Posted on 07/23/2014 1:15:49 PM PDT by chessplayer
“NASA is Pointless, Declares Creationist” may be a rather obvious headline, but Ken Ham took it one step further and declared why NASA is pointless: because they’re searching for extraterrestrial life, and according to the Bible, aliens are going to go to hell anyways, so why even bother?
“Jesus did not become the ‘GodKlingon’ or the ‘GodMartian’!” he declared in a Sunday column on his website, Answering Genesis. “Only descendants of Adam can be saved.”
(Ham) You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation.
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaite.com ...
How else would you even *know* what Ham said?
If you have proof Ham didn’t say those things, please show it.
If you have proof Mediate has a favorable bias toward the biblical texts and Ken Ham, prove it.
Did Ken Ham say, in effect, “aliens are going to go to hell anyways, so why even bother?” That’s what Mediate says he said. Show me where he says that, even in effect. Why do you post material that throws biblical Christianity into a bad light from a source that trashes people of faith?
Also, God does not send anyone to Hell. Those that go there choose to go there.
So if God created non-human ET’s, they choose to go to hell for being born non-human?
Don’t see a word there, or anywhere else of which I’m aware, that, “Only descendants of Adam can be saved.”
It’s implied, but I don’t think it is ever openly stated. The implication comes from the fact that Christ’s grace is described as repurchasing us from bondage, and that bondage arose through Adam. It was only the responsibility of your closest relatives or descendants to repurchase you, your family, or your property from bondage.
There are examples of this practice in the Bible, such as when the prophet Jeremiah had the responsibility to repurchase lands from the tribe of Dan, because he was the appointed redeemer for his tribe. He would not have been repurchasing the sold lands for other tribes, because he did not have the authority to act as a redeemer for them.
This is another reason why it was important to see Jesus’ lineage detailed in the Gospels. Not only did his descent need to be without blemish in order for Jesus to be the “spotless lamb” to fulfill the passover offering, once and for all, but He also needed to be of a lineage that was qualified to repurchase Adam’s original debt to God.
I’m done with you. I’m not playing your games.
OK, agreed. The subtlety is an invitation to misinterpretation. And agreed that the discussion at best is a distraction from the thrust of the gospel.
Whose to say that Jesus hasn’t had to go and be Jesus on all of the other worlds God has made? Might be why it’s taken so long for Him to return to this one. Tough way to spend your time though, being sacrificed over and over for a world’s sins.
and if there’s life on other planets
then I’m sure that He must know
and He’s been there once already
and has died to save their souls
Larry Norman, “Unidentified Flying Object”
That is true. I just like being special which is why Satan hates us so much.
All dogs go to heaven.
To your mind, what was it about Christ's human ancestry that qualified him in this way?
As Neils Bohr said to Albert Einstein, "Don't tell God what to do."
“And if there’s life on other planets,
Then I’m sure that he must know,
And He’s been there once already,
And has died to save their souls”
- Larry Norman.
Don’t actually have an opinion on life on other planets, or how such a hypothetical lifeform would interact with the Creator of the universe.
Nothing in the Bible explicitly rules out such a thing.
On a more rational point — it makes no rational sense to think we will find intelligent life.
Because: Suppose there is at least one other intelligent lifeform. Then, you’d have to postulate that there were thousands. The chances that we would be the most advanced of thousands is extremely small.
Which means some other intelligent life is way ahead of us. They would have discovered us by now. And, if they are way ahead of us, and discovered us, they would have communicated to us, just as we would have to them. But we’ve heard nothing.
Or, they would have destroyed us. But we are still here.
The chances of their being one intelligent lifeform evolved from nothing is exceedingly small. The chances of us being the most advanced is much more exceedingly small, if there are any others.
Update: Since secularists and some media outlets have been falsely accusing me of saying space aliens are going to hell as a result of this post, please read my response here.After I read that, I decided that I probably wouldn't trust what Medeaite wrote, and I'd just participate in a rational discussion of the topic instead.
But his actual point was this:
The Bible, in sharp contrast to the secular worldview, teaches that earth was specially created, that it is unique and the focus of God’s attention (Isaiah 66:1 and Psalm 115:16). Life did not evolve but was specially created by God, as Genesis clearly teaches. Christians certainly shouldn’t expect alien life to be cropping up across the universe.As part of his reasoning, he made what I believe to be a theologically unsound point that Adam's original sin would have impact on aliens because the Bible said it hurt the "whole creation". It is not an irrational interpretation, but "whole creation" could have been related to earth; and anyway, that the whole of creation was injured by the fall, only man and his descendants are actually infected by original sin and need salvation.
But it is a false and deliberately misleading claim that he said aliens were going to hell. He said they didn't exist.
But here is the ONLY sentence in Ham's article that mentions "NASA":
As the head of NASA, Charles Borden, puts it, “It’s highly improbable in the limitless vastness of the universe that we humans stand alone.”He says that we were wasting money trying to find other life. He didn't say NASA shouldn't be funded; NASA does a lot of things other than looking for aliens -- in fact, NASA doesn't spent most of it's money looking for aliens.
If they couldn't even make it through their title before the lied, why would you trust them?
The universe may be up, but the gate is down.
And if you read Ham’s article, he doesn’t raise an objection to exploring space, just says that we are wasting money looking for aliens.
Which we are, even if there ARE aliens. If they haven’t found us, they are way behind us and have no value to us, and worse might consider us a threat and pour their existence into destroying us. Even if they are ahead of us, if they have power we don’t have, they will likely destroy us.
We’ve seen what people on this planet who are just like us do to one another when they reach out. Why take the chance of bringing that down on us on a planetwide scale?
You mean the game where you ask someone to prove a negative (”show me he never said what they falsely claim he said”), and then they ask you to prove he actually SAID in the article what they CLAIM he said?
Given the actual link to the actual articles, I see why you would not want to play this game. I don’t even agree with Ken on this, but it is clear they lied about what he said, and misrepresented his point to put him and Christianity in a bad light.
If you want to stop playing games, start by finding the quote in the Ham article where he said “defund NASA”, like their title claimed.
Darn, you beat me to it.
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