Blue Collar Scientist

Yesterday, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Director of the Vatican Observatory (full disclosure: the Vatican Observatory on Mt. Graham was a client of mine), was interviewed by the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. He had some things to say about the existence of extraterrestrial life that were of interest to me.

I’m currently peddling a speech about exoplanets, in which I devote about the last fourth of the talk to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as deduced from the current state of knowledge of exoplanets, planetary formation in proplyds, and the fairly widespread existence of molecules like amino acids and sugars in space. My verdict is that the existence extraterrestrial life is so highly probable to be virtually certain.

What I’ve learned is that fundamentalist christians really, really hate the fact that I bring up the probability of extraterrestrial life and would rather me shut up about it. I’ve not really bothered to find out why, but when Dr. Funes made his comments, I decided to do a bit of research.

Dr. Funes, who I would rate not a religious extremist¹, gets to go first:

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

All of this sounds fairly reasonable to me, as far as it goes. I mean, if you accept the idea of an omnipotent creating god, then you can’t with any legitimacy impose any arbitrary limitations on what he might have done in the distant past. And you certainly can’t do it from the statements of some late bronze- and iron-age guys who wrote up their impressions of this supposed god in what later became a book. It is obvious they weren’t thinking in terms of the possibility that the Earth wasn’t unique.

And it was this, combined with some of the pushback I’ve been getting from the exoplanets talk, that had me wondering why the fundies had their panties in an uproar over the issue. I found some useful explanation at the notoriously untruthful site, Answers in Genesis.

They use three basic arguments to “prove” that there can be no extraterrestrial life. And mind you, they aren’t talking about extraterrestrial intelligent life, they are ruling out pond scum and even less derived kinds of life than that. Their argument denies even a pre-DNA self-replicating form of life.

Argument one boils down to: The Earth was “designed” for life, and everything else in the universe was “designed” for other reasons.

The earth is unique. God designed the earth for life (Isaiah 45:18). The other planets have an entirely different purpose than does the earth, and thus, they are designed differently.

You would expect Isaiah 45:18 to be a pretty powerful statement on the uniqueness of life on the Earth if that is the only part of the bible they can muster to support their remarkably extremist belief. But you’d be wrong:

For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else.

How does this relate exactly? There is nothing at all about Earth being unique, let alone about life being unique. In fact, it says that god “did not create a waste place,” which strongly implies that he’s not in the habit of slapping terrestrial planets on the great heavenly pottery wheel for the purpose of leaving them lifeless and barren. The fact of the matter is that to derive the uniqueness of life from this verse, you have to read it with a strong, blinding filter of your own arrogant presupposition in place. And what does the bible have to say about doing that?

• I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:18-19)

• You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. (Deuteronomy 4:2)
• Whatever I command you, you shall be careful to do; you shall not add to nor take away from it. (Deuteronomy 12:32)
• Every word of God is tested; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him. Do not add to His words Or He will reprove you, and you will be proved a liar. (Proverbs 30:5-6)

While some of these don’t address the specific issue of imposing your own traditional beliefs on your study of scripture, the preponderance of evidence would suggest that this god doesn’t like it when people add to, or take away from, what he’s said. So it seems to me that Answers in Genesis has actually taken an anti-biblical view of the issue, which is, of course, no surprise.

The second argument is that there can’t be any extraterrestrial life because the bible doesn’t explicitly mention that it was created:

In Genesis 1 we read that God created plants on the earth on Day 3, birds to fly in the atmosphere and marine life to swim in the ocean on Day 5, and animals to inhabit the land on Day 6. Human beings were also made on Day 6 and were given dominion over the animals. But where does the Bible discuss the creation of life on the “lights in the expanse of the heavens”? There is no such description because the lights in the expanse were not designed to accommodate life…. From a biblical perspective, extraterrestrial life does not seem reasonable.

At this point you simply have to point out that plastic exists. The frozen polar caps of Earth exist. Death Valley exists. The Grand Canyon exists. Bacteria and Archaea exist. The Duck-Billed Platypus exists. Antibiotics exist. The point being that none of these things are specifically mentioned as having been created; and although you could lump some of them in with their broader classes (you might be able to smuggle the Platypus in with “animals,” for example), there are some things that have existed for a very long time that don’t fit anywhere in the Genesis description - such as the polar caps, or antibiotics.

Let’s take this a bit further. AiG’s argument is that “extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist, because Genesis doesn’t mention it.” There’s a hidden assumption in that statement, and that is that the Genesis account offers a complete, comprehensive accounting of all the things that were created. But the Genesis account itself fails to mention that it is a comprehensive account. Again, we have some dimwit, dishonest theologians bringing their own traditional beliefs into their reading of the bible and coming to wild conclusions as a result.

The third argument AiG deploys is strictly theological - that is, even more so than their vapid outgassings so far - and applies only to the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Basically, it goes like this:

1. Adam sinned. (Yes, they say Adam, not Adam and Eve.)
2. As a result, death and sin entered the world. (They cite Romans 5:12: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned….
3. It was necessary for Jesus Christ, who was both human and god, to redeem this sin by being sacrificially killed. Killing animals couldn’t do it because they are not of the same “blood” as human beings.

Given all this - and I’ll take them at their word just for the sake of discussion, they conclude:

When we consider how the salvation plan might apply to any hypothetical extraterrestrial (but otherwise human-like) beings, we are presented with a problem. If there were Vulcans or Klingons out there, how would they be saved? They are not blood relatives of Jesus, and so Christ’s shed blood cannot pay for their sin. One might at first suppose that Christ also visited their world, lived there, and died there as well, but this is antibiblical. Christ died once for all (1 Peter 3:18; Hebrews 9:27–28, Hebrews 10:10)….

One might suppose that alien beings have never sinned, in which case they would not need to be redeemed. But then another problem emerges: they suffer the effects of sin, despite having never sinned. Adam’s sin has affected all of creation— not just mankind. Romans 8:20–22 makes it clear that the entirety of creation suffers under the bondage of corruption.

Having painted themselves into this corner, they say - hold on to your britches, this is really funny:

These kinds of issues highlight the problem of attempting to incorporate an antibiblical notion into the Christian worldview.

Hahaha! There’s two legitimate answers to this. The atheist would quite rightly say that this is a sign that your “christian worldview” is a bunch of make-believe rubbish, and maybe you should consider reality as an alternative.

The moderate religionist might point out that perhaps this is a sign that they’ve taken the “christian worldview” and pressed it a little too hard, believing it to mean something far beyond what the words were ever intended to say, and that maybe they should lay off the crack pipes for a bit.

(Moderate religionists might point this out, and they should - because whackjobs like these make them all look stupid and dishonorable - but for reasons that puzzle me, they rarely do.)

The AiG page goes on to debunk UFOs as alien spacecraft, a conclusion that I heartily endorse. Their arguments, of course, are rubbish.

Conclusion: Religionists who deny the possibility of extraterrestrial life are extremists.

1. Despite his church’s brutal views on contraception, etc - most Catholics I know freely ignore the behaviorally harmful aspects of Catholic teaching, and so I rate them more or less mainstream. In the meantime, I fully recognize the evil that the church is perpetrating against peoples in developing nations, of low income, of restricted educational opportunities, and so forth - and I condemn it. [↩]