Would the Discovery of Aliens Undermine Scripture?
by David K. Bernard
Podcast recording (no venue stated in the delivered transcript)
Kind: teaching

Source: https://acts238.life/repository/sermons/david-k-bernard--would-the-discovery-of-aliens-undermine-scripture
Published by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon transcript on that page.
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well first of all I tend to be skeptical of reports like this however to answer your question directly no I don't think the Bible explicitly excludes the possibility of alien life or other intelligent or non-intelligent life in the physical universe and you could argue of course that the Bible explicitly says there is intelligent life beyond the human that is Angels and Demons so let's let's let's break this down a little bit um now according to evolutionary theory um you know life just evolved and so with the trillions of stars and trillions of planets evolutionists say well it's inevitable that there must be other life somewhere because it's just a natural process of course I would challenge that in my book anchor points I talk about creation Evolution and say that even if evolution is uh accurate or a factor uh it would have to be intelligent design because the probability of all these random events just falling into place to result in intelligent life or or incredibly small so even if you had millions and billions and trillions of planets the likelihood uh that human life would evolve by random chance is non-existent so I disagree with the fundamental premise that an atheist or an evolutionist or maybe even a lot of scientists would say that well surely there must be life out there somewhere because no unless God intentionally designed it and created it no there's not going to be an intelligent life elsewhere alien life elsewhere uh so I disagree with that fundamental idea that surely there must be you know some other life out there somewhere we're not alone of course if you just read the Bible you might get the idea that we're alone certainly humans are unique and God's Apex creation uh but you could say that's with regard to planet Earth that's regard to our knowledge uh the Bible is not a scientific textbook it doesn't tell us everything we want to know it tells us what we need to know so could God have uh done something similar on another planet in another part of the universe or could could there be a different universe or could he have done something 10 billion years ago uh with another race of creative beings well the Bible doesn't explicitly deny that what would be quite interesting is if there actually was intelligent human life that we could interact with and communicate with some in some way and there are a lot of big ifs all along the way I mean if there is extraterrestrial life would it be intelligent would be be capable of discerning it would we be capable of communicating and if they have been coming since the 30s why why haven't they communicated with us what are they doing why are they hiding in the depths of the ocean or in the atmosphere you know it there's just a lot of questions that come up but let's just say uh it would be interesting to see if they have a concept of God I would think they would probably somewhere they would but of course the ones we meet might be like our atheists yeah uh then another interesting question would be did they sin and would they need a savior or did they avoid sin it's interesting uh C.S Lewis actually did um of course he's he was a well-known Theologian theological writer but he did write some science fiction fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia but he wrote the space Trilogy where he imagined there could be another race of beings in that didn't fall into sin and therefore they had a relationship with God but they didn't need to be saved from sin so that that would be intriguing certainly I will have to say that I've tended to think the various reports over the years of UFOs aliens etc etc as I said there's no concrete objective clear evidence it just seems strange that it would be in all these mysterious spooky ways over the years and kind of like a conspiratorial ways but they always seem to get in contact with the U.S government somehow but I tend to think that these stories can usually be explained by natural phenomena unusual natural phenomena like atmospheric conditions there are some incredible I mean clouds and and the northern lights and uh you know various unusual atmospheric conditions or um psychological phenomenon so it may have been sincere a sincere experience but it might have been dream psychosis uh you know other internal phenomenon and phenomena and then third there can be there is the possibility of of secret technology uh especially with the US government and with military technology that you know they might not want us to be aware of but so some things can and some things just things like weather balloons and other things that aren't necessarily secret but the average person wouldn't uh know about it wouldn't think about them so I do believe the vast majority of reports are can be explained by some of those but maybe there's some reports that aren't explained and more likely than there's some extraterrestrial intelligent life I would say demonic activity could be very real so we do believe in spirit beings created by God who are angels and we believe a certain percentage fell into sin which I believe that's the origin of the demon so there are Angelic spirits that can manifest themselves in accord in the Bible in human form and presumably other forms demons likewise presumably could manifest themselves in a human form or some other type of form so could it be I don't know that Angels would uh you know the Bible talks about angels appearing to God's people at different occasions but they would appear honestly as Angelic beings we'd probably recognize them as such could it be that an unbeliever could somehow see Angelic activity or more likely could could demons be responsible for creating chaos confusion maybe supporting narratives of atheism and evolutionism and and uh and uh you know Jesus did speak of the end time there would be various signs he said signs in the heavens so whether that's poetic or whether it's referring to atmospheric events or maybe even UFOs could be part of that that part of the chaos of our day and part of the the the fear and confusion of the end time could be all kinds of strange unidentified mysterious signs including signs in the sky caused by demonic activity to me that would be plausible in accordance with our view of scripture so I'm not going to totally discount um that there could be these unexplained phenomena that could have extraterrestrial causes but I would be more likely to relegate that to demonic activity