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Society, Religion and Technology Project Church of Scotland Looking at the ethics of technology for a New Millennium

LIFE ON MARS? - Is there anyone out there?

It is only human to look out on a cold star-filled night and feel a sense of awe at that vast array. But who has not felt also a touch of poignancy, wondering if there is life somewhere out there amongst those countless stars, or whether our earth is the only place in the universe where life is found? The sense of being alone on our spinning ball of rock and water, with no companions amidst all that space and galaxies, would be profound indeed, if it were true.

Little wonder that the idea that there might be life elsewhere in the solar system or the rest of the universe has fascinated humanity for a long time. For many people, indeed, it seems almost overwhelmingly probable, somewhere out there, but whether we would ever find out is another question. Monitors are set up to listen in to the "white noise" from space, and try and detect signs of some intelligent message coming across space, but the only realisitic place to get more concrete evidence is within our own solar system.

And of all the potential sites, the favourite has been Mars. Our near neighbour possesses some physical features that suggested life could have been possible. Science fiction has milked the possibility with innumerable fantasies. But science itself was dubious. When the Mariner probe went to look a few years ago, and found no evidence of life, that seemed to be the end of the story. If there was nothing else in the solar system, then our chances of ever obtaining evidence from anywhere beyond was remote indeed.

The discovery of the century ... or not?

That was until two sets of discoveries in recent months reawakened the old dream. One was the first respectable evidence for the presence of planets in a very few other star systems - long-anticipated but never found until now. The other was the spectacular announcement that a meteorite in Antarctica, which had a composition consistent with having been originally part of the planet Mars, appeared to contain a fossil of a bacterium. Suddenly the whole question was wide open again.

The media jumped on the issue with glee. Because good stories in August are thin on the ground, perhaps we heard more about it than at the height of some political crisis. Some rightly advised caution over life on Mars, but mostly the temptation to unwarranted speculations was too much to resist. It is jumping the gun to say we've turned a page in a new book in our understanding of who we are and of our place in the universe, when we all we have so far is one piece of data. You don't base major scientific theories on one point on a graph. For the moment the starter could still recall the runners to their blocks - say if the sample turned out to have been contaminated on earth. Only if several more such extra-terrestrial fossils are identified would we have a race on our hands.

Star Trekking in vain?

Even then, we would not be able to deduce that life was ubiquitous throughout the universe. If this extraordinary discovery is indeed confirmed, life would still not be expected on most of the other seven planets of the solar system, or their moons. To obtain similar data from planets orbiting remote stars is beyond reasonable likelihood, so we would probably never know. Along with most scientists, I do not hold out any hope that any form of communications could ever exceed the speed of light or that living beings could travel at such speeds. So for anything to come and visit us would imply that an entire civilisation had been able to travel for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years in some space craft to reach us, which seems a remote idea, even supposing they knew to look for us in a tiny corner of the universe (as it were).

Some astronomers think that life would be exceedingly rare, and the odds are stacked somewhat against our finding out about it. There is quite a strong argument that life is a pretty unlikely thing to happen. The "anthropic principle" reflects that the various physical constants of the universe and the specific conditions on our planet are, as someone put it, "spectacularly fine tuned for life". If conditions were only slightly different either way, we wouldn't be here. This has led to a counter-intuitive conclusion. Far from life being pretty common all over a universe as big as this, it might take a universe of this size and scale to create even one planet with "life as we know it". Life certainly wouldn't be found round every corner.

Where does God come into all this?

But suppose the meterorite is genuinely Martian, and did have some fossil in it, and that other samples like it are found. Would that mean the Bible is wrong in that it only talks of God creating life on this earth? Would this be a major argument against Christian claims? An Italian monk was put to death for heresy in the 16th century for speculating that there might be life elsewhere. This was seen at the time to deny the "geocentric" cosmological framework in which the teachings of the Catholic church about creation were then conceived. This shows up a basic mistake which has often been made since.

The church had got itself into an unnecessary corner by having so strongly embraced what was the accepted scientific theory of the time that it was virtually the equivalent of revealed truth. When the understanding of science changed, it left the church apparently astride the wrong horse, but unable to back down because it had made a dogma out of it. The lesson of that is that science is too transient a thing for the church to base its theology around it.

In fact the Bible is simply silent over the issue of life elsewhere in the universe. God is declared to be the creator of everything that is. Just on first principles, there seems no reason why the God of the Bible, creating a universe capable of producing the conditions for living organisms on earth, could not also create living things elsewhere than earth. Whether he did or not is not something we find in either the Old or New Testaments. That the Bible does not make reference to it, one way or the other, proves nothing at all. Indeed, its silence is hardly surprising, since its focus is how human beings can be reconciled with God through Christ, not whether evolutionary biology once involved a Martian step or two. The danger, as ever, is trying to read the Bible as if it were a scientific journal.

If the central point of the Christian faith is that God has come to earth in human form in the life of Jesus Christ, it is to this that human beings are called to respond. If there was intelligent, moral life elsewhere, theologians might speculate whether there would need to be an extra-terrestial incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ elsewhere too - using C.S.Lewis's analogy, a sort of Aslan in a sort of Narnia? But ultimately that is idle speculation, because God is God of the whole universe, but only tells us about the part that concerns us. Mark Twain said that it's not the parts of the Bible that he didn't understand that caused him trouble, so much as the parts that he did!

Searching

What are we searching for in asking this question about life elsewhere? It's partly simple curiosity, of course. But it would be naive to claim that it's just that. Is it to fill the deep basic human yearning not to be alone that we ask if there is anyone else there? But even if there was, would it be enough to answer our cosmic loneliness, as specks in the vastness of space? Back in the fifth century, the theologian Augustine made the timeless observation that whatever human beings do to look for satisfaction out of life, "our hearts remain restless until they find their rest in You." It isn't created life on some distant planet - whether a few primitive bacteria, or a supposed SciFi supercivilisation - that would meet the human longing for a dimension on life that is beyond the material and physical. It is God that we should be searching for off the planet. And it turns out that the God of infinity has come to visit our planet in human form in Jesus Christ.

This article has been produced by the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland, and is copyright, ©Donald M.Bruce, 1996. If you would like to reproduce all or part of it, please write or email us for permission.

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