Johnjoe McFadden speculates on what might be the effect of discovering life elsewhere in the universe. He says:
Few would now defend an Earth-centred universe but, to many, mankind remains the central concern of an anthropomorphised God. This would be harder to maintain if Gliese 581c and other worlds are teeming with life.I'm sure he too has noticed this, but our world is teeming with life. And most of it consists of other species than humankind, without this having been any barrier to belief in an anthropomorphised God. So extraterrestrial life, just in itself, might not make a big difference in that regard.
Maybe if some of the extraterrestrial life was more intelligent than we are, much more powerful, and enjoyed eating us for breakfast, it would make a bit of a hole in the idea that the universe is presided over by a benign intelligence. This puts me on the track of a further thought. There is an argument sometimes deployed to deal with the 'problem of evil', to the effect that God gave us free will, and it is this which is the source of evil but is itself a most precious gift we should not want to be without. The possibility, however, of a more powerful extraterrestrial species than humankind, and which found human beings a tasty breakfast substance, does make me wonder whether it was beyond the powers of the putative creator of the universe to create a universe in which there were multiple foods for all species - foods of the most delectable and nourishing kinds - but none of these came from the bodies of living creatures with lives of value and who, or that, suffered by being killed.