Anticipation of a forthcoming U.S. government “disclosure” on alien life is everywhere in the media.
President Trump has ordered a full release of files on UFOs. This week, FBI director Kash Patel said, “You’re going to start seeing those releases literally happening in the very near future. We just met on it.”
A Daily Mail headline, among many others, warns, “Religious leaders told 'prepare now' for UFO disclosure to unleash Bible-changing revelations.”
Next month promises to be a busy one, with Steven Spielberg claiming that his new blockbuster UFO movie, "Disclosure Day," to be released on June 12, is “more truth than fiction,” and will “upend all established order.”
UFO disclosure could turn out to be a highly redacted nothingburger. But let’s try a thought experiment: If the government were to disclose information showing the existence of alien life, what would that change for us?
Overnight, on the subject of UFOs, cynical smirks on countless faces would be wiped clean. Many will look to spiritual and scientific authorities for answers.
I don’t know if ET life exists, but as a Christian, it wouldn’t bother me. The Bible doesn’t say God did or did not create life elsewhere. As a scientist, too, I see no reason why the existence of aliens should threaten belief in God. Here’s why.
Everything we know about life tells us that it doesn’t arise naturally, but needs an intelligent designer.
At the heart of life is an information-rich molecule, DNA, bearing a language-based code that specifies the construction of highly complex molecular machines that process information in the cell. These machines read information in DNA and process it much as a computer interprets and executes programming code.
For these reasons, even atheist biologist Richard Dawkins wrote that “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like,” while Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, notes that “DNA is something like the hard drive on your computer,” containing “programming.”
Where do language-based code, computer-like information processing, or machines come from? In our experience, they have only one known cause: intelligence. The existence of ET life wouldn’t prove unguided, purposeless naturalistic evolution—it would provide another example to doubt it.
Some, including Dawkins himself, have speculated that life on Earth could have been seeded here by aliens. But then, where did the aliens come from? Ultimately, life requires a transcendent intelligent designer.
And there’s something much bigger that aliens can’t explain.
Modern astrophysics shows the universe had a beginning—long ago it expanded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense “singularity.” If the universe began, then it requires a First Cause. But no ETs, inside the universe, could fill that role. The only way to explain the universe is to invoke a superpowerful, supernatural First Cause. We call that entity God.
There’s more that aliens cannot explain. The origin of the universe at the Big Bang was no random explosion but a carefully orchestrated expansion event. The laws of nature are finely tuned for life. If they were just slightly different, we could not exist.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose calculated that a habitable universe would require that just one such parameter, the initial entropy at the Big Bang, be fine-tuned to one part in (get ready for a very, very large number) 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123.
We lack the words to describe such an incredible mathematical degree of fine-tuning. This is why another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Charles Townes, said “intelligent design … seems to be quite real,” observing that “if the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here.”
Aliens would owe their existence to a designer outside the physical universe, just as we do.
Alien life, if it exists, wouldn’t overturn anything about God. He made the universe, and could have made other intelligences than ours—be they “extraterrestrials,” spiritual beings, or anything else.
Following a credible government disclosure, figuring out where ETs fit into that spectrum would be our next task. Whatever the answer, the science of alien life would only increase our wonder at God’s creation.
Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist and associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.