Will NASA find life on Mars?

 

3 Billion Dollars!

NASA are in the process of spending three billion dollars on a most remarkable mission to Mars. The main purpose of the mission is astrobiology - read, an attempt to find signs of life on Mars. 

Not martians but microbes.

The mission is nothing short of a marvel of science and technology.

Laying aside the difficulties of just getting to Mars there is the extremely tricky final "minutes of terror," where the spacecraft has to slow down as it passes through the atmosphere and land safely.

To gently land so as not to ruin the expensive equipment on board the NASA engineers decided to lower the rover, named Perseverance, from a rocket-powered sky crane which then soared away and crash landed a little distance away.

NASA's Sky Crane for gently lowering Perseverance

To add splash to the mission, underneath the rover is a tiny helicopter named 'ingenuity' which will be able to give some aerial shots of the planet in the weeks to come.

Wonderful technology. And so far it has all worked!

Slaves of Dogma

How then should we think about such a mission? To paraphrase a line from David Bowie, will they find life on Mars?

If we think as a scientific materialist, someone who believes that matter and laws and time are all that is necessary to explain all things, here is how we would reason.

Everything in the universe has created itself without the input of a Great Mind. Solar systems created themselves around stars as gas and particles obeyed the natural law of gravity. 

And then life organised itself from simple to more complex until the first cell 'appeared' and from then on it was upwards and onwards.

Natural Law + Chance + Time = present universe. 

Of course, we must not confuse scientific materialism with science. There are many scientists who don't believe a word of the tale told in the previous paragraphs. But it is fair to say that many scientists are scientific materialists.

If you start without God, then the answer to Bowie's question, "Is there life on Mars?" is "Could be so" and "Hope so." Why hope so? Because it would confirm to those who refuse to believe that God is the source of life, that life can spontaneously arise anywhere.

No longer Slaves

But what if you begin to think about 'life on mars' as a follower of Jesus not enslaved to scientific materialism?

Well, everything changes! And we end up with good reasons for doubting the existence of any kind of life on mars.

Let's wear a science hat to start with. 

At last we can think outside the box, creatively and freshly - as all true scientists should. What a relief! We do not have to be slaves to scientific materialsim - the dogma that everything arises from matter.

This is how we can freely think.

Science tells us that complicated systems never arise spontaneously. The amount of order that nature by law, chance or time is able to conjure up is extremely limited. Beautiful but limited. Sand dunes. Snow flakes. Rotating storms. This rules out such incredibly complex things as cells.

Natural Law and Chance are limited in the amount of complexity they can conjure

Secondly, science teaches that should a complex thing be created by someone, it will become disordered over time, left to itself. Cars rust, machines corrode and wear out. As time passes everything becomes more disordered left to itself. Visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and what will you find? Houses, hospitals and swimming pools in very considerable decay and decline. And that is only 35 years ago! The only exceptions to this downward spiral rule are systems which are maintained by an intelligent mind. Car mechanics can keep a care from decay. Painters and decorators can renew paintwork.

Bumper cars near the site of Chernobyl: look what a mere 35 years of decay has done

All systems run downhill. There are no exceptions to this rule anywhere. Evolutionism insists exactly the opposite - that systems run uphill from the less complex to the more complex. That cannot and does not happen, anywhere in the universe. 

Third, time cannot come to the rescue. The  complexity of just one simple protein of a cell (think of a machine part, like a piston in an engine) is such that the probabalistic reserves of the solar system - remember the earth is said to be only 4.5 billion years old - are insufficient to produce one single protein by chance. So says one of our premier origins scientists Stephen C Meyer, in "Signature in the Cell."  And one protein is only one of dozens or hundreds required to power a single cell.

Fourthly, the simplest explanation of the grand complexity we find in nature is that a Great Mind - a Creator - made life. Science is always looking for the simplest explanation of things. This is the most reasonable explanation of life.

So if we wear a science hat and follow the simplest explanation we should be convinced that if life exists on Mars it must have been put there by a Creator.

But now let's put on our Christian hat. When we do, I think we must doubt if there is life on any planet but earth.

Scripture teaches us that planet earth is very special because man is very special. God made man alone in his image and gave him dominion over the earth. Mankind is the pinnacle of God's created order and the rest of the universe was made, first for God's glory, and second for our enjoyment and benefit. 

Where there is no man, there is no other life. All other, lower life, is connected to mankind. 

If there is no mankind on Mars, there is no other kind of life there either. 

So are we likely to find mankind on Mars? Well obviously not at present, for we have detailed enough photos to prove that; but the way the Bible speaks about mankind seems to imply that this earth is mankind's only unique home.

The emptiness of space doesn't trouble a Christian. If there was no life anywhere else in the universe that would not trouble us, for it merely points us to the specialness of our planet and us. And the vastness of space reveals to us the infinite glories of God.

People are the reason the rest of the living world exists, so why would God create life on a planet where he did not also put human beings?

The unique Cross of Jesus Christ

But that's not where a Christian stops, because the Scriptures go further and teach us that our world is unique for a second reason: the earth became the scene of God's plan of redemption.

Here to earth came the Saviour of the world, and here on earth a unique event took place, the suffering of Jesus Christ for the sins of all who will believe.

The way Scripture talks about the cross makes it clear that it was once-for-all. Jesus did not die on half a dozen planets, he died only here. Indeed it is unthinkable - and perhaps as blasphemous as the Roman Catholic Mass - to think that Jesus could have died many times, once here and then at other times on distant planets.

No-where do the Scriptures hint that the death of Christ atoned for creatures other than human beings on planet earth.

These two doctrines: the creation of the universe with the earth at its centre (not the geographical centre, but God's purposes centre) plus the uniqueness of the cross of Jesus Christ must shape our view about life on Mars.

So will they find life on Mars?

Men and women who refuse to acknowledge God as the author of creation would love to find life on Mars. For them it would seem to prove that life can spontaneously arise anywhere in the universe. Let's remember that implicit Creator-denial is a major part of this mission's (secret) philosophical purpose.

Christians, I believe, should doubt if life will be found on Mars.

My own guess is that instead of providing unbelievers with an opportunity to justify unbelief, this mission will prove that there is life only on this beautiful planet.

We will have to wait and see.