Life on Mars
Pity the poor <i>Beagle 2</i> team. Had circumstances been different, their compact craft would now be beaming Mars-data back to earth, grabbing headlines by the week.
Instead, the mission descended into silence and the team have watched the front pages colonised by the US Space Agency's <i>Opportunity</i> and, this week, by the European Space Agency's orbiting <i>Mars Express</i>.
They have shown us ice under the planet's south pole, once-salty Martian seas and, now, methane in the planet's atmosphere.
Behind every revelation and its breathless headline lies one big question: Is, or was, there life on Mars?
If the story does finally explode out of its cage of speculation, it will make a real impact on how we view ourselves. We will, officially, no longer be alone in the universe and our religious beliefs will, in the popular mind, take another blow. As one interviewee told me in LICC -Beyond Belief? - research, -"I really hope that they will find life in outer space because doesn't the Bible dispel that theory?
Such wilful perversity is depressing but reminds us that we too easily confuse a Christian worldview with an anthropocentric one. We 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 loving relationship with our creator. The only thing damaged by the discovery of life on Mars would be our pride.
Most physicists, believers and non-believers alike, now recognise that the universe is fine-tuned to an infinitesimal degree, in such a way that makes conscious life not only possible but likely. Similarly, most Christians recognise that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is lavishly generous and over-abundant; his creative love is literally unfathomable.
Surely, such a God would be <i>more</i> likely to seed his <i>entire</i> creation with life, rather than just our tiny corner of it?
Today, we may feel insecure and a little hostile, like a toddler whose parents bring home a new-born, when we speculate about life elsewhere. But we can rest assured that the Father’s love for us is undiminished, whether or not we are alone.
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