Are aliens real? Do UFOs really exist? These questions, once relegated to the confines of conspiratorial enterprises, are now legitimately being pondered among some scientists, academics — and even in the halls of Congress. It’s an issue Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist and apologist, has long researched and explored.
“I became a UFO expert, but not on purpose,” he recently told “Billy Hallowell’s Playing With Fire” podcast. “I was an amateur astronomer before I became a professional astronomer.”
Ross eventually found himself handling UFO reports at universities, exploring claims people made about aliens and unidentified phenomena. And he came to some fascinating conclusions.
If your faith in God feels threatened or shaken by the prospect of life existing outside of our planet, then you should first consider wrestling with why that’s the case. Nothing in the Bible expressly denies the existence of extraterrestrial life. Neither does anything in the Bible require us to believe it’s out there. Why? Because the Bible is far more concerned with your life and my life here on Earth—and, more specifically, how to live that life in relationship with God—than it is that speculative question. Satan would love it if we became divided over or obsessed with an issue that, most likely, just doesn’t matter instead of focusing on the things that do.
NASA recently 24 theologians at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, New Jersey, to offer religious guidance to people if contact with aliens were ever to occur.
A well-known astronomer posits in a new Scientific American article that aliens could be what existed before the big bang.
A 2021 study from Pew Research found that atheists and other nonreligious Americans are more likely than their religious neighbors to be open to the idea that intelligent aliens exist.
In a blog post and on the apologetics program Answers News, Christian apologist Ken Ham rejected the idea that alien life may explain the mysterious UFOs spotted by military aircraft, saying the Bible rules out intelligent life on other planets.
I am not aware of a biblical text that categorically vetoes the possibility of life on other planets. However, the logic of such life, combined with the uniqueness of our planet and the necessity of Jesus’ atonement for such beings, leaves me highly doubtful that aliens exist.
