IF ALIENS EXIST, DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL?

QUESTION: 

Does the possibility of Extraterrestrial Life pose a threat to religion, Christianity or any of its fundamental beliefs about the natural world?

RESPONSE: 

WHAT'S REALLY AT STAKE?

Thanks for articulating a very often-asked question. To answer, we have to first discern what the fundamental principle in religion or Christianity is that excludes the very possibility of this universe containing other life forms. In other words, what doctrine or Scriptural precedent precludes the existence of Alien life, such that the discovery of Aliens would be fatal to Christianity? 

THERE ARE ALIENS IN THE BIBLE

Before answering that, it's interesting to note that Christians have always believed God created at least one other raceof sentient, intelligent beings in the universe. I am referring now to angels. So for Christians, the questions “do Aliens exist” and “are we alone in the Universe” have always been settled with a “yes” and a “no” respectively. 

Angels, contrary to popular belief or medieval art, are not deceased humans with harps on clouds, or fat babies with bows and arrows. Angels are powerful beings of pure spirit. Christianity teaches that the creation of angels predates both the earth and the creation of humans on it. The bible records angels sometimes appearing as humans – but in their nature they are nonhuman, spiritual, intelligent, morally free, sentient beings.

Despite this long-held belief in angels, the Alien question is thought to be fatal to Christianity for two reasons, 

THE ASSUMPTION OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

Let’s call the first “the assumption of anthropocentrism” – the belief that the man-centered Bible must preclude other races on account of humanity’s unique relation to God. If we accept this, and if Aliens were to be found, the Faith would therefore collapse.

But why should this be true? It’s a false dichotomy. Any parent with more than one child instantly sees it as such. A parent can have more than one child, but the existence of another child does nothing to diminish the love, care and plans the parent makes for the first. 

Just like that, without denying the specialness of humanity to God, nor the eternal plans he made or the lengths he went to to save it, Christians may affirm that God may have made other races which are equally special to him, and for which he has equally wonderful and long-term plans. (Lewis explored these possibilities in his science fiction books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.) 

THE UNIQUNESS OF THE INCARNATION

What about Aliens and the uniqueness of the Incarnation? If God became one of us, doesn't that make us unique in a way that rules out alien life?  Well, again if we believe God is dealing intimately with the “alien race” of angels without ever being incarnated as one of them, why couldn’t this be true of some other biological alien race? Perhaps the redemption of the cross is universally applicable (literally!) and the discovery of Aliens would be further cause for mission. What if those races are unfallen and need no redemption plan like the Incarnation?  This is very speculative, but there’s nothing in the mere existence of those beings that is fatal to Christian theology about Jesus.

WHY ARE ALIENS NOT IN THE BIBLE

Further, I’m not troubled that we get nothing about such Beings from the Bible. Which is important to state, because inside this anthropocentric objection is another assumption: if Christianity really were true, it would give revelation of this fact to us. And yet the Bible is silent on Aliens, ergo their discovery would be a Christianity defeater.  

But this objection fails for two reasons: 

DOES SPECIALNESS IMPLY NO OTHER CREATURES CONCERN GOD?

Yes, the Bible affirms that humans are special, alone on earth we are “made in the Image of God.” And it’s also true that Angels are seen serving/helping us as if that were their purpose (Heb 1:14). And it’s also true Jesus said we matter more than the “many sparrows”.  But should we assume by this that no other life forms are special to God? Or that God has no dealings with them and purposes which have nothing to do with us? Far from it. 

Over and over the Bible says the animals have great value to God, as he extols all the ways (some of which unknown to us) that they reflect his character and qualities. (Job chp. 38-40). And when God tells Jonah that he has pity on the city of Ninevah, laboring under sin, he mentions it’s cattle as part of the city he cares for! In addition, Angels at times seem to be God’s primary concern, when even our redemption is painted as God’s act of warfare and glory directed at that race of exalted, powerful creatures (Eph 3:9,10; Col 2:8). 

So with both intelligent, sentient life, and with other non-image-bearing biological life – Christian scripture already tells us such life has value to God.  Therefore, we learn that the existence of other life, and that life having value to God is not mutually exclusive of humans having great worth, even preeminent worth on this world.

NO ROOM FOR WONDER

The irony is this: the person who raises this objection usually means to take a stab at what they think is the inherent anthropocentrism of Christianity, not realizing that the Bible beat them to it:  

ALIENS UNDERMINES CHRISTIAN CREATION NARRATIVE

But now the second assumption in this question is that Aliens would undermine Christian teaching about creation. This objection really is just an offshoot of the creation/evolution objection. Specifically, this person assumes that the discovery of the size/age of the universe, combined with the theory that life evolved on Earth by mutation/natural selection, means, A) the universe is teeming with life, and B) the Bible’s creation account has been falsified. 

DOES EVOLUTION MEAN THE UNIVERSE IS TEEMING WITH LIFE?

 Regarding the truth of the Bible’s creation account, John Lennox gives a compelling Christian view of creation in 7 Days That Divide the World. There, he notes that the same way Christians eventually saw how Scripture accommodates a heliocentric solar system, we should also see that the Bible’s creation account can accommodate long ages and the vast size of the universe.  

So the only real problem is not aliens but unguided evolution which supposedly is making aliens all over the galaxy.  But this objection is starting to backfire. 

LIFE FROM NON-LIFE

Even the most ardent Darwinian scientist will tell you that the theory is weakest at the point of the creation of the first self-reproducing cell. There is currently no working materialist model of how life first arose on Earth. Why? Assuming mutation/selection really works to create new structures and life forms, what about before there were any life forms?  What does mutation/selection work on? If life evolves by saved copying errors in DNA, what about before there was DNA? Life from non-life is a massive mystery, and we’re rapidly moving past the era when science naively thought time and the chance shuffling of chemicals could do the trick.  

As molecular biologist James Tour has said, 

So ironically, it’s at the point where the theory of life’s origin is weakest that the proponent of Alien life has to be the most confident in it. Exactly where we have no laboratory confirmation of how it happened on Earth, we have to believe that life came from non-life literally millions of times “out there”. Where does this confidence come from? Not from the science, which is at a standstill, but from people's hopes or materialist assumptions. 

LACK OF ALIENS A PROBLEM: FERMI PARADOX

For this reason, the discovery of other life in the universe wouldn’t be fatal to Christianity; it would just confirm the specialness of the universe for complex life.  However, the LACK OF DISCOVERY of other life in the universe may be fatal to materialism! For the materialist, evolution should be “easy”. It should be something that just happens, by chance, through random processes wherever the conditions are right. And so the universe ought to be teeming with life. 

 And that is what the early Alien Seekers assumed. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a government-funded group of such seekers that spend millions of dollars looking for the radio signals of life forms, which they assumed had to exist in the thousands, if not millions. 

But this has not been found to be the case.  This has led to the "Fermi Paradox."  The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the high mathematical probability (on life-from-nonlife theory) that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and the complete lack of evidence for, or contact with, them.  Where are they?

THE SPECIALNESS OF EARTH

This lack of alien discoveries should have put a damper on the Alien euphoria, not just from the increasing failure of chemical theories of prebiotic evolution, but also from the multiplying factors necessary to support life. Carl Sagan in the 1970’s presumed only 2 were needed so that if a planet had the right star and was the right distance from that star – wham-o! – you’d have life spring up out of non-living chemicals eventually and inevitably. 

Today, the factors have jumped from 2 to 200 and counting – making earth a very special place indeed. This doesn’t even begin to touch the finely tuned nature of the universe as a whole. 

So while the assumption is that the existence of Aliens is fatal to Christianity’s narrative about creation, it appears that if they do exist, they could only exist by the same intelligent design that designed us, and inside the same exquisitely finely tuned universe we inhabit. 

Needless to say, the discovery of an intelligently designed co-inhabitant of this finely tuned universe would not disturb the Christian faith in the least.