2nd Opinion: What about the spiritual condition of extraterrestrial life?

https://www.baptiststandard.com/opinion/other/20017-2nd-opinion-what-about-the-spiritual-condition-of-extraterrestrial-life
The question of extraterrestrial life—intelligent or otherwise—is faith-based. While individuals can "believe" whatever they wish, they may be wrong. It simply isn't known yet whether life is present on those planets. Maybe it's there; maybe not.

But faith, misguided or real, is operative here. Faith that:

• If there's water, some rudimentary form of life must exist.

• More advanced creatures could exist there.

• Life finds a way, if you endorse the evolutionary scheme of things; I don't.

• God is free to create other life separately from human concerns; yet the specialness of human beings isn't compromised.

• Intelligent beings not made in God's image are a creative possibility.

• Intelligent beings, if made in God's image, remain unfallen, or if fallen, a redemptive plan is under way; problematic because Jesus Christ is the God-man forever.

• Any blueprint for the new heaven and earth will somehow include all planets everywhere.

Regardless, we won't be going to TRAPPIST-1 anytime soon to find answers. But wait a second. If any of the planets somehow should prove dangerous, isn't it our fault? Or at least Adam and Eve's?

Fall “here”

Scholars disagree, too, about the extent to which earthly natural phenomena—volcanoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, etc.—can be linked to Adam's sin. Why so? Because the text doesn't teach unequivocally they're the result of Adam's curse per se. It's only a projected inference and conceivably not the sole reason they recur. Paraphrasing it, Genesis 3:17-19 merely states Adam and his progeny will have a much tougher time growing food! No more, no less.

Few, then, should contend colliding galaxies billions of light-years away are the manifest result of Adam and Eve, disobedient to God as they were, eating a piece of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Proving this from the biblical text is impossible, and making the fall the justifiable cause for the way the universe, near or far, naturally functions is, well, a leap of logic unsupported by evidence, an inference out of whack.

Accordingly, if God in his providence has placed conscious life on other planets, intelligent or not, there must be a reason, one with no real capacity to sabotage the Christian worldview and faith.


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where the "shaking my goddamn head" smiley when you need it