We continue a thread from our Mars water controversy, that there are two groups who are dogmatically opposed to finding life outside the planet Earth: Darwinists and Creationists. Darwinists, having uncorked the djini of spontaneous generation and the spontaneous emergence of mind, want to limit its scope lest they become associated with UFO lunatics. They rightly recognize that having produced Mind sui generis, they are defenseless against its paranoid conclusions. Creationists after having neatly described the scientific imperative of Genesis, do not want their science questioned lest it detract from their hermeneutical infallibility.  They rightly recognize that to admit ignorance in interpretation is to undermine their authority over science. In other words, neither group has the gumption to reconsider their assumptions, and hence rely on dogmatic denials.

Let's start with what scares Darwinists. Could it be that humans, with their complex biology and inexplicable mind are unique, unequalled by any other life form? If so, then perhaps non-sentient life is pervasive around the galaxy, with no desire to send us coded radio messages. Conversely, could it be that sentient beings exist who do not share our material existence? If so, then perhaps the voices that so characterize the diagnosis of schizophrenia are genuine. That is, the special position of humanity may be, as CS Lewis argued in "The Screwtape Letters", his amphibious nature, made of both mind and material. It is not that mind is so mysterious, or that biology is so different, but the marriage of the two that is so unique. If so, then neither a spiritual history of man such as Hegel's, nor a material history of man such as Darwin's, can ever explain the essential feature of humanity, the imago Dei.

This is why projecting a creation story ("myth") either onto a material substrate or onto a spiritual one has the cartoonish 2D effect of Plato's shadows projected on the cave wall. We miss the vital essence if we dissect only dead frogs, just as we are limited in our understanding of frog essentials if we observe only frogs in the wild. Both aspects of humanity explain and complement the other. Just as Genesis must be understood from a scientific viewpoint, so also Big Bang Cosmology must be understood from a spiritual viewpoint. Neither stand alone, nor does one contradict the other, but both are infallible the way the rock sealing an ancient tomb is infallible. It is we who tread the ridgeline between the material and the spiritual who suffer fallibility.  Therefore we imperil neither our theology nor our science if we discuss the spread of life throughout the cosmos, or the significance of Genesis 1 (and Job 38) for science.

Panspermia

Panspermia is the view that life can spread throughout the cosmos. While a staple of science fiction and Enlightenment skeptics like Bruno, it shows up in other mainstream religions such as Islam and possibly Hindu, as well as the ancient Greeks. There is nothing innately atheist about the proposition, especially if we distinguish between mind and biology, between sentience and life. The recent discovery of entire bacterial communities which form algal mats and the oldest known fossils on earth (stromatolites) but now found as fossils in CI-type meteorites thought to be the remnants of extinct comets, strongly implies that space is full of flying bacterial mats. Comets melt as they come near the Sun inside the Earth's orbit, where they can pick up some spores from previously infected comets, and over the ages the mats grow for the few months of summer in long millennial winters. Cometary impacts with planets spread this life throughout the solar system, which may account for the observed presence of blue-green algae on Earth the moment it cooled down from the molten rock of the Hadean-age 4.8 billion years ago. This would make blue-green algae the true pioneers of the galaxy, the space-farers designed for long winters, short summers and the ever-present hope of colonizing a new planet. Then the real biomass of the galaxy is not in the few miraculous planets orbiting moderate G-type stars in the habitable zone of 1-2 AU, but rather on comets. In this cometocentric view, Earth is not unique for holding life, but for holding humans.

Comets are small, you may object, and rather rare, what basis do I have for thinking that most of the life in the galaxy might be cometary? Well it is mighty hard to see comets, when they are not near the sun and sporting long tails. Four satellite missions to comets have all confirmed that comets are as black as carbon soot, so that when they are outside the orbit of Jupiter, "the snow line", they emit no water vapor and become virtually invisible.  So we don't really know how many comets are in orbit around our Sun, though estimates are 40 earth masses of comets far beyond the orbit of Neptune. Meanwhile, astronomers are still puzzling over the "dark matter" problem, that stars in a galaxy such as Andromeda or our own Milky Way galaxy, seem to be held together by much more gravity than the stars themselves, actually about 10 times more. Something that doesn't emit light, some "dark matter" is cementing the galaxy together. Could it be that much of this "dark matter" is comets?

Dark Matter

What little we know about dark matter, which is "visible" not only by holding stars together in galaxies, but by holding galaxies together in "clusters", and even by bending the light around galaxy clusters, is that it has gravity.  After that the evidence gets very speculative. One argument holds that if it were hydrogen gas, we could see it, but not if it were in icy clumps. Another argument is that if it were made of chemical elements, such as hydrogen and oxygen, then it would have increased the density of the Big Bang, sort of like soup getting thicker by adding potatoes. But if the Big Bang were more dense, we'd have more lithium and deuterium around instead of the 75% hydrogen and 25% helium we actually observe. This has led people to propose that the dark matter is exotic, something you and I will never see, such as small black holes, or heavy neutrinos. It's an argument from ignorance, however, and cosmologists keep shrinking the maximum possible mass of the neutrino so that shortly even neutrinos won't help explain dark matter.

We'll employ a little astrophysical speculation here, and attempt to put a lid on the density of comets. The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis arguments suggest that 85% of the matter in the universe is exotic, non-elemental. Of the 10-15% that is normal stuff, only 2% or so is hot enough to be glowing and visible. So if we are looking for material that can be comets, it could be the 8-12% of the galactic matter that is cold and elemental. In other words, some 5 times as much matter might be in the form of comets than is in the form of stars and glowing gas clouds. At our sun, the number of comets out in the nether reaches of the Oort cloud are estimated at 40 Earth masses based on the number dropping by for a visit every year, but if our upper limit is 5 times the mass of the Sun, then there are a lot more comets perhaps roaming between the stars.

Let's start with the most liberal estimate and work our way down to more conservative. If the 85% unobserved dark matter is comets, then there would be about 100 times more cometary material in the solar system than the Sun (were comets to be all gravitationally bound to stars). That is 30 million times more matter than the Earth, and all of it liveable (as in watery) matter. If we take a more conservative view that only 10% of the dark matter is nucleonic, that ratio drops down to 3 million times more mass in comets than in the earth. But let us be even more conservative, and use only 40 earth masses of comets in the outer solar system. IF every one of them is infected, or potentially infected, then that volume is some 10,000 greater than the thin skin of life that exists on Earth. A more conservative number would be taking only the comets that we think will be infected rather than the entire lot of them. Then if the dozen or so new comets visiting the inner solar system every year have  periods of 100,000 years  or so, then that is some 1.2 million potentially infected comets in our own solar system. Given a cometary radius of 10 km (somewhat larger than short-period comets), would suggest some 4 billion cubic kilometers of life-bearing material in our solar system alone. Contrast that with the approximately 200 million cubic kilometers of the Earth's oceans. So even in our most conservative estimate, cometary water outweighs Earth water.

But there is no reason that such cometary clouds can't exist around every star. Nor would it have to be a G-type star with a pleasant zone at 1 AU,  Any star will do, because comets only spend a few months in the melted state and thousands of years in the frozen, so it doesn't really matter whether the star is red, yellow or blue. In that case, we should multiply all the numbers up above by the number of stars in the galaxy, which is roughly one billion. That's why the biosphere of the Earth might be truly miniscule in comparison to the galaxy. Let me say this one more way. NASA is spending oodles of money to find Earth-like planets circling other stars. Should they be successful, I suppose the ghost of Carl Sagan will stop haunting Arecibo Observatory whispering "Are we alone?".  But in actuality, no NASA mission planned or unplanned will detect comets around other stars, and that is where all the action is.  Of course, finding blue-green algae throughout the solar system or galaxy will never satisfy the God-shaped vacuum that Blaise Pascal referred to,  though it might provide the nail in Darwin's coffin who asserted that once pond-scum is introduced, taxes are an inevitable result of natural selection.   

Hermeneutics

But how can such a cometocentric view be compatible with Bible? Easily. In fact, far too easily. And that's the scary part.

Let's first explain why that is scary, before we delve into hermeneutics and exegesis. The reason this is scary, is because Christians (as well as Jews) consider the Bible to be a sacred book, and therefore not easily in error. Chapter 1, paragraph IX of the Westminster Confession says it thus:

IX. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.

So if we can propose some cockamammy theory that may vanish tomorrow, and then justify it by some new interpretation of the Bible, either the Bible is easily manipulated to mean most anything, or the Bible is essentially ambiguous. In either case, attempting to invoke divine support for novel ideas should be regarded as suspicious. Now the Westminster Standards assert that a Biblical interpretation should be congruent with the rest of Bible interpretation, sort of like the Mosaic law that no one should be put to death on the basis of one witness. But it still tells us nothing on how to screen witnesses. Under the circumstances, I would want character witnesses, someone to verify that this Biblical interpretation is consistent with the earliest practices of the church. This is why the Young Earth Creationist (YEC) interpretation of Genesis (that the Earth is not more than 10,000 years young), should be regarded with suspicion. Not because Calvin may have taught it ( or may not have, since the good Bishop Ussher' s reckoning came a century later), but because Calvin isn't old enough. If it were taught by Polycarp, the Cappadocian fathers, or by Augustine,  then we would have a reason to think it was an important aspect of Biblical Theology.

But if we think, or practice, the art of finding novel interpretations of Scripture, then we have implicitly or explicitly advocated a superior rule of interpretation than Westminster--human intellect.  And now we are caught in a catch-22, for we are held captive by our intellect to find the true meaning of Scripture, the same fallen intellect that we are told, cannot please God.  And if you say, "well, God gives special grace to Christians, and especially seminarians, to remove this barrier", then haven't you invoked a modern version of divine inspiration, an evolving interpretation, an "open theology"? And what happens when two "graced" theologians disagree? Or must there be nothing new in theology, nothing novel in the world?

I think the resolution to this difficulty lies in a trinitarian (rather than the dualistic or Gnostic) view of science and faith. Augustine talked about the endless spiral between faith and knowledge, each endeavoring to help the other. But there is a sense in which the relationship between them is also sacred. That is, one can easily imagine situations where faith is opposed to knowledge and they become locked in a death spiral. So in order for Augustine's spiral to function, it must exist in a framework that accepts it, that produces it, that sanctifies it. And this is the function of the Holy Spirit. Therefore novel interpretations of Scripture are not equally bad, if they are based on recent knowledge and lie within the tradition of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, Kant would have us believe that science uses only inductive logic, and theology only deductive. So finding new meanings to Scripture (deduction) based on science (induction) is as forbidden as finding new meanings to science (e.g., Copernicus) based on theology (e,.g., heliocentrism). Not only was Kant wrong, but he left out the all-important context for doing both, the Holy Spirit.

Then have I joined the "open theology" crowd, in admitting that our theology can change? Not exactly. One can have an evolving science of semiconductors, for example, without saying that semiconductors have changed. We should not confuse our limitations with God's. But just as our science is fallible, so also our theology is fallible. They are both products of human intellect, after all. And it is not our theology that saves us. We are no more likely to be in heaven for being orthodox than for being heterodox (or else why would Jesus have said "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees...?) It is the Gnostic tendency within Protestantism that focusses on the superiority of intellectual knowledge, the salvific effect of mental assertion. That is why the YEC crowd are so adamant, lest by inattention they lose their salvation.

I would take a more relaxed view, and suggest that theology is a lot like science. No single theory is completely correct, or even complete. Einstein's criticism of Quantum Mechanics was that it was incomplete, it didn't tell him everything he wanted to know (which as a materialist, he needed to know.) If then scientific theories can go on for decades without being complete, why should we demand more of our theology theories? God is unchanging. His Word (both special and general) is unchanging. His Spirit and the community of the Trinity is unchanging. It is us who change from breakfast to lunch. So let us all take ourselves less seriously, and His creation more so.

Genesis 1

Isn't it peculiar that before He created night from day, which we moderns can take to be the creation of the Sun, he had made a formless earth with "face of the deep", and the "face of the waters"? That is, water shows up before the Sun does. But since the Sun gives not just light, but also heat, what temperature would those waters have been at? Well below freezing, about 3 degrees above absolute zero. And what exactly was the Spirit of God doing "hovering over" this frozen wasteland? Augustine addresses this in his autobiography. He says that the Spirit did not depend on the creation for its existence, that it was to demonstrate contingency. However, suppose that blue green algae were frozen into that deep, could the Holy Spirit be expressing some parental concern, some "vitalization" of the deep? If so, then life existed even before the first day was ended, which would contradict every creationist model I am familiar with.

Would such a newly modified creationism change any theological principles, such as the nature of sin and atonement, or the sovereignty of God? No. Which is yet another reason for suspecting that the church fathers had more important things to do than hammering out six day creation theories. So what is verse 2 doing in this story at all?

Keeping people like Procrustes off the street.