Aliens and UFOs are currently experiencing a resurgence of interest in the public mind due to declassification of government documents on the topic. To that end, let’s consider what the Bible has to say on the subject.

First of all, man’s “sentience” comes from the fact that he is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). There is a reason that the most complex form of intelligence in non-human life is the slight teachability of apes to use primitive tools. No other creature philosophizes, invents, or composes art the way we do, which flows from the way we embody God’s nature. Hence, it would be hard to imagine a non-human sentient life form.

Furthermore, if aliens did exist, they would have to be in one of three states:

1. Perfectly righteous, in which case, they would essentially be angels.
2. Perfectly wicked, in which case, they would essentially be demons (in fact, some Christians believe experiences with aliens are really interactions with demons pretending to be aliens).
3. Fallen, like humans. But if they are fallen, did they have a Fall just like ours? Does God love them like He loves us? Are they eligible for the gospel (unlike demons, who are ineligible)? How could they be saved, when our salvation is predicated upon the fact that Jesus came in human form? Did He also come in alien form? Can those not in human form be saved by a human?

The idea of non-human alien life therefore doesn’t seem possible in the Biblical worldview. However, UFOs could still be theoretically possible, under the following highly speculative possibility.

First of all, they would have to be sent by a highly advanced human society that is not part of the current world system we all are familiar with. It seems highly unlikely such a society could exist on earth (where would they be located?), but could it be in outer space?

They would have to be descended from Adam and Eve (as no other story of human creation is mentioned in Genesis or allowed by its narrative). They would also have to descend from Noah, as the Flood was clearly intended to reduce humanity to a single family.

But what about after the Flood? Genesis 9:11 implies that nothing cataclysmic would ever wipe out the human race again. Thus, after the Flood, mankind was free to develop as he saw fit, with only the passage of time and the will of God causing civilizations to rise and fall (Daniel 2:21).

Our “chronological snobbery,” to quote C. S. Lewis, generally makes us think that history was some sort of climb from utter primitiveness to eventually the advanced state of today. In fact, this is what evolutionary theory teaches. And yet, history shows us otherwise, as civilizations from thousands of years ago created inventions as sophisticated as our own. For example, the Egyptians were building massive pyramids several thousand years before the birth of Christ, and that involved some fairly sophisticated architectural techniques.

This is all because man was created as an adult. Man was reading, writing, and even composing poetry (Genesis 2:23) on the very first day of his existence. Man never developed language from nothing or played around with primitive tools in loincloths. He has always been sophisticated, philosophical, artistic, and creative. There is no reason he would ever have been less capable of designing something amazing, other than that some inventions require others first (we could not have designed modern computers without the Industrial Revolution, for example).

This technological sophistication reached a new height in the Tower of Babel. The Bible recounts some of its builders’ methods (Genesis 11:3), and then God says, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” (Genesis 11:6)

This was some kind of peak of advancement for man. God had to sabotage it (with the division of tongues) to keep it from getting out of control.

So, what if, around that time, one of the Noahic nations developed some kind of sophisticated technology that allowed them to visit other planets? Is it absolutely impossible?

It is astonishing how much information is lost about even massive civilizations when they crumble. We have to dig through the dirt to obtain even basic information about them. This would have been before more permanent and long-lasting forms of writing were developed, so any records they kept on earth could have easily been destroyed by the passing of time and their conquest by other nations. Moreover, it wouldn’t have to be space travel as we understand it. Maybe they mastered faster than light travel and sent explorers out, and then the ones left behind died out or transformed into new civilizations on earth. Who knows? It’s a possibility.

One reason I put forward this idea is that there is a certain beautiful symbolism that is captured by it. Consider this: throughout the post-Abrahamic Bible, there is a paradigm of “Israel and the 70 Gentile Nations.” There was an “oikoumene” (or world system) in the Bible, which encompassed all the lands of the known world, all of which were descended from Noah. These were the nations conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. These were the nations censused by Caesar Augustus in Luke 2:1. These were the nations evangelized by the apostles. When Rome converted under Constantine and later Christian emperors, the gospel conquered the whole world.

And yet was it the whole world? It turns out no. Maps showed sea monsters past the end of the known world, yet beyond those edges were continents with undiscovered civilizations on them, like Native Americans and African tribes. These nations were offshoots from the original Noahic Gentile nations, and they were full of humans made in the image of God, ready for missionaries to spread the gospel amongst them. The Church grew beyond her known bounds and found new lands to conquer with the good news of Jesus Christ.

What if the same thing is true now? The edge of our current maps are the surface of the globe, but what if there are undiscovered nations further out? New places to take the gospel? It is almost the right time for it: we have explored the entirety of our own globe, and we are, I believe, rapidly approaching a worldwide conversion and consolidation of worship under Christ’s rule. Maybe the visitation of humans from other habitable planets, offshoots of the Noahic nations from after the Flood, is the precursor to evangelism to other worlds. What if that is the next phase of our journey: missionaries to the stars, and the expansion of the human race beyond the earth?