Aliens and Us: A Sermon on Parshat Bereishit

Aliens! Aliens are a constant and consistent draw at the box office. From the warm and wizened ET: the Extraterrestrial, to the cold and logical Mr. Spock, to the warmongering and world-destroying villains of War of the Worlds, Americans are intrigued by the notion of alien life living and lurking in the cosmos. And though there is nothing sinful per se about a belief in aliens, I believe that the widespread interest in extraterrestrials indicates something alarming about the state of American beliefs.

You see, for centuries, the church, as well as Jewish Aristotelians such as Maimonides, assumed that the sun revolved around the earth, and that our planet was the center of the universe. It was a cosmology that dovetailed nicely with theology: given that humanity was created by God Himself, then it was only right that humanity occupy center stage in the cosmic drama. But then the Copernican solar-centric model of the solar system was pressed and adopted. Evidence of evolution having been discovered, many came to believe that mankind not only evolved, but evolved on its own without any input from some imaginary Creator; that sentient beings sprang out of nowhere, from serendipitous happenstance, in at least one small corner of the universe. To such a worldview, the question presents itself: if human beings can emerge onto the stage of the universe out of oblivion by sheer luck, in one random sector of cold and lonely space, why shouldn’t sentient beings evolve in like fashion elsewhere?

However, Fred Hereen, a Christian science journalist writing in the religion journal First Things, reports that some scientists eager for alien contact are beginning to admit that the odds of other inhabitable planets existing are close to nil, that planets with earthlike conditions are rare. It appears that one of the features that makes our celestial body lifeworthy is the specific size and precise position of the Earth’s moon.