> Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible?
We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once. The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex. Or, in other words, boring. Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthrough. It would prove the universe is not boring.
(It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions.)
Most existing religions are silent on the subject of life elsewhere. Since they do not say "it doesn't exist" finding life doesn't mean anything (it might even grow as they have a new group of life to convert).
Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
Christianity, at least as far as I have been taught it, seems to implicitly conflict with intelligent extraterrestrial life, as at the very least it would lead to questions whether the aliens also are in sin, whether Christ's sacrifice applies to them or did they have their own equivalent of Jesus, and generally how special humans are in God's grand cosmic plan.
> Religion tends to be very careful to stay in the area of not providing a testable hypothesis which means that new alien knowledge won't prove it wrong.
That's true, but until very recently, the idea of life elsewhere wasn't really considered seriously.
It depends on the preacher. Some are more traditional eg arguing that Earth is unique for hosting life because God created the Earth and that the universe is just there to demonstrate the epic scale of God's power.
Source: I'm not religious but I've been dragged to plenty of sermons by the extended family.
I'm going to guess they'll handle it the same way as they handled definitive proof that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, evolution by natural selection etc etc.
Unconditional belief in the unknowable gives you an awful lot of wiggle room when it comes to evidence.
We know it's possible, but we've also seen it happen only once. The observational data we have suggests the universe is mostly dead - that is, not complex. Or, in other words, boring. Discovery of any complex process on a comparable level to even simplest of what we call life would be a civilization-changing breakthrough. It would prove the universe is not boring.
(It would also ultimately kill off most of our existing religions.)