Exobiology

In answer to a couple of questions I received.

I don’t see that either scenario has any impact on Christian theology.

“I've been hearing through the blogosphere that some scientists are saying they are close to creating artificial life.”

1.

i) Scientists wouldn’t be creating life from scratch, a la creation ex nihilo. They would be imitating rather than creating life.

a) They would be working with preexisting materials, since God already created all the raw materials.

b) They would also be working with a how-to manual or blueprint for life, since all you have to do is take an organism apart to see how it was put together in the first place.

It’s like saying that if you hand a chef a recipe as well as the ingredients, he can “create” a meal. Well, in a very derivative sense—yes. But he could only cook up the meal because he already had the recipe and the ingredients.

And even if we carry this back a step, the farmer doesn’t really create the produce. He plants seeds in the ground. But all the initial conditions have to be in place. He doesn’t create the initial conditions.

ii) One possible objection would be if this implies that life is reducible to chemistry. No soul. But that’s complicated.

a) Who has a soul? Only man? Higher animals? Lower animals? A beetle? A bacterium?

It may be that many organisms are reducible to chemistry. This doesn’t mean that man is reducible to chemistry.

b) Moreover, there’s the question of how the soul pairs off with the body. It may be that God automatically assigns a soul to a living human body.

Of course, I’m getting way ahead of myself here. But I’m also anticipating possible objections or developments.

“And also that microbial life might have been found on Mars. I was hoping to know what you think the relevance of these things might be to Christian doctrine (especially the latter one), if they end up being true.”

2.

i) Not surprisingly, the Bible is silent on the possibility of life on other planets. So I don’t see how the discovery of Martian microbes would invalidate any article of the faith.

Even the existence of intelligent alien life wouldn’t invalidate any article of the faith.

ii) I guess the only question would be whether such a discovery is evidence for naturalistic evolution, a la abiogenesis.

But how would one prove that Martian microbes were the result of spontaneous generation? How would their existence select for evolution rather than creation?

By itself, I do see how it would be evidence for one explanation rather than another.