That’s really a false dichotomy; it presumes that literal accounts can’t also be theological – a presupposition easily dispelled by pointing to the Crucifixion, which in fact only tells us anything theologically if it is considered literally.
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This brought to mind a comment in a discussion a bout one of Dr. Michael Heiser’s presentations where he commented that there are nations that aren’t found in the Table of Nations, yet parts of the Bible address things as though those are all the nations that exist, or at least that matter. Given that, it seems that we already have a situation with “alien life” – life of people not found in the Table of Nations.
I came to that position the moment I first heard that there are meteors that began as pieces of other planets and that Mars certainly has pieces of Earth fallen on it.
For that matter, spores can waft high enough into the upper atmosphere that some could be carried to Mars on the solar wind, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there are fungi on Mars.
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They’re images from the past showing us how the Earth got all the elements needed to have this planet the way it is.
I don’t see the possibility of theological import until lifeforms have more brain power than is strictly necessary to survive.
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In context, the comment was made concerning Genesis, and specifically early Genesis which is of a different genre than the Gospels and as I see it is not historical or concordant with events in creation, but rather theologic. Apples and oranges.
Regarding bacteria, there was an interesting article this week about the release of mosquitos on Maui. They released a bunch with a different strain of bacteria in their gut than the local mosquitos, as when they breed, both of the breeding pair has to have the same strain to produce viable offspring. Interesting to see that reproduction is dependent on having compatible bacteria inside. We also are dependent on our biome for health, and makes you think when you consider creation.
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98% to 99% of all species that have lived on Earth are now extinct, so it isn’t necessary to go to Mars to ask that question.
What’s the theological purpose of life along ocean vents so deep that a photon from the surface only gets that far rarely?
This sort of question is one that is worth laughing at because it misunderstands why God communicates with us: He isn’t trying to give us a comprehensive systematic theology, He’s trying to tell us what we need to know to live in relationship with Him. This BTW is one reason that many people treat YEC as a joke – it’s trying to answer questions that God hasn’t indicated as being of any value (the Eastern orthodox have a good way to measure if a question is even theological: if answering it doesn’t start with “Who is Jesus?”, it isn’t a theological question at all).
As well as at least ten billion years for that incubator to bring about life, if some recent calculations are in the ballpark when it’s suggested that apparently life showed up on Earth as early as could be expected given all the factors that are necessary.
Good point!
For all we know, life on Mars could have been there for nothing more than to keep Satan guessing.
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That’s a nice twist on the effort back in the early 1970s where mosquitoes were released (in Sudan IIRC) with some infective agent that rendered something like nineteen out of twenty female mosquitoes sterile (which itself was a follow-up to breeding billions of female mosquitoes and rendering them sterile in the lab, in the very late 1960s). Plainly we’ve learned a lot more about bacteria since then!
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I don’t know if I’m alone or not in this, but I wouldn’t remotely care if they found bacteria on another planet outside of normal curiosity. It would be like telling me Mars has polar ice caps.
The press would spin it as “we are not alone,” “life found in the universe” and it would be world news, but it’s so meh to me. All that for microbes on another world? Now if we ever made contact with an advanced, intelligent, alien race, that would get my full attention.
Theologically speaking we all have the same God and creator. I would be interested in their religious beliefs if they had any.
Vinnie
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Many insects (and much less well-studied, but many other animals) have symbiotic bacteria in the genus Wolbachia that affect reproduction. In some cases, if a male and female have incompatible strains of Wolbachia (or one has it and the other doesn’t), the bacteria can cause infertility. In some species, having the bacteria is essential to fertility. Thus, the relationship is complex. For Maui (and Hawai’i generally), mosquitoes are not only a nuisance to us but a deadly threat to native birds. The native birds generally don’t have resistance to avian malaria carried by introduced bird species and introduced mosquitoes.
As Wolbachia is dependent on the host, it’s not a plausible candidate for Martian bacteria.
Overall, I’d agree with Vinnie that discovery of microbes on another planet would be quite interesting for scientific curiosity, and might give us a bit better picture of how many different ways there are to build life, but it would not be the overwhelming news that the media, NASA, etc. claim it would be.
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Ten billion years for any life; almost fourteen billion for advanced life.
This has me thinking it would be fun in a science fiction story to have humans encounter an alien race that firmly believes in a Creator, and when they eventually get someone to explain why they have no doubt at all that there is a Creator they say that their civilization rose on the ruins of one that had been spacefaring two billion years earlier – early enough that only a divine intervention would have made it possible.
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Given the poor grasp of things common to all too many science writers for ordinary publications, I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists found life on Mars and learned not only that it had DNA but that its DNA plainly branched from that of Earth and science writers totally missed the importance of that.
That would actually be a discovery that deserved a “meh”; discovery of life with a different genetic chemistry would be a “Whoa – wow!” moment because it would indicate that there could actually be “an advanced, intelligent, alien race” out there.
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There already “could be” an advanced intelligent life out there. Finding bacteria doesn’t really make that any more probable. Most people who embrace evolution and abiogenesis already think life may have started many times in the cosmos. Life survives and thrives in very “hostile” conditions on earth as well.
Obscure views whereby the earth is so rare and even microbial life so unique and hard to form, only God could create it, would be the views that are rocked. In the end this would fuel the idea that God is superfluous because that is how the general public will understand it: no need for a creator. Something we on this forum should take seriously and be hashing out ways to address this…
I would still generally think there are no advanced, alien races out there even if we found microbial life somewhere. It took earth billions of years and a lot of “coincidences” to get to where we are today. I am fond of a rare earth hypothesis when it comes to thinking, sentient being capable of morality and so on in the universe. Finding pond scum doesn’t touch on this view or justify belief in little green men except via logical fallacy.
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Yes, it takes multiple stellar lifetimes to get the necessary heavy elements for life to form via nucleosybthesis. The universe really is the size and age it should be for us.
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Sure it does – it shows that other life actually happens. If we never find any evidence of other life at all, there will be no reason for any confidence at all that we could find intelligent life.
It’s kind of like something from my conservation work: if I’m looking in an area of dunes for places to plant native trees and/or shrubs, in a place where there’s nothing but sand I have little to no reason to believe that trees or shrubs will grow there, but if I find a spot with even one species of native herbiage then I can expect that shrubs and trees could grow there, since the presence of those lesser species makes it possible for trees and shrubs to sprout on their own.
In short, if there’s no lesser life, the odds of more complex life are nil.
This was expressed in a seminar I watched a while back one weekend when binging on Neil DeGrasse Tyson videos: once panel member said he doubted that there’s more than a half dozen sentient tool-using species in the galaxy – and that that was premised on first finding alien primitive life, since if the galaxy doesn’t show signs of primitive life being common there’s no reason at all to think intelligent life even exists.
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I am not following. We only have the capacity to search an extremely small amount of places in the cosmos that might have primitive microbial life. Just because we don’t find any says nothing about whether or not there is life out there—microbial or otherwise.
Imagine you are looking for a coin and there are 10 billion cars. If you searched 2 cars and did not find a coin that would hardly warrant claiming anything about the other 10 billion (minus 2) cars. Imagine if we searched every location in our galaxy (an impossible feet) would that even justify claiming the universe is devoid of microbial life given the number of galaxies?
We could theoretically have immense confidence in primitive life arising out in the cosmos without ever seeing any direct evidence of it. This would simply be due to the large number of potential candidate locations and the fact that we cannot examine them.
This doesn’t work because we can examine next to nothing when it comes to all the places life could exist in the cosmos. As a percentage there will be a 0 followed by a decimal point and then a lot more 0s before you see a number. How many exactly, I do not know. Until we have an adequate sample size, nothing more than “we haven’t found signs of life” can be inferred from “not finding signs of life”.
As a premise this is true—assuming uniformitarianism and that life has a “natural” development. We cannot quantify how a supernatural being might change these odds. But at the end of the day, we have no way to search all these places for lesser life so there is no way to justify or substantiate the “there’s no lesser life.”
Vinnie
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