‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ So wrote Immanuel Kant in the conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason.

Kant may have been an ambiguous believer (to put it generously) himself, but his starry heavens have long been one of creation’s – thus Christians’ – greatest theistic arguments. At their simplest (and least convincing) they supposedly demonstrate God’s existence. At the more subtle (and more persuasive) they lift the human mind towards the possibility of the transcendent, the numinous, the ‘other’. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ Psalm 19 declares, ‘the skies proclaim the work of his hands.'

Yet, over recent years, this most spectacular of arguments has been subtly co-opted by ‘the other side’. Nowadays, stories about the sky at night are more likely to declare the non-existence of God than his existence – let alone his glory.

It began with the planets. For centuries there was considered to be only seven: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and the Sun. The Earth was the centre of the universe and beyond Saturn there were only stars. Seven was enough. It seemed a suitably perfect number.

Then came the troublesome sixteenth century. Whilst Christians in Europe were busy arguing with and then killing each other, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe were gazing at Kant’s starry skies and seeing something entirely new. After much thought, and a few dead ends, they reached the conclusion that the earth was also, in fact, a planet (despite the fact it didn’t seem to be a ‘wanderer’, the root meaning of the word ‘planet’) and that the sun and the moon were not (despite the fact they did). The earth was no longer the centre of the universe. Nor was it unique.

A couple of hundreds years later Uranus was noticed and admitted to the planetary club, followed, 70 years on, by Neptune. The total was up to eight. Pluto was discovered and admitted in 1930 but then unceremoniously ejected in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union decided it didn’t, after all, meet club regulations. Duly humiliated, it was reclassified as a dwarf-planet, along with the less well-known Eris and Ceres. We were back to eight.

Except, however, that we weren’t, for in the time between Pluto’s admission and expulsion, astronomers had started to detected planets orbiting stars other than our own. These ‘exoplanets’ are fiendishly difficult to detect but number over 200 now. Only last month, the prosaically named Gliese 581c was let into the club. Being a planet no longer seemed so special. Nor, by implication, was being on one.

If human pride was damaged, it wasn’t irreparable. Humanity’s place of abode may no longer be unique but it was at least the only one in town that was occupied. The universe may be full of houses but only humans lived in a home.

Except that no-one actually knew whether that was the case. Just because we could see these planets, it didn’t mean we could peer through their curtains. Who was to tell that they weren’t full of primitive bacteria or, worse, primitive humanoids?

This lingering question has left its mark on our news coverage. Hardly a story about a new planet (or, in some cases, an old one) is reported without this particular angle being taken. ‘Universe could be teeming with life, says study,’ ‘Methane find gives new clue to life on Mars,’ ‘“Second Earth” cuts odds on finding aliens’.

The tone is breathless and the sense of excitement palpable, despite the fact that the vast majority of the 200-odd exoplanets so far discovered are not only gas giants, like Jupiter, but also outside any recognized habitable orbit, and thus highly unlikely to sustain life.

Gliese 581c, however, is different. It boasts conditions that ‘are the most conducive for extraterrestrial life of any so far discovered’. It is ‘rocky’, ‘Earth-like’, with an orbit in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of its solar system, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold and where, therefore, liquid water may exist. Not significantly larger than earth and with an estimate mean temperature of between zero and 40 degrees Celsius, Gliese 581c could be jackpot. ‘On the treasure map of the Universe,’ said Xavier Delfosse, a member of the team that made the discovery, ‘one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X.’ Who can blame William Hill for shortened its odds on finding evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life from 1000/1 to 100/1?

If any one group is supposed to be particularly threatened by the prospect of this discovery it is Christians. I still remember an interviewee (one of those whom Theo Hobson defended in last month’s

Third Way

) telling me, ‘Do you know what I really hope? I hope they will find life in outer space. Because doesn’t the Bible dispel that theory? Doesn’t it say there is nothing else out there, that we are the only ones? I really hope that they are going to find a little green man out there.’

Her opinion might have been rather eager but she was only articulating what most of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, think. The Bible clearly states that earth is the high point of creation and that human beings are uniquely sophisticated, spiritual beings, unlike anything else in the universe. As soon as we stumble across a host of bacteria warming itself round a Martian thermal vent or, better still, that UFO that landed in the Nevada desert back in the ‘50s the game will be up, and the property market will be flooded by 16,000 des-res ex-parish churches.

Indeed, when, in 1996, NASA scientists announced that they had found what looked like fossilised bacteria in a Martian meteorite, it looked as if the game was indeed up. It was the news for which we had all been waiting. We are, officially, not alone.

The evidence, alas, was not conclusive and the verdict was deferred to 2004, when three separate missions were sent to probe Mars’ mysteries and answer, once and for all, the big question. In the end, the two of them that got there, NASA’s Opportunity and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, beamed back some notable findings: ice under the south pole, evidence of once-salty seas, methane and possibly ammonia in the atmosphere. But, alas, it failed to clinch the deal and William Hill put away the cheque book.

If the story does finally explode out of its cage of conjecture, it will have a genuine impact on how we view ourselves. The discovery of life elsewhere would, it has been suggested, be comparable to the discoveries Copernicus, Kepler and Brahe 500 years ago. Humans, having discovered they were not, in fact, centre stage in the universe, would now suffer the further indignity of having to share that stage with other life forms. Christians, wedded more than most to the idea of human uniqueness, would be particularly humiliated.

But would they? In spite of popular opinion, the discovery of life on Mars, Gliese 581c or anywhere else, would not disprove orthodox Christianity. If anything, it would give theistic and arguably Christian belief a vital shot in the arm.

Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees has written how ‘just six numbers’ underwrite the entire universe.^[1] Two relate to the basic forces of nature, two to the size and ‘texture’ of the universe, and two to the properties of space itself. Each is fine-tuned to an infinitesimal degree in such a way as to make life possible. Were one to be ‘detuned’ by even a minute amount, the universe, as we know it, would never have existed. No earth, no humans, no Third Way – just an eternity of sterile void. The universe is no more a brute fact, as Bertrand Russell claimed, than a Faberge egg is a brute egg.

Despite the fact that many, Martin Rees among them, do not believe this ‘tuning’ is sufficient evidence for the existence of a creator, theists commonly get rather smug about it. Not only is there something rather than nothing but that something is calibrated to an inconceivable degree so as to make life possible.

It is a persuasive argument, but not a conclusive one. There is still a chance, albeit a fantastically remote one, that the universe hit the ‘life jackpot’ by chance and that we are simply the credulous beneficiaries of that accident. The one discovery that would surely refute the idea that we are ‘just an accident’ would be the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe. To find life once might be considered good fortune, to do so twice looks like carefulness.

There are good, scientific arguments that contend such a discovery may never be made and that we are indeed alone. In his book, Life’s Solution, Cambridge paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, argues that although life itself may be a ‘universal principle’, the suitable conditions for it may be very much rarer than we imagine. We may, as his book’s subtitle suggests, be ‘inevitable humans in a lonely universe’.^[2]

That may be so but, contrary to popular opinion such a conclusion would sit uneasily alongside the Christian understanding of God and humanity. Ideas about mankind’s uniquely sophisticated, spiritual nature owe at least as much to human insecurity as to divine revelation.

The Old Testament theologian Chris Wright has pointed out that the Bible’s opening chapters have as much to say about what links humanity with the rest of creation as what divides us. Humans share with other animals a day of creation, the breath of life, and the command to multiply and fill the earth. The one verse that supposedly gives mankind the immortal soul denied to other creatures – ‘God… breathed into his nostrils… and man became a living soul’ as the King James’ Version translates it – is misleading. The word translated as soul, nepes, is used repeatedly of all the other living creatures. We are, in Wright’s words, ‘animals among animals.’

In a similar vein, Psalm 8 is as alert to the wonders of creation as Psalm 19, but sees in them a subtly different vision:

 

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

Rather than being honoured by the vastness of the heavens apparently revolving around him, man is radically belittled by them. His dignity is due to the unfathomable grace of God, not any intrinsic worth.

The reluctance to recognise humanity’s created and dependent status has bred many popular misconceptions. More precisely, it helps to explain why believers and non-believers alike readily confuse a Christian worldview with an anthropocentric one. Human beings are not special because we are alone, any more than an only-child is loved because she has no siblings. We are special because we can have a relationship with the one who made us. The only thing damaged by the discovery of life on Gleise 581c would be our pride.

In reality, if the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is as lavishly generous and over-abundant as monotheistic believers claim he is, might he not be more likely to seed his entire creation with life, rather than just our tiny corner of it. After all, what kind of father says, ‘I only want one child. I’m not capable of loving two’?

Today, because of confusion, misconception and the occasional good kicking from aggressive critics, Christians feel insecure and a little hostile when we hear speculation about life elsewhere, a bit like the toddler whose parents bring home a new-born. But the truth is that if we do ‘find a little green man out there’, it will be the best evidence yet to suggest that we are not alone.

This article first appeared in Third Way.

[1] Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The deep forces that shape the universe (Phoenix, 2000)

[2] Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe (Cambridge University Press, 2003)