Christians may be more likely to accept the possibility of extraterrestrial life given our prior assumptions.
Image: Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons
Stories about unexplained aerial phenomena (or UAP—which is what we’re now supposed to call UFOs) used to be reserved for the more garish or sensationalist parts of the internet or the tabloids lining the bottom rung of magazine racks. Not so today, when stories pointing to the evidence for extraterrestrial life are now turning up in every major news outlet.
Prominent, as ever, is a headline that won’t go away: that the US government recovered crashed spacecraft with “nonhuman biologics.” There’s even a newly released book detailing, as the headline of a recent Time article suggests, “The Government’s Search for Aliens and Why They Probably Exist.”
Perhaps now is an ideal time for Christians to start asking some serious what-if questions, like “What if the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper carries news of evidence of life on another planet?” This question has led me into some of the most fascinating theological territory I’ve ever considered—some of which I explore in my recent book, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe.
I was also one of two dozen theologians invited to participate in the NASA-funded research project on the societal implications of astrobiology at Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry. And in my research, I was surprised to discover that Christian thinkers have been pondering life beyond Earth for a long time. Why? One reason is that the Christian worldview has a unique set of prior assumptions that may make us more willing (not less willing, as some might assume) to believe in the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
Let’s look, for example, at the reactions to one UAP in particular, which leading scientists seem most excited about. ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”) entered our solar system and passed quite close to the sun (and not that far from Earth) on September 9, 2017, traveling at almost 200,000 miles per hour. This was the first “interstellar object” observed in our solar system—that is, an object that has traveled between stars, in contrast with a comet, for instance, which is bound by the sway of our sun’s gravity.
That’s notable enough, but ‘Oumuamua had some other unusual properties. We can’t be exactly sure about its shape, but it seems to have been either an oddly long and thin object, like a stretched cigar, or perhaps a disk (or even a saucer, as familiar from so many science-fiction films). It also took an unusual trajectory when it got near the sun.
