We may be Martians. Men (and also women) are really from Mars. For nearly two centuries scientists have been trying to explain the origin of life. The late Francis A. Schaeffer once said that the dilemma for the materialist is that something is here rather than nothing, and he can’t empirically explain how the something got here and became what we see all around us.

Of course, the dilemma has not stopped scientists from trying. Here’s the latest attempt to explain our evolutionary origin:

“Life on Earth may have started millions of miles away on Mars, according to scientists.

“An element believed to be crucial to the origin of life would only have been available on the surface of the Red Planet.

“These ‘seeds’ of life probably arrived on Earth in meteorites blasted off Mars by impacts or volcanic eruptions, Geochemist Professor Steven Benner claims.

“Prof Benner, from The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the US, said: ‘The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock.’”

Anaxagoras ( c. 510–428 BC)

This is really old news. The theory of cosmic seeding has a long history going as far back as the Greeks. “The first known mention of the term was in the writings of the 5th century BC Greek philosopher Anaxagoras.” Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking offered similar opinions. “Life could spread from planet to planet,” Hawking claimed, “or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors.”

People looking for a way to fill the spiritual vacuum left by atheistic materialism want to do it on their own terms, even if what they advocate is more fiction than true science. The materialists are still trying to prove that God does not exist and that no God is necessary for the origin of life. If they could only find another highly evolved civilization among the multitude of unexplored galaxies, then such a discovery would prove that no god is needed to explain how life came to Earth.

Francis Crick (1916-2004), co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, for which he received a Nobel Prize, proposed a theory called “directed panspermia” (pan = all + spermia = seed)1 Crick contended “that life on earth may have begun when aliens from another planet sent a rocket ship containing spores to seed the earth.”2

The most natural question is, “Where did the aliens come from?” Was there an alien race that seeded the planet of aliens that seeded Earth? Crick’s hypothesis only pushes the argument back several steps with no final resolution. “This scenario still leaves open the question of who designed the designer [aliens] — how did life originally originate?”3

Crick and other advocates of “panspermia” have no way to account for the original seed bearers. Crick’s extraterrestrial quest, even though it has the trappings of science, is religious nonetheless. He was searching for ultimate meaning in terms of what the stars might reveal about how life originated on Earth.

The latest Martian-origin theory is no different. Kinda reminds me of the sci-fi film The Blob (1958). A blob of cosmic stuff made its way to Earth in order to replicate itself. It was not friendly by Earth standards. Who’s to say that the original cosmic dust that made us had sinister motives and is the origin of all our problems?

Beware of The Blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of The Blob

1. Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). [↩]
2. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 248. [↩]
3. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 249. [↩]