Can a Christian Believe in Aliens?

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So can a Christian believe in aliens? It sounds like a completely wild question, but actually, I think more than any other question, this is one that I’ve been getting asked a lot lately. And it’s a really kind of tantalizing question, especially as we start to look at space and make all sorts of new discoveries. Can a Christian believe that there is something out there on other worlds?

There’s two ways to answer this question. The first one is a short, very unsatisfying answer, and the second one is a medium answer that redirects our attention a little bit to maybe something that we didn’t expect. So let me give you the short, unsatisfying answer first. The shorter, unsatisfying answer is the Bible doesn’t say. We know that God created all things. If he created creatures on other planets, that’s certainly well within his power. It’s maybe not something we would expect would be brought up specifically, since that’s not really what the Bible is about, but it certainly well within his capacity to have done it.

I’ve got to say, I’m really curious if we did find aliens, what kind of arguments would I hear from people who don’t believe that God created all things, what kind of arguments would we hear that abiogenesis occurred twice, but, you know, forgiving that, there’s nothing in the Bible to prevent it.

Okay, but what about when we if we’re not thinking about, like, life on a bacterial scale or if we’re thinking about like, animals as aliens, right. What about like, the smart aliens? What about like, the aliens who are in spaceships and, you know, like visit farmers fields in the middle of nowhere and that sort of thing? What about those aliens? That one starts to give us a little bit more pause. Like if we did meet super smart aliens, would they be Christians? Should we baptize them? Like, what would our, what the nature of our interaction with other smart creatures be?

When we start to deal with those questions, we actually find ourselves getting redirected into the actual purpose of Scripture. What is it that the Bible is about? The Bible is only about one topic. It covers a lot of things. There’s stuff in it, right? There’s there’s history and there’s science, and all of those are things that are kind of in the Bible, but they aren’t the purpose of the Bible. The reason for the Bible is one topic. It is the book of human salvation. It is about how even though we unmade the world, we get to go to heaven anyway. It is dedicated specifically to our plight. It was human beings that brought sin into the universe. It was human beings that took perfection and made it into imperfection. It was human beings that undid so much of the good that once upon a time existed inside of creation. It was human beings who owed the debt to God.

When Jesus came, he took on humanity. He was true man and true God simultaneously. Why? So that he could pay the debt that human beings owed to God so that he could absorb the punishment that human beings deserved for what we had done to creation, for what we had done to ourselves, to reconcile human beings with God. The Bible is the book of human salvation. If there are aliens, even super intelligent aliens, they’re living in a fallen universe. They’re living in a universe that would have been suffering the effects of our sin. But beyond that, we don’t really have any expectations about it. And it leads us down all sorts of weird, unusual paths, right? Like how would God interact with them? Would they have souls, that sort of thing? The Bible does not speak to any of those kinds of topics or any of those kinds of questions. I can say with some assurance, we probably wouldn’t want to baptize an alien, Jesus wasn’t an alien. Jesus came for human beings. If there are other provisions for other creatures, that’s an that’s an area of entirely just speculation.

But as we speculate and we kind of can’t help but speculate, it’s too interesting to not speculate on these sort of things. But as we speculate on them, it should always redirect our attention to what we know to be the truth. That the Bible was written for you, that the Bible was written with your life and your salvation in mind, that the Bible was written because God wants to see you in his heavens.