Posted on 07/01/2011 6:19:36 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Veritas Riff is a group of friends who combine deep faith with world-class expertise in subjects ranging from politics, science, culture, business, medicine, and more. They offer their informal take on the big questions facing us all. I'm the host of the Veritas Riff, Curtis Chang.
For centuries, humans have asked whether life exists on other planets. In the last decade or so, astrophysicists have made actual progress in answering that question. As more exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—are discovered, the chances of locating extraterrestrial life rises. But how would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religion, and particularly Christianity?
Today we're talking to an expert uniquely suited to address this topic. Jennifer Wiseman is Chief of Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics at NASA. She's also the director of the Dialogue of Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
Jennifer, where are we headed with this current pace of discovery? Is science on track to discover the presence of extraterrestrial life any time soon?
My personal opinion is that if we get the support we need in the next twenty years to build more sophisticated telescopes, we'll find several planets that are earth-sized, perhaps in our neighborhood of stars, that support atmospheres similar to earth's atmosphere. I don't think that's enough time to do what we would like to do, which is actually to find incontrovertible biomarkers, as we call them. A biomarker is a chemical signature in a planet's atmosphere that is a telltale sign of life. I think there will be so much ambiguity at first that we won't be able to say such a thing.
Now, if you ask me about fifty years instead of twenty, then I would say at that point we should have a great inventory, including all the spectroscopic studies, of hundreds of neighboring stars, including a detailed study of their atmospheres, and we should be able to say whether or not there's at least simple life on those planets. And now I'm getting into my true speculation, but I really believe there's a chance we'll find a signature of simple, single-cellular-type life somewhere out there. If Earth is as abundantly full of life as we think it is, then I have to think that other planets could be the same.
Take off your NASA hat for a moment and speak to me as a scientist who happens to be a Christian. If we got the news flash that there is intelligent life out there, how do you imagine that would impact Christian thought?
I imagine two steps in the Christian response. The first has to do with the idea that creation is good. That's set forth clearly for both Jews and Christians in scripture. Creation is a good thing, and God has created abundant life. Now, "created" could include evolutionary processes, but the point is that since God is the author of all of it, whatever is there is good.
So, with that theology when we see the abundance of life flourishing on this planet, we could simply broaden our view of God to include life elsewhere. If God is the author of life on countless other worlds, it increases our sense of wonder and appreciation.
The second step is this. In Christian thought, humans have a problem in their personal relationships with God. We're separated from God by our own sin, we need restoration of that personal relationship, and that restoration has been provided by God becoming human. God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and walked the surface of the earth, guided us, and then died and rose again. That restored our relationship with God.
So if there are other intelligent civilizations out there, how has God interacted with them? Have they sinned? Have they needed redemption? Did Christ visit them in their forms? Or did his work here on Earth suffice for all life everywhere?
We get into a conundrum about the exact work of Jesus Christ on this planet and how it could pertain to life all over the cosmos. That's particularly important in Christianity, because it's really only humans in Christian theology who have this problem of sin. That's where we get into a really interesting theological case.
This is the sort of territory C.S. Lewis explored, of course, in Perelandra. What if we drill down beyond this abstract level of theological reflection to actual Christian communities? What is their range of reaction to news of extraterrestrial life?
I suspect the range of reaction, if we find simple life elsewhere, will be mostly positive. It's similar to when we found unusual life forms at the bottom of the ocean. It simply broadens our view of life and creation. If we find intelligent beings, that requires more thought. But if they're there, they're there, so it has to be incorporated into the theology.
I have some quotes from theologians and believers across the spectrum of Christian belief. Billy Graham said, "I firmly believe there are intelligent beings like us far away in space who worship God, but we have nothing to fear from them because, like us, they are God's creation." That would be one reaction. Another Christian leader in a ministry here in the United States felt that if we found extraterrestrial life it would actually make a mockery of our Christian faith, since the entire focus of creation, in his view, is mankind on this earth. In this person's view, finding life elsewhere would be a major shock to the way he had conceived God's work on earth.
So I'm not sure how people will react. Most, when asked, seem to think it would simply enrich their view of God, and they would be all the more awestruck. But for some, it would create this feeling of disorientation, like maybe what they've believed all along isn't right. It might strike a chord of fear and reexamination.
It seems to me that the fear and anxious reexamination might be concentrated in certain church traditions that elevate this personal God-and-me relationship over and above everything else in their teaching. Recently I drove by a church near my home, and the church had a sign: "God loves you as if you were the only one there is." What would happen if we discovered we aren't all there is? Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life threaten Christian notions of significance?
If we're looking at things from a Christian perspective, we have to examine where significance comes from scripturally. It never comes from a person's life span or location. Sometimes it's overt. The psalmist, for example, tells us that we're made of dust, and we're like grass that's here today and gone tomorrow. Yet we're constantly reminded of God's great love for us as individuals, so much that God even knows the number of hairs on our heads.
God's love is by choice, not by merit of place, time, or character. So I think we can expand that too. We already know that the universe is vaster than our wildest imagination. We have literally hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one with hundreds of billions of stars. We're looking at a universe that's been around for over 13 billion years and is still expanding. So the universe should already make us feel quite, quite small and insignificant in a spatial or temporal scale. But that does not at all translate to whether or not we're significant in the sight of God.
This should give Christians great comfort. Biblically, our significance is based on God's choice to love us.
Christianity would unravel with ETs because they would be dying and could not receive the Gospel because they are unrelated to Jesus Christ. The reason why Christ can save us is because He is our kinsman redeemer, having been a descendant of Adam in His human nature. Also, Jesus did “once for all” on the cross, so that precludes Him from going to other planets to die for ETs. The whole thing would make the problem of evil unsolvable from a Christian perspective.
Are you joking. Is not God big enough? How do you know that ETs are not also decendants of Adam. How do you know that Christ was not dying on one million crosses at the same time. You have no idea of what God is capable of.
The heaven (singular)
The Bible is the sole infallible source of the Truth. All Truth is consistent with the Scriptures, and since the Scriptures are the sole infallible source of the Truth, then it follows that we must judge all purported truth by Scriptural teaching.
Biblical mysteries are those things that God keeps to Himself. We will only find them out if and when He chooses to reveal them to us.
The heaven (singular)
Two things are for certain- there is infinitely more proof of the existence of God than of any alien life, and often the beliefs of individuals are restricted to belief in one entity or the other. So while most are waiting for Jesus (or their own God) to arrive, others are waiting for aliens instead.
Having personally witnessed some of God’s minor miracles myself, and undertaken my own decades-long investigation into ET life (including unexplained sightings), I’m of the belief that there’s more evidence that the so-called aliens we’re now being subjected to are fallen angels, who have shifted their form to match the times.
For example, why weren’t there many reports of flying saucers back in the days of the Civil or Revolutionary Wars? Or as some must believe, the aliens just coincidentally completed that technology, or just completed their journey here. Right.
And what of all the abductees, many of which say their abductors attacked their belief in Christ, and/or vanished when Jesus name was spoken? They supposedly came all that way, jut to tell us that? More likely they have been here all along.
to my knowledge.
That’s the key. No HUMAN is without sin. No reason to believe one way or another about some NON-son-of-Adam.
Deliver us from evil is right! I'm thankful I've never seen any UFO-type things nor has anybody in my family admitted to having seen any.
Biblical mysteries are those things that God keeps to Himself.
That may or may not include creatures he created on other planets. Again, I see nothing in scripture that precludes the possibility.
I’m not limiting God. If God wanted to, He could have made a billion planets with life on them. However, what He has told us in the Holy Writ is simply incompatible with that. Jesus could not have died on a million crosses at the same time, not because God is limited, but because man is limited, and Jesus was a real life human being in addition to His Divinity. If He was dying on a million crosses, then He wasn’t human, and if He wasn’t human, then He isn’t our Redeemer.
As for ETs being descendants of Adam, I do not even know what to make of that. Based on what evidence? It surely doesn’t come from the Bible, wherever it comes from.
LOL! Ok. Not that I buy any of your logic, just acknowledging that you have a point of view different from mine. We can agree to disagree on this one.
Precisely.
Where does it say that man on earth was His only experiment?
ISSA 11:6 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling[a] together; and a little child will lead them. 7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. 8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den, the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. 9 They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
Now I am not dogmatic about any of this. I clearly say we can’t KNOW one way or another.
But where is my LOGIC in error?
On EARTH, as a consequence of God and man healing our rift.
ET’s interacting with people on Earth is a COMPLETELY different issue. Scripture clearly tells us Jesus dealt, harshly, with non human entities here.
The possibility that I am talking about is that life exists on other planets. Planets that God has DELIBERATELY put beyond our ability to connect with.
As someone who is a bible fundamentalist, if there were “others”, God would have mentioned them in His word. He didn’t, therefore there isn’t. So, to me, your logic is contrary to Gods word. And with the same breath, my logic probably eludes you. That is why I said we have to agree to disagree or at least ... move on.
Not necessarily.
The Ori is Christianity of the Pegasus sector.
I thought everybody knew that.
All right friend. Be well.
And you as well.
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