life on Mars! Part 1

Further evidence of how the Universe evolved? Or further contradictory theories denying the great Creator? 

In 2020-21 it is (almost) certain that ‘life’ will be claimed to have been discovered on Mars. This ‘discovery’ whether real or false, will serve two principle purposes in our age: (1) it will justify and impel further financial investment in the progression of such ‘knowledge’ and (2) it will be used as an affirmation of the various, if often contradictory, theories of evolution.

This will reinforce the idea that “God is dead” in the infamous words of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Tragically, but perhaps not surprisingly, Nietzsche died thoroughly insane. His story explored in a recent book ‘I am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche’ by Sue Prideaux. ‘The World’ of course has a vested interest in promoting evolution – and remember that wherever ‘the World’ is cited in Scripture, very often it is in the context of defiance of, and enmity towards, our Creator God.

I may be unusual amongst Sword readers and contributors in being pretty much uninterested in the various theories of how God created the universe. Indeed the principal debates between the young earth creationists and theistic evolutionists leave me quite cold! To me these debates are often sterile and founded on the principles of philosophy rather than revelation (Greek, rather than Hebraic thinking!). But I recognize they are important to some, so I apologise readily if I have offended any readers at this point. For myself, I believe quite simply what Genesis chapter 1 affirms, that God created this universe in a defined period of time. Period! To me, Genesis 1 is much less about creation than it is about Sabbath rest, and true Sabbath rest is found only in Jesus (Hebrews 4: 9 to 11 – but read this in full context, Hebrews 3:7 – 4:11.

Jesus, our Sabbath Rest

The key to understanding how Jesus is our Sabbath rest is the Hebrew word sabbat, meaning to ‘rest or cease from work.’ After creating the heavens and the earth God “rested on the seventh day from all His work” (Genesis 2:2).

This doesn’t mean that God needed a rest. God is omnipotent, ‘all-powerful.’ He never tires, and His most arduous expenditure of energy cannot diminish His power in any way. God uses His example of resting on the last day of Creation to establish the pattern of the weekly day of rest for His people. In Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15, God emphasizes to the Israelites; “remember”the Sabbath and “keep it holy.”

Various elements of the Sabbath symbolize the coming of Messiah, Who will provide permanent rest for His people. With the establishment of the Mosaic Law, the Jews were constantly ‘laboring’ to make themselves acceptable to God. These labours included trying to obey ceremonial, Temple, and civil laws. Because they could not keep all these laws, God provided sin offerings and sacrifices so they could come to Him for forgiveness and temporary restoration of fellowship with Him. Yet as they recommenced their physical labours after a one-day rest, so, too, they had to continue to offer sacrifices for renewed sinning. Hebrews 10:1 tells us that the law “can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.” Yet these sacrifices were offered in anticipation of the ultimate sacrifice of Messiah on the cross, who “after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right of God” (Hebrews 10:12). After providing the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus sat down and rested. He ceased from His labour of atonement because there was nothing more to be done, ever. Because of what Jesus achieved, we no longer have to ‘labour’ in law-keeping to be justified in the sight of God.

Beagle and Beagle 2

In the evolutionists’ lexicon, the word BEAGLE serves as a useful acronym – believe evolution and God loses everything. HMS Beagle was, of course, the ship that carried naturalist Charles Darwin on a voyage of survey work in 1831-36. After this voyage he published his theories of evolution. Today Darwin and Beagle are synonymous with the evolutionary movement. Would I be unfair to call it the religion of evolution?

Beagle 2 was a British Mars lander that was ferried by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) 2003 Mars Express mission, searching for life on the surface of Mars. Successfully deployed on 19 December 2003 the spacecraft was scheduled to land on 25 December. No telemetry contact, however, was made at the planned time of landing and the ESA declared the mission lost in February 2004, after numerous failed attempts to establish contact. Beagle 2’s fate remained a mystery until 2015 when it was identified in a series of images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera. The images suggest that two of Beagle 2’s four solar panels failed to deploy, so blocking its communications antenna. We will never know what it may have discovered!

The Beagle 2 project, designed and developed by UK academics and companies, was conceived by Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University. Whist its purpose was to search for signs of life on Mars, past or present, its name emphasised this goal, as Pillinger explained: “HMS Beagle was the ship that took Darwin on his voyage around the world in the 1830s and led to our knowledge about life on Earth making a real quantum leap. We hope Beagle 2 will do the same thing for life on Mars.” Beagle 2 failed, but its dream lives on through the well funded SETI Institute, a not-for-profit research organization whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe. SETI stands for the ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence’.

Let there be light!

From the SETI Institute website: Our Solar System has idiosyncrasies, especially obvious if you check out the dim spaces beyond Neptune. A prime example is Pluto’s oddball orbit, tilted by 17 degrees to the flat ecliptic plane in which all the other planets travel around the Sun. Pluto’s orbit is also highly egg-shaped. This dwarf ice ball takes 248 years to revolve around the Sun, but spends 20 of those years closer to Sol than Neptune. It’s as if one of the horses on a carousel were to weave in and out of the path of an adjacent steed.

… What accounts for such deranged arrangements? Why doesn’t the Sun’s retinue of worlds have near-circular orbits?…

The usual explanation has been that these distant and generally small objects were tossed around billions of years ago by bully worlds such as Neptune. But a group of researchers headed by Susanne Pfalzner of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany has offered another idea – and one that’s far more dramatic. Their hypothesis is that long, long ago another star – as big as the Sun – passed close to the nascent disk of dust and gas that would become the worlds of our Solar System. Its gravity stirred things up, dooming the objects that would eventually form to erratic behaviour and small size.

Imagine being in our Solar System at the time it was born, four-and-a-half billion years ago. Earth was still being built – it was no more than countless bits of dusty rock, gently circling the young Sun. Other planets were also noiselessly condensing out of this protoplanetary disk…

Eventually a bright star would appear in the sky, brighter than others. Over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, it would grow steadily more luminous, eventually looking like a dot 40 times brighter than the full moon is today. You could easily read a newspaper by its glow, had there been newspapers. This passing star was an unnamed cousin of the Sun…

Pfalzner’s team simulated this encounter using computer models. They varied the distance of the passing star, its mass, path and so forth. What they learned was that the nearby passage would tear some of the dust and gas away from the edges of our protoplanetary disk – which disrupted the formation of the outer solar system. In addition to accounting for the strange orbits of objects like Pluto and Sedna, it would also be responsible for the striking fact that we’ve not found any really big objects beyond Neptune.”

Critique

Let’s critique this for a moment, ignoring the unintentional ‘creationist’ wording, “Earth was still being built”, with which most Christians agree! We concur that Earth was indeed “built”! Isn’t it rather more interesting, however, that this new hypothesis suggests something that may, just may, come close to affirming what Genesis 1:3 has already told us – “Let there be light” – as the opening of the Creation event? This was before our sun was put into orbit on day four. Remember the Genesis sequence: Light > Water > Sky > Sea and Land > Vegetation > Stars, Sun and Moon > Sea creatures, Birds > Land creatures. Whether or not we agree precise details, it is encouraging that‘science’, in its attempts to fathom the wonder of creation, often inadvertently and unintentionally affirms the truth of Scripture!

In out next instalment, we consider the need to prepare for the Media challenges ahead.