On Life on Other Planets

Lots of ET talk these days.

SpaceX thinks they’re going to Mars, and their recent IPO is, um, out of this world. The US government has been releasing, a few at a time, records of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, formerly called unidentified flying objects, or UFOs). Part of the cachet around that subject is that despite the formal meaning of the acronym “UFO,” in the popular imagination the term means “flying saucer,” so when a government spokesman speaks casually about a UFO, some people think he just said there are flying saucers, and awaaaaay we go.

And now Stephen Spielberg has released the movie “Disclosure Day,” which he says is going to shake the faith of some religious people.

No need for that to happen. The shaking, not the movie.

Proof of life on other planets I would find highly interesting but not at all troubling. Here’s why.

The Bible says nothing about life on other planets, despite John 10.16 (Jesus is talking about Gentiles) or the fevered imaginings of Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard. Of course, humans are not the only intelligent created beings; there are various classes of angels, both good and bad, and have been, apparently, since before Adam arrived on earth.

But as to other forms of life elsewhere in the universe, I think it’s pretty obvious that the God who made this planet and all the forms of life it contains could have created any number of other planets and populated them as well.

Interesting theological questions show up when we start to speculate on the possibilities.

Could planets be populated with just plants, or animals, or both? Sure. Of course, the way that works here there are symbiotic dependencies, so if there’s a planet with just plants, there would need to be some mechanism for pollination and related matters. And if there were just animals and no plants, I assume they’d all have to be carnivorous. But I see no biblical or theological problems with the idea.

What about human life? Well, a whole bunch of questions follow in rapid succession:

Are these beings in the image of God? They don’t have to be, of course; angels and demons are not said to be in the image of God, and God could certainly create a human-like race without imbuing it with his image.

If they are in God’s image, are they fallen? They need not be; Adam and Eve weren’t fallen initially, and of course God can create humans who would not fall. Kinda wish he’d done that here. :-)

If they are fallen, are they redeemed? God has chosen not to redeem the fallen angels, but it appears that the presence of his image in humans has been a significant factor in his redeeming work for us. The God who is loving and merciful here on earth is loving and merciful on every other planet in the universe, and it would seem uncharacteristic of him to leave creatures in his image in an irredeemable state.

And this brings us to the million-dollar question: if they are redeemed, how? Is the vicarious death of the Son the only means by which God might redeem his image anywhere in the universe? And if so, would God repeat that redemptive act on another planet, or would he simply reveal to that race the good news of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice without their having witnessed it, as he has done for the great majority of the redeemed here on earth?

Whew. That’s a lot of questions. And no answers–because we could determine the answers only by authoritative revelation, and we simply don’t have any.

But this is an opportunity for us to remind ourselves of a few indisputable truths:

• God can do anything that is not contrary to his nature.
• He will act in ways that are perfectly consistent with his nature, in any times and places.
• He has done much that he has not revealed to us (Dt 29.29), which means that we don’t know the half of it.
• We must not put limits on God that he does not place on himself. I’ve been told that Bob Jones Sr., the founder of Bob Jones University, believed that humans would never land on the moon, because God told Adam and Eve to take dominion over the earth, not the heavens. Well, he was mistaken, and the Lord kindly took him home a year and a half before he would have found out.

When the time comes, we’ll find out that God was doing all sorts of things far beyond our imaginations. If, in the meantime, we meet life forms from other planets, that’ll be great. We’ll need to ask them how they solved the distance / speed problem. Ion engines? Wormholes? Warp speed? We’re all eager to find out.

Photo by Haziq Mehboob on Unsplash