What about aliens and UFOs?

Question 60055.

Aliens and UFOs are no longer a fringe subject. Governments have released footage, congressional hearings have been held, and polling suggests a substantial minority of people now believe intelligent life elsewhere has already made contact. So the question deserves a proper answer rather than a joke, and I get asked it often enough by thoughtful people.

Let me set out what Scripture does and does not say, offer some categories for thinking about unexplained phenomena, and then say why I think the spiritual dimension of this subject is more significant than the astronomical one.

What Scripture teaches about creation

Before we get to aliens and UFOs specifically, note what sort of book we are consulting. The Bible is an account of God’s dealings with this planet and with the human race. It tells us that God made the heavens and the earth, that He made the lights in the expanse, and that He formed man from the dust and breathed into him the breath of life. It never mentions inhabitants of other worlds, either to affirm them or to deny them.

That silence is worth taking seriously in both directions. Christians who declare confidently that Scripture rules out life elsewhere are claiming more than the text says. Christians who declare that it obviously allows for it are doing the same. The honest position is that the Bible addresses a different question and we should not force an answer out of it.

What Scripture does insist on is that this earth is where the decisive events of the universe took place. God became man here. The Son of God died here. The redemption of the whole created order was accomplished here. Whatever else exists, that is not a minor detail about a provincial planet.

The uniqueness of humanity

Only human beings are said to be made in the image of God. That claim marks us out from the animals and, in Scripture’s account, from the angels too, who are ministering spirits rather than image bearers. If intelligent physical creatures existed elsewhere, we would have no information about their standing before God, whether they had fallen, or how they related to the work of Jesus.

Some Christians have speculated about aliens and UFOs in this connection, and I do not think the speculation is sinful, only unprofitable. The New Testament says that Jesus died once for all, using the Greek ephapax, once and never again, and Hebrews is emphatic that He does not offer Himself repeatedly. Whatever the answer would be, it would not involve repeated incarnations.

So the doctrine that matters is settled regardless of what a telescope eventually finds. That is a comfortable position to occupy. Our faith is not staked on the outcome of an astronomical survey.

Explaining the sightings

Most reported sightings of aliens and UFOs have ordinary explanations, and that is not a dismissive claim but a documented one. Aircraft, drones, balloons, satellites, atmospheric optics, camera artefacts and simple misidentification account for the overwhelming majority of cases once investigated. A residue remains genuinely unexplained, and honesty requires us to say so rather than to pretend the file is closed.

Unexplained does not mean extraterrestrial. It means unexplained. The gap between those two is where a great deal of modern mythology has grown, and Christians should be careful not to fill it in either direction with more confidence than the evidence supports.

There is also a plain physical difficulty that rarely gets mentioned in the excitement. The distances involved are almost unimaginable, and the nearest star system is more than four light years away. That does not make visitation impossible, but it does mean the casual assumption of regular traffic deserves rather more scrutiny than it usually gets.

The spiritual dimension of aliens and UFOs

Here is where I think the more interesting question lies. Scripture is entirely clear that non human intelligences exist, that some are hostile to God and to us, and that they are capable of appearing in ways designed to deceive. Paul says that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, at 2 Corinthians 11:14.

It is striking how often the content of claimed contact experiences carries a religious message, and how consistent that message is. Humanity is on the brink of a leap in consciousness. Traditional religion is outdated. There is no judgement to fear. We are all part of one universal mind. If you have read anything about the New Age movement, that list will look familiar, and I have written about it in what the New Age movement is.

I would not claim that every strange light in the sky is demonic, and I have no patience with the sort of teaching that sees a devil behind every unexplained event. But when phenomena arrive attached to doctrine, and the doctrine contradicts Scripture at exactly the points Scripture says the enemy attacks, a Christian is entitled to notice the pattern. See also whether Satan can appear as an angel of light.

The danger of speculation

Christians have sometimes made the subject of aliens and UFOs a good deal worse. Elaborate systems have been built connecting UFOs to the sons of God in Genesis 6, to the Nephilim, to the rapture and to a coming deception in which the disappearance of believers will be explained as an alien abduction. Some of that may turn out to have something in it. None of it can be demonstrated from the text.

My rule is a simple one. Where Scripture speaks, speak. Where it is silent, say so and stop. Prophetic speculation that gets attached to current events has an unhappy history, and the reputation of the church has repeatedly been damaged by confident predictions that did not survive contact with the calendar.

The notes on Genesis 6 illustrate how much genuine disagreement there is even among careful interpreters about the sons of God, which should make anyone cautious about building further structures on top of it.

Why the question has grown so loud

It is worth asking why aliens and UFOs occupy so much cultural space just now, because the timing is interesting. We live in a society that has largely abandoned belief in God while retaining the conviction that we cannot be all there is. Something has to fill that space, and a superior intelligence out there does the job neatly without making any moral demands.

Notice the shape of the hope on offer. Beings of vastly greater knowledge, who have solved the problems we cannot solve, who may intervene to rescue us from ourselves, and who will explain what everything means. That is a religious hope wearing a technological costume, and it is being offered to a generation that was told religion was outgrown.

Christians should feel some sympathy at this point rather than superiority. The longing is right. The address is wrong. We were made for contact with an intelligence beyond ourselves, and the tragedy is not that people want it but that they are looking upward through the wrong instrument.

Talking about it wisely

If the subject comes up in conversation, resist two temptations. The first is to mock, which closes the discussion and makes the Christian look frightened of the topic. The second is to overclaim, announcing that all reports of aliens and UFOs are demonic activity, which goes far beyond anything you could demonstrate and will be remembered as an embarrassment if a mundane explanation emerges.

The better path is honest curiosity plus firm ground. Yes, some of it is unexplained. No, that does not tell us what it is. Meanwhile, here is what we do know, which is that the Maker of whatever else is out there entered this world in a stable and left it through an empty tomb.

Peter tells us to be prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, and to do it with gentleness and respect. That instruction covers this subject as much as any other.

One last thought for anyone tempted to treat the subject as trivial. The Christian faith already asserts the existence of intelligent non human beings who visit this world, intervene in human affairs, and take an interest in the church. We call them angels, and Scripture treats them as entirely ordinary furniture of reality. A believer has no business finding the idea of other minds startling.

So, now what?

If a discovery about aliens and UFOs is announced tomorrow, your faith does not depend on it. The tomb was empty, and that fact is not altered by anything that turns up in the atmosphere or on a distant world. Hold the subject with interest and without anxiety, which is roughly how a Christian should hold most things.

And if someone you know is deeply invested in aliens and UFOs, listen before you argue. Often there is a real longing underneath it, for meaning, for contact, for the sense that we are not alone in a vast and indifferent universe. That longing is answered, and not by a spacecraft. Who could you have that conversation with this week?

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Psalm 8:3 and 4, ESV