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206 comparatively more cohesive, more cooperative, and more fraternal. The more unified group could present a stronger front against bands of less organized or unified adversaries. “Faith is what allows you to keep going even in the absence of information, evidence, or immediate gratification,” said Wilson. Another key to the success of religion is its emphasis on the moral equal- ity of those in the community. This guarded egalitarianism may be funda- mental to the willingness of people to cooperate with others, including those who are unrelated to them.*! There is a dark side to this. Although religions may preach kindness and cooperation within the group, they often say nothing about those outside it and may even promote brutality toward others. Some blame religions for the longest lasting wars in our own history.” Many scientists believe that more advanced intelligences, if they ever have organized religions, will abandon them. Tarter argued that the mono- theistic religions typical of Earth would be inconsistent with very long-lived civilizations; if such civilizations had any religion, it would be devoid of factions and disputes. For old technologies to exist, such a universal religion must be compatible with scientific inquiry.”* Davies recognized that aliens may have discarded theology and religious practice long ago as primitive superstition. However, if they retained a spiritual aspect to their existence, it is likely to have developed to a degree far ahead of our own. We should expect to be among the least spiritually advanced creatures in the universe. Some may take comfort from this, secure in the knowledge that aliens would have a spiritually advancing effect on us should we make contact, but others will feel deeply threatened. Even if extraterrestrials do not have revealed or traditional religions, they may have a metaphysics. As Pontifical University scholar Paolo Musso saw it, their metaphysics would share two common questions with ours: the First Cause of the world and the ultimate ground of ethics. Intelligent aliens should be able to understand our religious values.”* Vakoch suggested that studying theological perspectives on extraterres- trials can challenge—and thus potentially expand—implicit scientific assumptions about the nature of alien intelligence. Such perspectives may allow us to reach beyond our habitual assumptions about ways that intelli- gent beings will encounter the world and each other; they may help us to anticipate the consequences of contact. In the case of Catholic theology, such concepts as the preternatural and the supernatural—whether taken literally or metaphorically—can help us see beyond nature as depicted by science. “If we can understand that our way of encountering the universe and our views of spirituality only begin to express the range of ways that intelligent beings deal with Ultimate Reality,” proposed Vakoch, “we are guaranteed to gain something very powerful: a more humble, more realistic, and yet paradoxically more SETI and Religion