argue that religion could simply be defined as the active following of a being that is a part of a higher plane of existence, regardless of whether they ascended to said plane, or simply always existed, and regardless of whether following them means active worship, following their teachings, or both.

There's also good reason to believe a lot of mythologies that we know of are derived in some form or another from Proto-Indo-European mythology, so the idea that humanity has been anthropomorphizing naturally occurring phenomenon, with each new generation evolving their own different takes over the nearly 10-15,000 years human civilization has been around, to explain things before modern technology started helping us actually understand said natural phenomenon is probably what actually happened, if not pretty close to it.

As far as the question at hand goes, they'd most likely view it as a curiosity, but it is important to note exactly why they think that way.

Again, mythologies and pantheons exist for us because we lacked the means of truly understanding how the natural and cosmic forces that have shaped life on Earth actually worked, so we needed some way of explaining it. But that doesn't necessarily have to apply to other sapient species. Maybe they perceived their worlds a little differently than we did with ours as they evolved, or they're a Hive Mind and always have been, or at some point when they were about to form religions of their own, something happened and they decided against it.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Jul 16th 2022 at 6:55:41 AM

Replace "being" with "force" and I think you have it (the Tao is not a 'being' in any proper sense of the word), with the caveat that the mystical force is seen as something larger and more important than humanity, a force that we must align ourselves with in order to survive and be successful in life. That's as close to a definition as I can get it.

Would aliens have an equivalent set of beliefs? Not at all unlikely, but I bet the particulars would be so, well, "alien" that it would come across as extremely peculiar. Eliezar Yudkowsky had some things to say about that (the set of "10" is clearly superior to all other sets").

By this standard I think nationalism is a religion (a nation is something larger and more important than individual humans, you owe it your allegiance for giving you life, it has a spirit or purity that must be protected and for your participation in the social contract you will prosper, etc; sort of a modern incarnation of an imperial cult, minus a living god-emperor, I suppose). I can think of arguments for certain economic ideologies as well.

I'm not necessarily arguing it is or isn't, because my point isn't to try to find a real, 'true', strict definition that fits; rather, the fact that it seems to fit the definition despite not typically being considered a religion shows the concept is fuzzily constructed, and anthropologically endemic, and therefore just how different an alien species would have to be to avoid having anything they could compare religion to.

^ Perhaps. It might be worth just strictly defining religion then to the active following of a being or force that is inherently not of the natural and/or material universe, even if people seem to hold certain things in such relevance that they actually do worship it, unless said thing actually does, or within the beliefs of its worshippers, ascend to godhood, Nirvana, or some other higher existence. Or a combination thereof.

It might also be worth considering whether the sapient aliens evolved without a religion because they themselves are godlike and/or Eldritch Abominations, or at least somehow became eldritch and/or godlike, and have thus never really considered the possibility of something greater than them existing.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Jul 17th 2022 at 12:11:30 PM

Assuming that the Human definition of "Religion" should even be applied to them in the first place.

I know we have a sample size of one planet with life, but that's still a lot of life. Also, considering that this question is assuming "aliens that can be contacted" and "aliens that are meaningfully sapient" and "this is explicitly a first contact scenario presumably by the aliens reaching us, or us bumping into each other, and presumably not us landing on their planet", that really limits the range of assumption of how alien the aliens would be in mindset.

Essentially, if aliens explicitly evolved (as in being organic life) and are going out into space instead of sending solar sail probes and being done with that, you've got an at least mildly expansionist group (which is guaranteed in most species anyway, more is pretty much always better in evolution for social species) who have some form of culture (which means social to some extent because non-social species cannot transmit knowledge between each other effectively or consistently) who live on land at least part of the time (living underwater alone means you can't invent fire, so you can't invent metalworking, so you'll probably never go to space). To invent the science they'd need to go to space, they'd need pattern recognition, and once you've got that, you've got luck rituals because the world is chaotic, which when agriculture happens leads to ancestor worship, and then religion is a natural outgrowth of that. (Religion may also grow out of the culture, as stories get repeated and drift, how it developed isn't entirely clear, but it independently developed tens, if not hundreds or thousands of times, so it seems unlikely that you'd get a species with the behaviors implied that doesn't develop at least one or two.)

Aliens might well be very alien, but the question as asked heavily restricts what the aliens would be like to "potentially very different culturally but pretty much everything they do would be a recognizable behavior to a layperson" They'd almost certainly have historical religions or belief systems which they could use as an anchor point for our situation, even if they don't have any ones when the story takes place. And they'd obviously be interested in the past to some extent, probably enough to have a general idea of what a religion or a belief system is, because otherwise they couldn't have a culture.

(I'm fairly confident life is like bridges, in that the laws of physics constrain how they can be to fairly few ways. Aliens, if they need bridges, will have bridges that look like ours. The same is true for their environment. It will have a food chain, because the food chain existed before multicellular life, so the food chain, when they become multicellular, will likely be fairly similar to ours, and this continues, physics, chemistry, and their environment's precedent constraining each step.)

I think I saw someone talk about how religion formed before modern humans and thus any human aliens couldn't evolve without religion however i disagree and say that an alien species could evolve without religion if they always questioned how things worked

They did. It's how they got religion in the first place. Because as far as they could tell, it worked. in fact, tremendous amounts of effort went into these sorts of religions and religious practices to make sure they were as best as you could possibly make them. people analyzed the effects of the rituals.

But without the written word to keep a trail of knowledge alive, it's really hard to maintain any sort of overview. And without the necessary tools and knowledge to analyze this, how could they do so in depth? Not to mention, why would the people who held the spears care?

Edited by devak on Jul 31st 2022 at 10:35:49 AM

"and once you've got that, you've got luck rituals because the world is chaotic, which when agriculture happens leads to ancestor worship, and then religion is a natural outgrowth of that."

While the rest of your post seems well reasoned, this part is highly speculative. We don't even know how an alien would reproduce, let alone whether they keep track of ancestors.

True, though family units do seem an inevitability in a social (rather than eusocial) species of the kind described, and cultural diversity means that statistically speaking, one of them will develop ancestor-tracking.

Though it is true, perhaps their reproductive methods make that infeasible (perhaps they're egg laying and have a communal hatchery where it's unclear which of them laid the eggs), in which case it'll be less proper ancestor worship and more likely something like hero worship, where any notable deceased member of the larger clan is considered as being connected to, rather than only someone who's clearly related. That would be interesting speculative fiction.

A better example would be the development of funerary rituals. Even energy beings would need a way of safely dispose of dangerous disorganised waste heat, and provided they had any degree of recognisable society they would presumably need to do that while acknowledging that until just a little bit ago it was a person.

Satanists revere Satan without literally believing in his existence. Unitarian Universalism has no supernatural dogma and is more about the structured search for personal meaning. One or both of those should not be considered a religion under such a definition.

I mean. Humans are godlike compared to other animals, and yet... (I have idly imagined a human-adjacent society that believes "each of us actually IS a god of some very specific thing, all you other panhumans just have weirdly high standards for godlike power".)

It's an interesting question, because another common route to religion is hero worship that then turns into actual worship. Everyone uses themselves as a baseline for their peer group (this is existential, not social - aliens that don't do this would have to not be recognisably conscious) and their peer group as a baseline for everyone else (this part is social, depends on distinguishing between "peer group" and "everyone else"). That's the basis of the theory that mythologies are cultural memories of real people embellished to impossible levels over time. Someone brags about how cool and insightful their friend is, and several hundred years later people are worshipping Apollo the god of prophecy. A superhuman divinity remains superhuman even when humans learn to emulate their original feats by becoming even more impressive. People do the same thing with human artefacts - mediaeval Europeans looking at Roman roads and justifiably thinking "I don't know how to do that, no one I know knows how to do that, faeries must have done this", pseudo-archaeologists looking at the Sphinx or the Nazca lines and less-justifiably thinking "I don't know, therefore aliens". The idea that an entire species has a perfect record of their own history, or always continuously improved by the same consistent set of cultural standards, seems implausible.

(A Hive Mind or Genetic Memory species having perfect history developing religion around the legendary figures who preceded their group consciousness)

(A species who are so empathically egotistical that they can look at prehistoric megastructures and identify themselves with whoever made them, despite not knowing who did it or how to do it themselves... and probably claims credit for making columnar basalt and rainbows, too. What does that do to in-group/out-group dynamics, like recognising members of the same tribe, or even species? Wait, this might be the "we are all gods" culture again)

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Jul 31st 2022 at 9:45:34 AM