Over the past few months it has become difficult to open a news feed without bumping into the subject of life beyond Earth. In February the federal government announced it would direct its agencies to declassify and release decades of files on what are now politely called unidentified anomalous phenomena, and by May the Pentagon had posted the first tranche of that material online through a new clearinghouse, with the promise of more arriving every few weeks. A former president had volunteered that aliens are, in his word, “real”; a sitting one promised to tell us what the government knows; and the internet did what the internet does with such an invitation.
And now, as if on cue, Steven Spielberg — the man who four decades ago gave us Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. — has just releasd a film built entirely around the question. It is called Disclosure Day, it opens this week, and in the run-up Spielberg has been unusually candid about his own convictions, telling interviewers that he holds a “very strong suspicion” we are not alone and that he expects humanity to confirm it within our lifetimes. He has described the picture less as a story about aliens than as a meditation on how eight billion people might react if a long-hidden truth were suddenly set before them. Whatever the film turns out to be, its marketing has already accomplished something: it has made the existence of extraterrestrial life a dinner-table conversation again, including at a good many Christian dinner tables.
I write, as regular readers know, as a confessional Christian and a biologist, and what has interested me most is not the renewed cultural fascination but how that fascination is being discussed by Christians. For most of my life the reflexive evangelical answer to “is there life out there?” was a confident no. That answer is not said with as much confidence as it once was. I encounter more believers every year who take the possibility seriously, and I think they are right to wonder about it, and right to want a response that is neither a nervous denial nor an uncritical enthusiasm.
So, let’s take a look at the various Christian responses and then offer my own reflections, which turn in the end on a question many of these debates never quite stop to ask: what do we mean when we say a creature is made in the image of God.
What do we even mean by “extraterrestrial life”?
The first difficulty is that there are two very different questions hiding inside one phrase. “Is there life elsewhere?” might mean any life at all — a colony of microbes in the dark ocean beneath Europa’s ice, a smear of ambiguous organic chemistry in a Martian rock. And I am not going to even get into the tricky question of how to define what life is (are viruses alive etc..?). Or it might mean something far more particular: another rational, self-aware, creature, and for the Christian perhaps even a creature made in the image of God. These are not the same question, and a surprising amount of confusion in Christian writing on the subject comes from sliding between them without noticing.
The distinction matters because the theological stakes are wildly different. The discovery of alien bacteria-like life forms would be one of the great scientific discoveries in human history, but on its own it would not disturb a single clause of the Apostles’ Creed. Microbes do not sin, do not need redeeming, and do not bear God’s image. Image-bearing life elsewhere is the discovery that would send theologians reaching for their pens. Throughout what follows I want to keep these two questions apart, because nearly every interesting disagreement turns out to be about the second one masquerading as the first.
I should also point out, this is not a new question, however new the headlines feel. Augustine engaged related puzzles about the plurality of worlds; medieval theologians argued the matter vigorously as they pushed back against Aristotelian limits on God’s power; Nicholas of Cusa speculated about inhabited regions elsewhere in the cosmos; and in 1815 the Scottish evangelical Thomas Chalmers turned the vastness of the heavens into a bestselling argument for the grandeur of grace. C. S. Lewis was writing carefully about it by 1958. The church has been turning this question over for a very long time, which is something to remember the next time someone presents it as a modern crisis.
Let’s begin with a survey of various Christian groups that have had some stake in this discussion before I share my thoughts on the subject.
How young-earth creationists have answered the question
For most of its modern history the young-earth movement treated Earth’s uniqueness as essentially settled. The stars were made “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (Genesis 1:14), not as habitats for other beings; the search for life elsewhere was read as an outworking of evolutionary assumptions and therefore something to be opposed; and to find the heavens empty was taken as a quiet falsification of those evolutionary assumptions. The instinct, in other words, was not merely that life elsewhere is unlikely, but that the very expectation of it belongs to a rival worldview.
The most forceful contemporary version of this position comes from Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, who argue that intelligent extraterrestrial life is not just improbable but, in their words, “completely unbiblical.” What is striking is that the argument is fundamentally soteriological rather than astronomical. Laid out in their own terms it runs roughly like this. Adam’s sin brought a curse upon the whole created order (Romans 8). Christ became the “last Adam,” a kinsman-redeemer who took on human flesh and died “once for all” (Hebrews 9:28); he did not, as AiG memorably puts it, become a “God-Klingon” on some other world. Therefore, if intelligent aliens existed, they would be suffering under a curse (remember that most YECs believe that Adam’s sin literally cursed the entire universe causing physical changes billions of light years away) they did not bring about, with no redeemer of their own kind and no second incarnation available to them — an outcome a good God would not permit. And so, the argument concludes, he did not make them. I worked through an earlier version of this reasoning some years ago in a blog series on Ken Ham’s aversion to the very idea of life on other planets, and the basic structure has changed little since.
It is worth noting a genuine shift within the movement. Where the older position ruled out life of any kind beyond Earth, a number of creationists, including Ham himself more recently, now concede that simple microbial life elsewhere would not, by itself, break the atonement logic, since bacteria are not the sort of thing that needs redeeming. They judge it unlikely on a different ground: that the rest of creation was made for human dominion, so that biology on a distant and unreachable world would serve no discernible purpose. The position has thus quietly moved from “no life anywhere” to “perhaps simple life, but certainly nothing sentient.” For some Christians they may be non-Nephesh life or not “intelligetnt/sentient/conscious” life which could include worms, bacteria, plants and fungi. You might say, but maybe life was created elsewhere so that when man goes out into the starts he will have other places to stay, but few creationists believe man would achieve this ability this prior to the return of Christ.
I want to give this line-of-thought some credit. The gospel really does hinge on a real fall, and a real, unrepeatable atonement, and an account of alien life that dissolved any of those would be no friend of orthodoxy. Within its own system the AiG argument is coherent. The trouble is that the conclusion goes too far and AiG’s own writers concede the ground. One of their articles candidly admits that Scripture is silent on extraterrestrial life. But from silence one cannot derive a prohibition. The move from “the Bible does not mention X” to “X is impossible” is not exegesis; it is a chain of inference from a particular reading of Genesis, Romans, and Hebrews that is presented as if it were the plain sense of the text.
Here a confessional point is worth making to my Christian readers, since the Westminster Confession is sometimes enlisted on the restrictive side. When the Confession affirms that Scripture contains all things necessary for God’s glory and our salvation, it is making a claim about sufficiency for faith and life, not promising an exhaustive inventory of everything God has made. The Confession is likewise silent about penguins and about the rings of Saturn, and no one concludes from that silence that they cannot exist. Sufficiency for salvation is not the same as completeness of knowledge, and a great deal of trouble follows from confusing the two.
Two smaller corrections round out the picture. The first is historical: AiG has at times presented Christian reflection on other worlds as a modern novelty that arrived only with heliocentrism. That is, to put it gently, a tad overstated, as the long pedigree from Augustine through Chalmers and Lewis makes plain. The second concerns a stray prooftext. Occasionally someone, not usually a young-earth creationist, reaches for John 10:16 — “I have other sheep that are not of this fold” — as a hint of extraterrestrial moral-being flocks. I would put that reading firmly in the highly-suspect column. In context Jesus is plainly speaking of Gentiles being gathered in alongside Israel, and pressing the verse into service for distant civilizations is the sort of prooftexting that, in any other setting, we would not tolerate for a moment. The text settles nothing about other world in either direction, which is rather the point: the confident claims on both sides of the extraterrestrial life question have outrun what Scripture actually says.
The old-earth and intelligent-design responses
Old-earth creationism, represented most prominently by Hugh Ross and the ministry Reasons to Believe, accepts the mainstream age of the universe while rejecting an unguided evolutionary account of life, and it anchors its view of extraterrestrials in what is usually called the Rare Earth Hypothesis. The argument is quantitative. RTB catalogs hundreds of finely tuned planetary, galactic, and cosmological parameters that must fall into place for advanced life, notes that a habitable world must sit within something like eleven overlapping “zones” rather than the single liquid-water zone of popular imagination, and points out that the great majority of stars are of types hostile to complex aerobic life. The conclusion is that advanced life is staggeringly improbable and very likely unique to Earth. Interestingly, Ross is rather open to microbial life elsewhere. He has even predicted that Earth-launched microbes, flung into space by ancient impacts, will eventually be found on the Moon and Mars, while ruling out image-bearing creatures on much the same “one time, one place” reasoning that AiG deploys.
Intelligent design comes at the matter from a different angle and with fewer doctrinal commitments. Its central contention is that undirected chemistry cannot generate the information-rich machinery of a living cell here on Earth, and that whatever cannot happen here by unguided means cannot happen elsewhere by unguided means either; on that view, the bare number of exoplanets does not move the needle. The most developed ID contribution, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards’s The Privileged Planet, argues that the very conditions which make a world habitable also make it an exceptional platform for scientific discovery — that the cosmos looks, in their phrase, designed for discovery. And several ID writers will cheerfully add that finding life elsewhere would only strengthen the design inference, since design is design wherever one encounters it.
While the fine-tuning literature, and the rarity of complex life could prove true, notice what kind of claim it is. “Complex life is exceedingly rare” is an empirical wager about chemistry and astronomy; it is not a liberation of Genesis. If we were to discover a second biosphere tomorrow, the Rare Earth Christian would only have to revise an estimate, not a doctrine. This is, frankly, a far healthier place to stand than that of someone who has staked the atonement itself on the negative. Intelligent design, for its part, is the least exposed of all of the special creationist’ positions precisely because it has made the fewest theological commitments. That is also its limitation here. It tells us that life bears the marks of design; it has remarkably little to say about whether such life would be morally accountable, fallen, or in covenant with God. And those are exactly the questions a Christian most wants answered. So their positions still leaves more questions than answers.
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Almost every Christian argument about extraterrestrial life turns, whether the writer notices or not, on a prior question: what is the image of God? This question, by most accounting, is what allows the separation of man from other “living” things. The tradition has offered three broad answers, and which one you hold, I believe, plays a large role in how you likely feel about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
1) The substantive or ontological view holds that the image consists in a set of capacities we possess — reason, self-awareness, moral agency, a spiritual soul. This is the view of much of the historic Western tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas. On this reading, a sufficiently intelligent and self-aware alien would simply be an image-bearer by definition, and the full weight of questions about the fall and redemption would descend on us the moment we met one.
2) The functional or vocational view holds instead that the image is an office: to be made in God’s image is to be commissioned as his representative and steward, his royal vice-regent over a domain. This reading, rooted in the kingship language of the Ancient Near East, has been developed by scholars such as John Walton and J. Richard Middleton, and — in a direction I find especially compelling — by G. K. Beale’s account of Eden as a temple in which humanity serves as priest-king.
3) The relational view, associated with Barth and Brunner and with a good deal of modern Reformed theology, holds that the image is constituted by a particular covenant relationship: God addressing a creature and calling it into fellowship with himself.
Let me put my own cards on the table. I have never held that the image of God is fundamentally a matter of intelligence, or tool-making, or technological achievement. A species that builds starships has proven that it is clever; it has not thereby proven that it bears God’s image, any more than a crow that bends a wire into a hook or a chimpanzee that strips a twig to fish for termites has done so. My own view is a combination of the relational and the functional, leaning toward the relational: to be made in the image of God is, before it is anything else, to be a creature whom God has addressed and bound to himself in covenant, and then commissioned to represent him within his creation.
If that is right, the supposed crisis largely dissolves. Picture a world populated by genuinely intelligent, social, even technological beings — creatures of real capability and self-reflective thought. On the substantive view they would be image-bearers, and the whole tangle of fall and redemption would arrive with them. But on a relational-functional view there is no contradiction whatever in saying that such creatures are magnificent works of God’s hand who do not bear his image, because he has not entered into that particular covenant relationship with them. Consider the chimpanzee. It shares the overwhelming majority of our genome; it is intelligent, social, capable of grief and deception and tool use. And Christian theology has never lost a moment’s sleep over the chimpanzee’s fallenness or its eternal destiny, because for all our biological kinship it is not a covenant partner with God. I can see no reason a being on another world could not stand in the same relation to its Creator — kin to us, perhaps, in capability, and yet, like the chimpanzee, like leviathan, like the morning stars that sang together, a part of creation that glorifies God simply by existing, without standing inside the human-divine drama of sin and salvation.
Notice what this does to the atonement objection that anchors the young-earth position. If extraterrestrial beings are not image-bearers and were never called into the covenant that Adam broke, then they are not “fallen” in the theological sense at all, and the question of whether Christ died for them simply never arises. There is no second incarnation to account for and no curse-without-a-redeemer to lament. The “once for all” sacrifice remains exactly what Hebrews says it is — once, for all, for the children of Adam — and the cosmos is left free to be as full of God’s creatures as it pleased him to make it. This is, incidentally, why I think Ken Ham has hold of the right doctrine attached to the wrong conclusion. He is defending the particularity of the atonement, which is well worth defending; he has simply tied it to an Earth-exclusivity that the doctrine never required.
I should be honest that the strongest objection runs the other way. A defender of the substantive view will say that rationality and moral agency just are the image of God, so that a reasoning, choosing alien must bear it, and that to treat such a creature as a mere “smart animal” outside the covenant is chauvinism dressed up as theology. I feel the force of that. My answer is the one Reformed theology has always given about election: God’s covenant choices are particular, and unmerited, and not owed to us as an explanation. He chose Israel out of all the nations, not because Israel was the most accomplished, and he chose Adam’s race out of all conceivable biology to bear his image without giving an accounting of whatever creatures he may have passed over. Intelligence may well be a prerequisite for the work the image does; it is not the image itself.
So how likely is life elsewhere?
Here I have to disappoint anyone hoping for a number. Where the previous question was theological, this one is partly empirical and partly a matter of how one thinks God creates — and that second part is too often left out of the conversation entirely.
If God creates by fiat (direct, unmediated acts, the special creation of discrete “kinds” that the young-earth model envisions) then the life we observe here tells us essentially nothing about life elsewhere. On that model the number of inhabited worlds is a matter of divine prerogative; it could be one (the Earth), or a million, or anything in between, and we would have no way even to estimate it, because there is no natural regularity from which to extrapolate. (This is a point young-earth writers might press harder than they do. Their own model makes the probability of life elsewhere genuinely incalculable, which is a more honest answer than a flat zero.) If instead God ordinarily creates through the lawful processes he established and sustains (the view held by evolutionary creationists) then the calculus shifts. If the chemistry that produced life here is the same chemistry that operates everywhere, and if God has already scattered more than six thousand confirmed planets across the small patch of the galaxy we have so far been able to survey, with sound reason to expect there are septillions more planets to discover, then life arising somewhere else becomes a thing one might positively anticipate. An evolutionary creationist could survey those very same facts and conclude either that the origin of life is so improbable that Earth stands alone, or that the sheer scale of opportunity makes life elsewhere nearly inevitable. The honest answer is that we do not yet know which since our understanding of those processes is limited at this time.
For my own part, and I hold this loosely, I do not discount either special creation or creation through God-ordained processes, and I lean, gently, toward thinking the origin of life elsewhere is probable rather than not. My reasons are as much theological as scientific. I find it difficult to believe that a God who so plainly delights in filling his creation, such as packing a single handful of forest soil with more living things than we can readily count, would furnish a universe of a hundred billion galaxies with countless planets with nothing but inanimate matter and light. Why not adorn a planet a billion light years away with an array of living thing even if we may never see them? Would that life not reflect God’s glory? That is an intuition rather than a proof.
So far, all our efforts to find life beyond this planet point toward a low chance of life elsewhere rather than a high chance. We now have more than six thousand exoplanets and not one confirmed biosignature; the heavens, in Fermi’s famous formulation, remain conspicuously silent.
However, we are very early in this work. Our instruments have only just begun to sniff the atmospheres of distant worlds and early silence is not a final verdict. But a faithful approach to natural revelation means following the evidence we actually have rather than the evidence we would prefer, and at present the universe has not yielded a strong signal that we should expect to find life elsewhere. I am content to wait and do not fear any new evidence that we may find.
I will add the point that, for the Christian, matters most of all: even if we should someday learn that the galaxy teems with capable creatures, I would be surprised to find anything much like us. The vastness of the cosmos and the diversity of potential life forms would likely be astounding, yet I suspect that any intelligent beings we encounter would possess their own unique characteristics, shaped by their environments and experiences. Likewise, on the account of the image of God I have offered, that ought not trouble us in the slightest. Human-likeness was never the thing of theological significance. Covenant was. It is in our relationship with God, our commitment to His commands, and the unfolding of His divine plan that we find true meaning and purpose, transcending any comparison to other life that may exist throughout the universe. The depth of our covenantal bond with the Creator highlights the profound uniqueness of human existence, rooted in divine love and grace, rather than mere physical resemblance to other creatures.
Where this leaves us
Step back from the particulars and something becomes clear: the remarkable thing about the Christian conversation on extraterrestrial life is how little of it is actually a conversation about astronomy. The fault lines do not run between believers and unbelievers, or between the scientifically literate and everyone else. They run between different ways of reading Genesis, different accounts of the image of God, and different convictions about how broadly Christ’s work reaches and how God brings his creatures into being. The discovery of life elsewhere, if it ever comes, would be a stress test of portions our theological architecture but not a refutation of the gospel.
Why write this post today? Some of the loudest Christian voices on this subject have often conveyed a kind of defensiveness, as though the faith itself were riding on the night sky staying empty. It is not. The Roman Catholic tradition, with its Vatican astronomers cheerfully debating in print whether they would baptize an extraterrestrial, has understood this for a long time, and there is real wisdom in their refusal to panic. Whatever Spielberg’s “disclosure” turns out to disclose, it will not unmake the resurrection.
So suppose we did learn, one day, that we share the cosmos with other creatures. What exactly would we have to surrender? Not the doctrine of creation, which would simply have grown larger to include more things. Not the image of God, rightly understood in my opinion. Not the once-for-all atonement, which was always for the children of Adam. Not the sufficiency of Scripture, which never claimed to be a detailed list of all thing created and the means of their creation. We would have to give up only a set of confident extrapolations that were never taught in the text to begin with. Surrendering claims that ran ahead of the evidence is no loss to the church. It is, in the best sense of an old Reformed phrase, the church being always reformed.
We have two books from the same Author, the book of Scripture and the book of nature, and they cannot finally contradict one another, because God does not lie in either. The right posture toward the second book is not anxiety but attention. So when the trailers play and the files keep dropping and the question comes round again over dinner, I would commend to my fellow Christians the oldest and least dramatic of responses: to look up at a sky we have barely begun to read, and to be curious rather than afraid.
Blessings,
Joel
References
Scientific and current-events sources
NASA, “Exoplanets” (current confirmed-planet counts and the definition of the habitable zone), science.nasa.gov/exoplanets.
U.S. Department of Defense, declassified UAP records released through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), beginning May 2026, war.gov/UFO
P. Ward and D. Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus, 2000), for the scientific form of the rarity argument.
Creationist and apologetics sources
Answers in Genesis, “Did God Create Alien Life?” (AiG topic at website) and “Is There Life on other planets” by Danny Faulkner https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/alien-life/there-life-other-planets/
Creation Ministries International, “Aliens and the Bible,” and Gary Bates, Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection (CMI), for the spiritual-deception reading of UAP.
Hugh Ross / Reasons to Believe, Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men (NavPress, 2002), and RTB articles on Rare Earth fine-tuning, reasons.org.
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet (Regnery, 2004); Discovery Institute commentary at discovery.org and evolutionnews.org.
Recommended theological reading
C. S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (1960).
G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission (IVP, 2004), on Eden as temple and humanity’s priest-king vocation.
J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos, 2005); John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2006), on the functional image.
Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (Image, 2014), for a thoughtful Roman Catholic treatment.
R. Joel Duff, “Ken Ham’s Aversion to ‘Life’ on Other Planets” (Naturalis Historia, 2014), for an earlier discussion of the atonement argument examined above. (see link in post)
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?