Editor’s Note: Lauren Greem is a member of Redeemer PCA in New York. This story contains a lengthy comment from Tim Keller (it’s in the ‘read more’ portion). It also gives a lot of coverage to the Answers In Genesis ministry and comments from author Lee Stroble. Not the kind of story one sees every day on main-stream media.
The Bible says God created Adam and Eve — but what about E.T.?
While rocket-science researchers at the 100 Year Starship Symposium pondered interstellar travel on a whole new class of spaceship over the weekend, theologians debated an equally paradigm-shifting concept: reconciling the Bible with life elsewhere in the universe. Simply put, if life is discovered on other planets, can we still say that mankind is unique — made in the image of God?
“The discovery of intelligent life from other planets would be a challenge to the Christian worldview,” admitted Dr. Jason Lisle, an astrophysicist with the Creation Museum’s research arm, Answers in Genesis.
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His museum, located in Petersburg, Ky., is based on the belief that Earth is “specially designed” to be inhabited by living beings, called the anthropic principle.
“The fact that no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence has ever been detected must be considered … a confirmation of Christianity,” Lisle told FoxNews.com.
Yet it’s not too farfetched to believe that there could be life somewhere out there. After all, there are estimated to be more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, containing trillions of stars and planets.
Lee Strobel, author of the book “The Case for a Creator,”has no problem with the idea of life on other planets. But he points out that the anthropic principle is not a uniquely religious point of view: Pure statistics, he says, suggest life isn’t likely elsewhere in the skies.
“The anthropic principle is an argument from probability, that the likelihood that conditions needed to bring about life are extremely rare,” he told FoxNews.com.
Strobel points to the book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe,”written by scientists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee. The book explores the hypothesis that much of the known universe cannot support complex life.
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