[Darris McNeely] One of the oldest and most challenging questions that scientists have had in recent years: Is there life on other planets? All kinds of experiments and observations have taken place and continue to go on to answer this critical question. Are there other forms of life on any other planet besides what we know here on Earth?

There has been on the planet of Mars just within the last year or so a rover sent there by NASA called Curiosity, and it has been taking samples of soil and the atmosphere on the planet Mars in order to again learn more about the planet, but also to continue searching for an answer to this particular question. Now because of the presence, they thought, of certain levels of a particular gas, methane gas, which to them could indicate the presence of some type of microbial life on Mars, scientists were hopeful in recent weeks that the Curiosity rover would gain some detectable evidence of high levels of methane gas, which then would lead them to again perhaps a further conclusions or proof or closer to proof that perhaps some type of life was there because methane gas is normally given off by decaying bacteria or vegetation.

Well, just recently the rover's results that have come back to the scientists have indicated that the levels of methane gas to indicate any form of life there are pretty much not there. There's just not the level of gas there to indicate any type of life and no other means by which to determine this. So they're disappointed on that particular part of the discovery of what has taken place on Mars with this rover in recent days.

So, again, we're still asking the question, they are: Is there life on other planets? It's an interesting question. It will continue to fascinate scientists.

There is perhaps a bit of an indication in the Bible that might help us to understand and answer, to come to an answer, on this because as we understand what the Bible tells us about God and the creation and the unique creation of life on this Earth as God has created it. The Bible doesn't tell us everything scientifically that we would like to know. That it seems to be is left for science to discover. But what the Bible does tell us sometimes gives us indications of perhaps what the ultimate answer even to a question like this might be.

In Isaiah 45:18 it says this from God, "For thus says the Lord who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the Earth and made it." Again a direct statement corroborated by Genesis 1:1 that God formed the Earth and He made this planet. He's made all the other planets too, but this is the one that has life as we know it. "Who established it, who did not create it in vain, who," this God, "formed it to be inhabited."

Did you catch that? God formed Earth to be inhabited. Isaiah 45:18. Could it be that this is God telling us that this planet, this one planet Earth has been formed to be inhabited by life and especially the highest form of life created by God in His creation of man? And so if we were to take that, then it's a step toward understanding what the Bible does eventually tell us and reveal very clearly as to the purpose of all life and especially human life created in the image of God.

The Bible does give us certain answers, and it's those answers that we can cling to as a foundation to understand and begin to reason our way toward other answers to other questions that in a sense are eternally there.

That's BT Daily. Join us next time.