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.
Why in HELL (literally) are they asking this about Christianity?
The moonbats are already coming unraveled just from being unable to deal with life on THIS planet.
Lots of interesting possible parallels, considering all the possible combinations of cultures meeting one another on this planet.
Frederich Pohl might have some ideas.
(Or, for that matter, what if the aliens are fallen and not yet redeemed; and their redemption (by whatever means) starts after their first contact with us -- but propagates unevenly? What if humanity is the tool used by God for their redemption? What if they have had redemption vouchsafed by God, but (as on Earth) the believers are divided, and they are confused whether God calls them to evangelize us or not? What happens when our believers meet theirs? What if their unbelievers gang up with ours, or they aliens get along with some of our nations or creeds, but not others? What will extraterrestrial help / intelligence services / weapons do for purely terrestrial wars -- analogy to Europeans in the Americas and the shifting weapons / alliances with or against / weaponizing / evangelizing the Indians...not to mention John Wayne.)
And don't even get me started on the idea of how the folks in San Francisco (or Bill Clinton, or Anthony Weiner) might greet the aliens.
As Sherlock Holmes said, it is a capital offense theorize in advance of the data.
Cheers!
‘The Man’ by Ray Bradbury
‘The Man’ is a simple parable involving a prophet who travels from planet to planet; his best-known appearance was on Earth roughly 2,000 years ago. The Man doesn’t appear in the story himself—instead, it’s the story of Hart, a rocket ship captain who lands on an alien world shortly after the prophet’s departure. Hart’s initial incredulity about the Man soon turns into a violent obsession, and he threatens the quaint alien villagers with violence if they do not help him locate the prophet. Hart’s tragedy is that he thinks of God as a destination, something to be found elsewhere. He doesn’t realize that wherever the Man visits, he never truly leaves:
“And he’ll go on, planet after planet, seeking and seeking, and always and always he will be an hour late, or a half hour late, or ten minutes late, or a minute late... And he will go on and on, thinking to find that very thing which he left behind here, on this planet.”
Wrong! It is THE truth.
I certainly agree the answer to the question posed in the topic is "No."
Why would this be a topic......
GOD came to this Earth and saved Man.
God saved us from that which he cast here. God created the Heavens and the Earth.
God Creates All!
Absolutely Not....
Yes Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
Just because there are other forms of life in the Universe does not mean what Jesus tough us is not true. You have to remember a couple of things too. F
irst a lot of the important information in the world was lost. For instance, how were the Pyramids in Egypt built?
Second, when Jesus and God spoke.... People at the time did not know what was DNA was or gravity. So God kept is simple for us.
I do believe Science and the Bible go together. Science tells us how and religion tells us why. So going back to Aliens .... Just like their other spices on our planet there are other Aliens in other worlds. That does not mean does not exist. Absolute rubbish...
Think of this quote from Max Planck,
“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Translation God is behind everything.... So it does not matter if Aliens exist or not.
Exactly right. And this would certainly demonstrate the extraordinary love of G-d... that of all the thousands of worlds He created and turned out “good”, the only one that went “bad” (i.e. earth)... He didn’t just blow it away, but decided to go to a huge effort / sacrifice to provide a way for it to be saved. Unbelievable love.
They will never ever find life on another planet. Even if they did, it would be vegetable, not animal or humanoid type.
Any “Christian” -including the Pope- who believes in UFOs, extraterrestrial life, etc, is NOT a Christian. God created one earth, one universe, one race. God sent his ONLY SON to save the human race on earth, not on Mars or on some distant planet. I wish we cut this empty and wasteful talk about “life out there” and instead, conform our behaviors to the teachings of CHRIST -—H E R E-— ON EARTH!!
One of the most interesting aspects of the Koran is that it explicitly states that Allah is worshiped by all intelligent beings in the universe. Yet we see no spaceships parked outside the Kabba !!!
Or maybe there aren’t any alien races.
No.
INDEED.
Beautiful.
:-)
Oh...so what chapter and verse says that E.T.’s are demons?
Personally, I go with Poul Anderson’s take on this in his short novel “The High Crusade” in which a variety of alien races are shown to “have souls and could be saved” resulting in “a hundred races united in Christiandom”.
If your interpretation of the Bible would cause you to lose faith in Christ when contact occurs with non-human intelligent life, then your interpretation is flawed, not the Bible, not God and not Christ.
That is definitely a possibility.
Freegards
Up until this point, I've always thought of you as being a cut above. This causes me to reconsider my opinion.
Depends on how you want to define God. If you say that God is a deified, Jewish rabbi then, yes, it complicates things greatly.
Jews have always defined God as a non-corporeal being who will never become physical in any way, shape or form. Jews over the millenia have a taken a bunch of slack from the rest of the world for staying adamant over that definition and never compromising on it.
The non-Jewish world has almost always added a physical side to defining their god(s) in order for people to feel close to them.
I know what I’m saying does step on a number of toes here in this forum, but I am not here to do that but just simply state the truth.
So . . . Moses lied?
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