Like Avatar, Contact uses a sort of science fiction story to portray exactly how religious faith works. In this case, it consists of Jodie Foster and others experiencing an alien encounter that they are unable to provide any concrete proof for. Not only is the alien encounter a story that’s hard to believe in the first place, the encounter actually makes little sense. The life form that the characters interact with is from being with intelligence far exceeding that of humans, and so the encounter is enigmatic, hard to describe to other people.
It’s a fitting analogy for how religion often works. People have these profound experiences with a realm of consciousness they can’t properly describe or explain, but that they are sure came from some higher place. To an outsider, it seems ridiculous, and they’ll relate it to experiences they’ve had that seem similar, which they later deemed to be formed by their imagination or heightened stress or something. But a person’s conviction about something they experienced is hard to argue against. You can’t really dispute it. Whether it’s aliens or God, if you’ve encountered something truly profound, no one else’s skepticism is going to persuade you it was anything but meaningful and true.
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