Would ALIENS DESTROY Christianity?!

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. I'm River Man, I'm the Connectionist, and today I'm in a new place. I'm actually in my office right now, so you can see all my fun random books from college. There's no telling what they're what's back there now.

[00:00:10]Books are from college and seminary and all that. This is here in my office. I figured uh when I'm able to do it from uh my office, it makes it a little easier to to do stuff. So, uh today I want to jump right into the big question that's been on social media recently. The government uh is releasing a lot of files around UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomenon. It's raised a this really big question of like, are aliens real? Now, I've followed this story pretty closely for the last 10 years, and I think right up at the front, this is what I want to say.

[00:00:42]Right up at the front, I am an adherent to the same philosophy of Carl Sagan in the terms in terms of um great claims require great evidence, or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? So, we haven't really received extraordinary evidence. There's like a lot of smoke, which a lot of times just a lot of smoke means something is going on, but it's hard to tell really what it is.

[00:01:05]Uh but, what would happen if it was confirmed that life outside of Earth was real? What would that do to Christianity? I think that's an open question. In fact, one of my closest friends in college wrote his senior undergrad religion thesis on this very question, and there's a great video um it's probably great. It's from Dr. Gavin Ortlund.

[00:01:24]I want to react to his video today and kind of talk about this topic. I think it'll be a lot of fun for us.

[00:01:29]So, that's what we're going to do today.

[00:01:31]Um so, yeah, I'm looking forward to doing that. Um I think it's really important that we we do remember the thing I mentioned up front, which is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I do think it's important to discuss this question and begin to think about this question and understand uh where Christianity falls within all of this.

[00:01:52]So, let's go ahead and dive right on in.

[00:01:57]If aliens exist, does Christianity collapse? A lot of Christians wonder about this and it it feels threatening because if Christianity is true, we're accustomed to seeing human beings at the center of everything. But do we need to be threatened by this? This is a fun topic to think through, although it seems a bit quirky. Actually, this is really useful. It's kind of a helpful thought experiment because it brings up broader questions about the expectations we bring to the table when we're evaluating Christianity.

[00:02:24]Uh now let's start with talking about some alien movies.

[00:02:27]I love alien movies. Most of most alien movies are about hostile aliens.

[00:02:32]Yeah, I I'm a big fan of alien movies as well. Um all of them. Huge Star Trek fan, have been for a long time. Like the old movie Independence Day, remember this from the 90s?

[00:02:42]Or lots in this genre. War of the Worlds is another. So many others. We can think of the course the whole alien franchise.

[00:02:49]But I think when you have benevolent aliens like in the movie Arrival Oh man, in in Alien when the alien comes out of his chest. Ugh. Arrival from 2016, underrated movie, great movie.

[00:03:00]Or a an older favorite of mine, Contact.

[00:03:04]So here you have benevolent aliens.

[00:03:05]Those movies almost raise questions even more, spiritual questions. I talked about that in a video I put out on Carl Sagan's book Contact, which I read and was fascinating.

[00:03:15]Um because the question comes Remember I mentioned Carl Sagan at the beginning? That's that's He Carl Sagan did a lot of thought on this topic and uh he always ended with great or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So people can say rumors. You see all sorts of rumors like, "Oh, there's four species of alien and uh this insider from the CIA." It's like, "Guys, at the end of the day you know, it's like that old adage, pics or it didn't happen." It's like no one has been able to produce any kind of real evidence other than like grainy videos. And I I look, I have watched a lot on the the UAP phenomenon.

[00:03:52]There's clearly some kind of thing going on. It's unclear what it is, but fighter pilots, very experienced people, are seeing real things. But, like, take going from that to there are four reptilians species running around running our planet, it's like, yeah, you're going to have to show some pictures. You're going to have to like show some pretty extraordinary evidence for something like that. I mean, come on. Stop. You know, how do you make sense of this? And if you're a Christian, uh what what's the conclusion to be drawn here? Yeah. I think this topic raises some interesting larger methodological questions. Let's think it through quickly in a fun video with four thoughts. Number one, Christianity is capacious. I just wanted to use the word capacious.

[00:04:30]All right, yeah. I love how he says he just wanted to use the word capacious cuz I'll be honest with you, I don't know what that word means. And I know what most words mean. I'm pretty good at that, but I've never heard the word capacious.

[00:04:39]>> This this one I love this word.

[00:04:40]Capacious means capable of holding a lot.

[00:04:43]Uh there you go. Christianity is roomy.

[00:04:45]Christianity is spacious. Christianity has a lot of absorbing power. It can take on a lot without without capsizing.

[00:04:55]And the reason for this is because there are relatively few claims that Christianity makes that would falsify it if they were discovered to be incorrect.

[00:05:03]There are some.

[00:05:04]We're not saying there's no falsification issues, but they're relatively few. So, one example would be if Jesus did not rise from the dead. If you could find the bones of Jesus and you knew for sure they were of Jesus, that would be a falsification event.

[00:05:17]But, there's relatively few things like that. Even stranger possibilities than aliens wouldn't actually disrupt the core claims of Christianity. Suppose you got transported into an alternate dimension, like in Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse and the sequels to that really cool movie. Even something as bizarre as that wouldn't undo the positive claims for Christianity, like Yeah, and I think he's going to talk about this, too, but Christianity's claims are actually quite specific when you think about it, and something like aliens is not as disruptive as you may think. the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ. And the reason Christianity can absorb all these other counterintuitive and surprising possible discoveries is because secondly, Christianity's claims are specific. The Bible and other Christian resources simply don't address the question of aliens. Scripture is written with a well focus on human history, human redemption, the things we need to know about.

[00:06:14]And it just doesn't go into, you know, later scientific discoveries, you know, when Einsteinian physics replaces Newtonian physics, this isn't a theological event. This is just a scientific event because the Bible never says that Newton was right and Einstein was wrong. It also Although I'm sure he's going to address this, it does change though if other intelligent life exists. I think that's a much larger disruption into Christianity's claims than like the change from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, right? Um I I just think fundamentally that's a completely different thing. doesn't say that Einstein was right. He just doesn't talk about that. There's so many things the Bible doesn't talk about. Actually, it's helpful to think about this and and, you know, give some fun examples here.

[00:07:01]Uh here's some other things the Bible doesn't tell us. How smart is the angel Michael? Who would win in a chess match?

[00:07:09]Michael or Gabriel? If they played 10 games of chess, does Michael win 10 out of 10 or is it six and four or how does it go? Why did God make Stephenson 2-18?

[00:07:18]That's the biggest star in our galaxy.

[00:07:19]It's really big. It doesn't say anything about that.

[00:07:23]>> 10 billion times larger in volume than our sun, so it's absolutely massive. And uh the Bible doesn't tell you anything about it. It just says God made all the stars.

[00:07:34]What color eyes did Jesus have? What color hair? How tall was he? Somebody might say, "Hey, you need to know Yeah, the Bible is really about the larger principles. Um like when I think about, you know, the claims of the scripture, I really think it's it's more about what are the larger principles, right? So, when you look at the book of Genesis, it's not so much a history lesson as who created, right? It's like kind of this larger overarching communication that's trying to happen in the book of Genesis, which is God is responsible for everything, God created everything.

[00:08:09]Um you don't need to know in granularity how that happened. You just need to know who did it, right? So, I think that's important for us to remember. Seriously.

[00:08:20]this information. If you're going to pray to this person, you need to know what he looks like. The Bible doesn't tell us.

[00:08:25]Uh what is heaven going to be like after the first 100 hours? What What will you be doing 100 hours into your time on the new earth after the final judgment if you're one of the redeemed? We don't know. In the details, we can say some things about it. Point is, just fun questions trying to get to to uh cement this in our minds that there's just so much the Bible doesn't claim.

[00:08:47]And actually, it's important to understand that so we don't create tension in areas where there needn't be tension. Here's a key point.

[00:08:55]>> The Bible is trying to answer the questions we need to have answered, not every question we might bring to it. And so, a perceived problem with something like a Yeah, so this is the Anglican and Methodist viewpoint on this, right? Scripture Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation.

[00:09:15]That's That's what we teach. We do not teach scripture containeth all things.

[00:09:20]Okay? Scripture does not contain everything you need to know about the mysteries of the universe. It contains what you need to know for salvation.

[00:09:26]That's it. aliens says more about our expectations than anything that's actually intrinsic to Christianity.

[00:09:32]Third point, God is infinite, free, and creative.

[00:09:36]Yeah. I think this is a theologically accurate statement to say God is creative.

[00:09:41]Um and so we we don't what we don't want to do is put God in a box and say, "Well, he's not allowed to do things outside of my expectations."

[00:09:49]Right, he's not allowed to make life forms elsewhere. It's like you could actually find a What it For instance, here's a thought exercise. Say we find a planet 800 light-years away. There's an intelligent species on it.

[00:09:59]And they may have religion, they may not. If they do have religion, it's like kind of different from ours. That doesn't threaten. It could still have the same source because Jesus Christ may have been who God sent, right? Jesus Christ, the man. There's still a We would assume in Christianity that the triune Godhead is over all things in the cosmos, but that may be articulated and understood differently, and God may reach those people and that intelligent species differently than he reached us because God is infinite and creative and is going to reach a different species of people differently, right? So, this idea that like Jesus like the son of God, the second person of the Trinity would have to incarnate as a human being and could not reach people in a different place in a different time differently, I think is a real limitation. And yeah, if you do believe that, then yeah, aliens being discovered would collapse your viewpoint of Christianity if that's how you believe about God is that it can if your if your view of God is so broad in this is in in that it's required for like to be on Earth and be a human in order to interact with God, then yeah, the discovery of aliens is going to bring your worldview crashing down. If your view of God is, "Well, the claims of Christianity are specific. God reached humans in a specific way and might reach another species in a different way," right?

[00:11:30]Which would mean that if we discovered a species and their religion was different, but it had a lot of similarities in terms of the character of God and all that kind of stuff, then we we might be in a different place, right? Um so, if your view of God is um broad enough to include a creative and infinite God, then you'll be fine if aliens are disclosed or ever discovered or whatever it is. Um who knows at this point. Uh but if you uh think God can only interact with humans and that we're uh more special than every everything else, then yeah, aliens being discovered would be tremendously harmful to your spiritual worldview. Think I explained that well. I think that's what Gavin's trying to get at.

[00:12:13]>> In my sphere of awareness, I there are people who have made the argument that multiple intelligent physical creatures would greater magnify divine wisdom and divine love. But, I think we also just need to be careful not to insist upon that either and just to be open-minded, and that's what I'm encouraging here to be to be open-minded >> toward reality if you're a Christian. Uh to to believe how many stars there are and how many angels there are.

[00:12:39]That alone already shows you you've got this Looks like there was some kind of skip there. Sorry.

[00:12:44]>> ocean of things, all of which are diverse.

[00:12:49]And if you've got that many stars and that many angels already out there, aliens really wouldn't be that big of a deal. Honestly, you could just be open-minded about this. Um we're going to be constantly discovering new things about God in heaven for all eternity.

[00:13:03]So, we can really have an open-minded attitude. Think about Yeah, like I'm not saying this would happen, but imagine you like make first contact with an alien species and then they tell you a story about, "Oh, yeah, one of the major religions on our planet is like uh and they explain it to you and it sounds very similar to the Christian story."

[00:13:22]That'd be very interesting, right? It's like, "Oh, interesting."

[00:13:25]Right? Uh but it may be very different and I think it's important to keep our hearts and our minds open because if they are too close, if you have too close of a world view on this, if it ever does happen, you're going to be in a lot of trouble, right? Uh because sometimes reality comes crashing in.

[00:13:43]Uh but again, I want to give the caveat like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have no even good evidence um of extraterrestrial life existing anywhere. Not even It's not even good evidence.

[00:13:58]Let alone extraordinary evidence. This uh the animals that God has created. Did you know that the mimic octopus can impersonate multiple other animals like lionfish, sea snakes, and flatfish. And it you know, so these different animals and it doesn't just change its color and shape, which it can do. It actually acts like this. It mimics the behavior.

[00:14:21]>> Crazy.

[00:14:22]Did you know that the vampire squid, which lives almost totally in the dark and itself glows in the dark, can literally turn itself inside out? Yeah.

[00:14:31]Did you know that leafcutter ants work together in an incredibly complicated and organized society to bring back leaves to their underground nest. Do you call it an ant nest? They're where the center of their colony. And they don't eat the leaves. They bring them there to grow fungus.

[00:14:50]Meanwhile, their bite force is 2,600 times their body weight. These insects are crazy that God has made.

[00:14:57]>> Yeah. Um the mantis shrimp. Did you know the man Right. And like when these insects do these amazing things in the in the mimic squid, it is all something God has made to glorify his own complexity and his own magnificence and glory. That's why God has created all these things that wow us. It's it's it's a proclamation of his glory. This shrimp can see more colors than human beings can see.

[00:15:22]And we could go on and on and on. I was just researching some of my favorite examples of just fascinating things about the animal kingdom, how high a giraffe's blood pressure has to be to pump the blood all the way up the neck, how flying squirrels manage to steer midair, how lyrebirds can mimic almost any sound they hear from chainsaws to camera shutters to car alarms, and then they use those impersonation skills in courtroom displays.

[00:15:53]Yep.

[00:15:53]>> we could go on and on. The animal kingdom's amazing. I think I was probably like in my early 20s I watched the Planet Earth documentaries and just I think a Christian theologian should be able to be captivated with wonder at the fascinating world that God has made. And those are just animals. We could talk about plants. We could talk about other things God has made. The point is simply God is not predictable. Don't put him in a box. God is mind-bogglingly creative.

[00:16:19]I think you can say give me a little bit of grace here in my language to say God has capacities for delight, God has a sense of humor, and God is the kind of See, now oh, that's such a bad freeze frame.

[00:16:33]>> person who, so to speak, There we go. That's much better. So, I think I did that thing about God having humor and there was that Catholic bishop who was like, "No, because humor requires like um what did he say? Humor requires embarrassment and or dishonor and or some kind of juxtaposition that is sinful or something like that."

[00:16:57]And it was just crazy because it it it there are texts in the Bible that are funny. Like Jesus turns jokes on the Pharisees.

[00:17:05]Uh and humor brings us joy and God has created all things and so all good things flow from God. And so, yeah, God has a sense of humor as well.

[00:17:18]is capable of saying, "Sure, why not?"

[00:17:21]How can you not say that when you look at the world that God has made? So, the point is simply if you're a theist, you should have an open mind toward reality.

[00:17:29]If there's anybody who should have a capacity for wonder and for saying, "Well, maybe. I don't know. Let's think about it." It should be a theologian.

[00:17:37]Fourth, what about the incarnation and redemption? Here's where the real theological questions come up. Sin and redemption. So, we can envision a couple of different possibilities. Number one, aliens are unfallen and therefore don't need redemption. They'd be like the angels.

[00:17:52]Possibility number two, aliens are fallen and Christ's work is cosmic. So, you might go to passages like Colossians 1 to say that the incarnation here on planet Earth has universal significance.

[00:18:05]Possibility number three, aliens are fallen but God could redeem them differently.

[00:18:11]Yeah, I was talking about I mostly talked about possibility three.

[00:18:16]Um this idea that aliens are fallen creatures that God made and God can redeem them differently. I think when you when you go back to possibility one, I don't know. This idea of like angels being aliens and a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's ridiculous. Uh possibility two, aliens are fallen and Christ's work is cosmic saying that Jesus' work on the cross here redeemed everything in the universe um in terms of like every intelligent species seems a little um human-centric if it turns out aliens are ever discovered to be true. Seems a little human-centric. Seems a little egotistical. So, possibility three seems the most attractive um of these options to me.

[00:18:59]So, you could say uh and just keep an open mind for different methods of redemption for the aliens.

[00:19:06]And there's other possibilities as well.

[00:19:08]Whether any of these would be correct, we don't know. And we don't have to know.

[00:19:12]But the point that we're making is that Christian theology has conceptual room for all of this. Again, Christianity has absorbing power. It's capacious. It's roomy. Christianity is not like a hotel room in Manhattan where you can only fit three shirts in it because it's so cramped.

[00:19:30]Christianity is like a mansion in the countryside where you've been there a week, you know, and all of a sudden after eight days you discover a whole new wing of the mansion and it's like, "Wow, there's more space over there."

[00:19:42]This is like Christianity. It can absorb a lot. The view that appears more cramped, more restricted, and has less resources would be a strict naturalism.

[00:19:53]Because this view arguably has a harder time explaining any rational creatures anywhere. Right.

[00:19:59]>> consciousness and moral instincts are already mysterious under a strict materialism. Something like theism, and certainly Christian theism, I mean, what it already posits is so vast that you can fit a lot in a worldview like that.

[00:20:16]So, aliens would not threaten Christianity at all. They would simply raise new theological questions. It'd be fascinating.

[00:20:22]But uh they'd be that would happen within a worldview that can accommodate that.

[00:20:26]What does make the difference with Christianity is the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ. Those are the answers.

[00:20:33]>> Right.

[00:20:34]Yeah. God and Jesus. And then everything flows out from there.

[00:20:38]So, this is why I put out videos on those topics like my argument for God from eternal truths, my favorite argument for God, or this one on the resurrection of Christ. And I have a book coming out where I make my full case. I was just re- Is it weird to read your own book? I was rereading some sections of it last night, kind of just preparing. Uh I'm excited about this book. I really poured my heart into it.

[00:20:58]It's called Why Christianity makes sense, a book about Jesus, the mysteries of the world, and the longings of your heart. The whole theme is that's >> Christianity makes emotional sense as well as rational sense.

[00:21:10]And it goes through all the arguments for why I think Christianity makes sense, but then it tries to localize them all to I'd love to do a sermon series on that book like a in the church. That'd be awesome. your heart because that's what the gospel must do because the reception of Christianity is as personal as anything else. It's as personal as falling in love or being afraid of death.

[00:21:31]The same part of you that falls in love or is afraid of death, that's the part at which you access Christianity. And so I'm trying to speak to the human heart even as I'm saying, but it also does explain the world around you pretty well. That comes out in September.

[00:21:45]Uh I got a new cover. I'm so excited. I loved working with Zondervan on that and I just can't wait for it to be out there. Link in the video description if you want to pre-order that.

[00:21:53]All right, now he's plugging his book, so I'm going to go ahead and jump back out. Yeah, that's a great question. Let me know what you think in the comments.

[00:21:57]I find this incredibly fascinating as a topic. Um I really believe that because Christianity's claims are specific within a universal trium God framework, uh because the claims are specific that the discovery of aliens or the the you know, the revelation of aliens existing would not crush Christianity because its claims are could be very targeted to be specific. Um that God is cosmic in nature in terms of creation and all these other things, but our incarnation, right, for Jesus here redeems us and all of creation, but God may choose to redeem a different intelligent species differently somewhere else, right? So like because the claims are specific and because Christianity can can absorb a lot, I do think the the revelation of aliens will be a traumatic for a lot of people, like straight-up traumatic.

[00:22:51]And mid-sentence I lost my camera right before the video is over. Anyway, make sure to like, comment, subscribe on the video. That's the best way you can help a young growing channel like mine. But I'm River Matt. I'm the Connectionist and I will see you all again soon.

[00:23:04]Bye-bye.