12 - God, evolution, and astrobiology

Summary

There is a Family Circle cartoon that shows the father of the family escorting his daughter home from school. The caption is a single question that the little girl asks of her father: “If we send astronauts to Mars, do they hafta drive past Heaven?” While this strikes us as funny, it illustrates the double world in which many of us live. Few educated adults would ask the question in such simplistic terms. Nevertheless, many people live in a bifurcated world in which they have accepted the results of science, and presume the reasonable world of scientific endeavor. However, when it comes to thinking about God, some people still have a somewhat childish, antiquated, or rudimentary worldview. In the scientific world everything is open to question and results are only as valid as the evidence that supports them. With regard to God, however, both believers and non-believers often assume that religious issues can only be settled by reverting to a kind of mythic fideism.

In the contemporary Christian world of North America, the notion that God might have created other worlds with novel emergent life forms can threaten this basic religious intuition. The Genesis accounts of creation presume that the Earth is central to God's purposes, most notably that of establishing a special relationship with mankind. The discovery of extraterrestrial life in any form would seem to contradict this core assumption of the Judeo-Christian tradition.