Can you believe in aliens and Christianty?

Question

wouldn't that be hypocritical?

Answer 1

Of course not, but alot of athiests will love you to think the two are unreconcilliable. The idea that God has been around "forever" and yet this is the only planet that He ever got around to populate with living organisims is alittle silly don't you think?

Answer 2

It's happening now. A show yrs ago with guys using code names & in the dark who had been in some government cover-up was a trip. They were saying various things about the aliens that were all advanced they knew about, but the most revealing was when someone asked the aliens 'Do you believe in God?' By the way they talk with their 'think'. The aliens gave themselves away when they replied 'Yes, God is in everything-that rock, mountain..etc.' If that is a true account they're NOT of God and some Christian leaders think the aliens will be cohorts with the anti-christ(scripture says something like one goes before him or something like that). I don't think it's in the Bible that aliens(space) don't exist. By the way it must sound like some Christians are really nuts now, hee hee hee (not REALLY!).

Answer 3

Why should it be? It's a vast universe, and isn't it arrogant to assert that we know everything God (or whatever higher power) ever created? We discover new things all the time. We can't just disbelieve them because a holy book doesn't mention them by name. On the other hand, if you're a Christian and worshipping the aliens as divine, that is a slightly different matter.

Answer 4

If Christians believe in the Bible - and they do
And, if the Bible is the revealed truth of God - and it is
And, if we understand that God has not revealed the entire
truth - and He has not as Jesus points out when asked about
the final judgement - "Only the Father knows".
then it is entirely possible that alien life forms exist and that
God has not seen fit to reveal this to us.
A belief in aliens is not hypocritical if it is based on facts
and not on Faith as Faith is spiritual and God given
and aliens, if they exist, are material and corporal.

Answer 5

Certainly not! Christianity teaches that there are forms
of life called spirits, that exist on higher levels of reality than our own. If humans will be fighting on Earth during
the tribulation. And spirit beings from higher dimensions. Wouldn't it stand to reason there will be aliens battling here as well?

Answer 6

not if you believe jesus was really an alien!! Actually I am not christian, so that was an unfair answer. But one way to look at it, if you do not believe in aliens, aren't you being rather egotistic thinking you are the only beings your creator made among billions and billions of stars, galaxies and planets?

Answer 7

hello: most christains R already that"" Who says there diferent entities, maybe through all of the times befor the translation should remain Mother earth, as Native spiruality' Or the thunder gods of the Axtec,s Spriital plains of ones culture, good bad, ying&yang,

Answer 8

I realize that no one ever really reads the Bible anymore, but just in case, there is one little statement that fits:

"With God, all things are possible."

Answer 9

not necessarily.
If God intended for you to find other races from other planets then how would that be hypocritical.

Answer 10

You need a dictionary
hypocrite--
Pronunciation: 'hi-p&-"krit
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English ypocrite, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin hypocrita, from Greek hypokritEs actor, hypocrite, from hypokrinesthai
1 : a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion
2 : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

The ongoing scientific quest to explore ‘Space, the final frontier’ is intimately bound up with the search for ‘strange new worlds and new civilizations’, and with issues of an undeniably spiritual character. As a 1999 NASA report on the ‘Societal Implications of Astrobiology’ affirmed:

the search for extraterrestrial life. . . offers a meeting ground not only for physical, biological and social scientists, but also for artists, philosophers, [and] theologians. . . The effort encourages people from very different intellectual traditions to talk to one another, and may set the stage for. . . the unification of knowledge.

In other words, SETI (search for extra-terrestrial life) is all about trying to understand our place in the scheme of things, not merely scientifically, but metaphysically, in terms that inform our worldview. Hence it is no surprise to find professor of psychology Albert A. Harrison writing that: ‘the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe. . . will affect our philosophy, our science, our religion. . .’ Of course, Christians have never exactly thought that we were ‘alone in the universe’. God, while transcendent, is also immanent: God is with us. And then there are the angels. Only an atheist would phrase the question of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) in quite this way.

However, some Christians have believed (and do believe) that humans are the only embodied creatures in creation to be made in God’s image, and some atheists love to suggest (it is rarely argued) that “if and when one ever detects evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligent. . . that evidence will be inconsistent with the existence of God or at least organized religion.” One suspects that some SETI enthusiasts look forward to the discovery of ETI for just this reason, and that their faith in ETI actually functions as a bulwark against religion. Of course, unless SETI actually ‘delivers the goods’ this piece of atheological self-justification will remain another example of what John Polkinghorne calls ‘promissory naturalism’.

On the other hand, the possibility that both God and E.T might exist is something assumed by M. Night Shyamalan’s film thriller Signs, wherein a priest regains his faith in divine providence (lost after his wife died in an accident) amid the climactic events of his struggle to protect his children from alien invaders navigating by crop-circles.

A related piece of atheological rhetoric suggests that: ‘SETI’s emphasis on the enormity of our cosmos attests to the tiny, and perhaps insignificant place we occupy in the cosmic scheme. . . The quaint little stories of our conventional religious teachings seem but musings of children at play.’ However, it seems that our growing appreciation for the size of creation at least cuts both ways, for: ‘When one stares upward into a clear and dark night sky and out across the vast star fields of our galaxy, a sense of mystical astonishment is inevitable. When one thinks of how small our galaxy is in the larger scheme of things, even greater wonder is inspired.’ This sense of cosmic wonder might motivate reflection upon the contingency, beauty and design of the heavens that has lead many to conclude that there is a Designer behind the cosmos: ‘What could be more clear or obvious when we look up to the sky and contemplate the heavens, than that there is some divinity of superior intelligence?’ So wrote Cicero, and the majority of humanity has echoed this insight.

Although popular belief in the existence of aliens has died down from a peak in the late 70’s (when 51% of Americans believed that ‘there are people somewhere like ourselves living on other planets’), a significant minority of people continue to believe in the existence of ETI (in 1990 46% of Americans believed in ETI). Moreover, there has been a ‘recent legitimation of the search for extraterrestrial life within the scientific community’ that calls for ‘a rediscovery of the significance of this question within the theological community.’

According to an aside in the opening chapter of Genesis, a passage about God’s creation “In the beginning” of “the heavens and the earth” (v1): “He also made the stars” (Genesis 1:16). Later on God promises Abraham to make his descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.” (Genesis 22:17) We now know that there are around 100 billion stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and that there are around 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. We live on just one planet, orbiting just one star, in just one galaxy (something beautifully illustrated by the opening shot of the film Contact).

I wonder what thoughts and feelings go through you as you consider such statistics, or look at images taken by the Hubble Space telescope? Do you find yourself naturally echoing king David’s psalm:

"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens."

Or do you sympathize with Oxford chemist Peter Atkins who says:

"I’ve always thought that I was insignificant. Getting to know the size of the Universe, I see just how insignificant I really am! And I think the rest of the human race ought to realize just how insignificant it is. I mean, we’re just a bit of slime on a planet belonging to one sun."

David even sounds a little bit like Atkins in verse 4: ‘what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?’ However, while Atkins, who is an atheist, looks at the Universe and concludes that there is no God and that man has no significance, David concludes that the Universe is God’s handiwork and that humanity is crowned “with glory and honour”. This isn’t just a difference in emotional response; it’s a difference between two mutually exclusive worldviews. The theist sees the same heavens as the atheist, but interprets them quite differently:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4.)

This interpretation is either right, or wrong. Let’s examine the issues of Space and Aliens in order:


According to The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,

‘Space. . . is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen. . .’ and so on.

Could such little things as we are really mean that much to an infinite God? (Only to such a being could we mean infinitely much!)

The size of the universe is the sort of fact that atheists love to dangle in front of Christians as if it obviously undermined the rationality of belief in human significance, and hence the whole gospel story. For example, Gregory Stock writes: ‘the special significance of humanity seemed clear to Western thinkers in the Middle Ages; Earth was at the centre of the universe. . .’ However, says Stock, ‘The Copernican revolution shattered that notion, wrenching humanity from its exalted station and leaving it stranded on a peripheral planet circling one of many stars’. Likewise, Richard Dawkins says: ‘we should not think there’s anything special about us. We used to think we were the centre of the Universe and no we know we’re not.’

Frankly, this is nothing but the poorest sort of atheistic rhetoric in scientific clothing. The importance of a thing has nothing to do with its spatial position (is someone in the centre of the room somehow more important than someone in the corner?), or size (is a man worth less than a tree?), and scientific descriptions of the universe are in principle incapable of ruling out notions of design, significance, or purpose. The water in the kettle may be boiling because of the vibration of molecules; but the water is boiling because I want a cup of tea. The universe may have started with a ‘big bang’; but the universe began because God wanted a universe.

Besides, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, although our scientific model of creation may have changed, ‘The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a common-place to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it, to mortify human ambition.’

Perhaps the wittiest reply to the doubt that God could be interested in ‘little-old us’ came from the quill of the French philosopher and mathematician Blasé Pascal, who wrote that, ‘If you want to say that man is too feeble to deserve communication with God, you have to be very elevated to be the judge of that.’

The belief that humans are significant because God made us His own image is often thought by non-believers to be a piece of egoism on the part of Christians; but I wonder who is the more egoistic: someone who says that God made them in His own image, or the person who says man made God in his own image? The Christian claim that God has revealed Herself to humanity, especially in Jesus, does not involve any egotism. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it would be a mistake to think ‘that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. . . it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.’ There is, said Lewis, ‘no reason why the minute earth and the yet smaller human creatures upon it should not be the most important things in a universe that contains the spiral nebulae.’ No reason, that is, if God exists.

Indeed, our modern scientific understanding of cosmic ‘fine tuning’ shows that carbon based life forms couldn’t exist in a universe that was any smaller or younger than ours: ‘We currently believe that the universe is around 15 billion years old, give or take a few thousand million years. That length of time is needed for an initial generation of stars to be formed and die. . . and in that process make some of the heavier elements, of which we are composed, by nuclear fusion.’ The realisation that the universe is finely tuned, that even a slight deviation from the physical givens of the cosmos would produce a universe incapable of sustaining life, has been called the ‘anthropic principle’ (from the Greek for people: ‘anthropos’). People can only exist in a certain very unlikely kind of universe, and that’s the very kind of universe that exists.

The fact that we wouldn’t be here if the universe were different doesn’t explain why such an unlikely universe should exist in the first place. Suppose you were up for execution by firing squad. The soldiers fire, but they all miss. Would your surprise be alleviated if I pointed out that you wouldn’t be alive to feel surprised if any of the soldiers had been on target?! You might suggest that you were simply the beneficiary of dumb luck, but isn’t a more likely explanation that the soldiers missed on purpose? Likewise with the universe. The cosmic fine-tuning could be dumb luck, but it seems more rational to say that it was set up that way on purpose. In which case the vastness of space shouldn’t be discouraging to our self-worth; rather the opposite. It would seem that God went to a lot of ‘effort’ to put us here.

I recently overheard the following conversation, between a counter clerk and a customer, in my local bookstore:

Clerk: “I reckon it’s the most important book since the bible; he’s talking about back-engineering alien technology from the Roswell crash.”

Customer: “Surely that’s more important than the Bible, if it’s true.”

Clerk: “Yeah. Well, if the Bible’s true, being about the creator and all, then that would be more important wouldn’t it?”

Customer: “Well, both books can’t be true at least.”

Clerk: “Oh, No.”

Customer: “Although, God could have made the aliens. . .”

In other words, the existence of aliens wouldn’t disprove the Bible.

Physicist Paul Davies, on the other hand, thinks that the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would have profound and even catastrophic results for religious belief. The general assumption here is that Christianity says that humanity is the sole end and pinnacle of creation, and the only object of God’s love:

It’s inevitable that if we discover life elsewhere in the Universe, it will change for ever our perspective of our own species and our own planet. . . Those people who cling to the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of creation, or that somehow we were made in the image of God, would I think receive a rude shock.

Philosopher Theodore Schick agrees:

For all their differences, Christians and humanists agree on at least one thing: that humans are the most valuable form of life on the planet. Whether divinely crafted or naturally evolved, both groups consider humans to be the crown of earthly creation. . . since humanists believe that life is a natural rather than a supernatural phenomenon, they have no trouble admitting that self-conscious, intelligent beings may exist elsewhere in the universe.

Such an admission is not so easy for Christians, however. The Bible does not mention the existence of other planets, let alone intelligent creatures that inhabit them. . . So, if intelligent aliens were discovered, Christian theologians would have a lot of explaining to do.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, Schick presents a logically false dilemma between viewing life as ‘natural’ [i.e. evolved] rather than ‘a supernatural’ [i.e. created] phenomena. Logically speaking, life could be created by God through evolution (a position accepted by ‘theistic evolutionists’). Alternatively, even if life is (as I suspect), in some more robust sense of the term, a ‘supernatural phenomena’, the discovery of ETI would simply reveal that God has created life more than once. Either way, theists have no trouble admitting that self-conscious, intelligent beings may exist elsewhere in the universe. Moreover, Davies and Schick are attacking a ‘straw man’, an unfairly weak characterization of their target: ‘The Bible does not explicitly confirm or deny the existence of intelligent life from other planets.’ As Mark Wm Worthing says: ‘Christian theology has no biblical or theological basis upon which to reject out of hand the possibility of extraterrestrial life’.

There are a lot of things the Bible doesn’t mention. For example, the Bible doesn’t mention the existence of the telephone; but no one looks at their telephone and concludes on those grounds that the Bible has been falsified! Why should things be any different with alien life?

The idea that there is only one world goes back to Aristotle (in his treatise De caelo), not to the Bible. The biblical phrase ‘the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis 1:1) simply means ‘the whole of creation’. For another thing, Psalm 8 recognizes the humbleness of man: ‘what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?’, and affirms that although man is not God’s top creation (as Davies assumes): ‘You made him a little lower than the angels’, we are nevertheless ‘crowned. . . with glory and honour’ by God. As Hebrews 2:9 (quoting Psalm 8) says, it was for our sake that Christ himself was made ‘a little lower than the angels’. C.S. Lewis puts this paradox in context:

It is, of course, the essence of Christianity that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. But that does not prove that man is the sole end of Nature. In the parable, it was the one lost sheep that the shepherd went in search of: it was not the only sheep in the flock, and we are not told that it was the most valuable - save in do far as the most desperately in need has, while the need lasts, a peculiar value in the eyes of Love.

After all, in John 10:16 Jesus says: ‘I have sheep that are not of this sheep pen’; and while this obviously means non-Jews, it could mean non-humans as well.

If there are aliens who need a revelation from God, Christian physicist Russell Stannard seems to me to have a point when he says: ‘I can’t see why the same Son of God, who has existed for all time, can’t take on the form of other creatures once they reach the stage where they can communicate with God.’ This needn’t imply that God loves them more than us; no more than the existence of different races on earth implies that God loves one more than the rest, or that there are many individuals implies that God loves some more than others:

If intelligent beings were found elsewhere in the universe, (they) couldn’t compromise the special relationship already existing between God and human beings any more than a young couple compromises their love for their first child after having a second. The first child may feel slighted for a time, but the parent’s love nevertheless remains steadfast.