Ian Lovett Space Mission Summary

In Ian Lovett’s essay “Space Mission: Christians Ask if Alien Souls Need Saving,” the title proved to be fairly self-explanatory from the beginning. In this piece, Lovett did an excellent job at opening his essay by introducing Proxima b, which he described as being a “dream planet,” and quickly progressing his writing into explaining how a portion of the Christian community took this scientific discovery as their cue to try and implement their religious teachings upon life forms that may potentially inhabit the planet. This writing begs the question of whether or not all Christians should be held in the same category as Evangelists, a specific group of Christians who focus on spreading what Lovett refers to repeatedly as simply “the gospel.”
The discovery of this planet prompted a lot of questions from both scientists and religious persons alike, though the context of these questions is vastly different. The scientists in this debate asked more logic-based questions, such as whether or not there was water on the planet and whether or not a rocket could travel there someday. They also questioned whether there could be life on this planet. The Evangelists, however,
He quoted a man by the name of Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist who founded a religious ministry that “seeks to show that science supports Christian scripture.” Ross made an agreeable point in stating that “It’s just planet Earth that has spiritual beings in need of redemption. … That doesn’t rule out dolphins or grass or bacteria on another planet. … It’s not Jesus Christ dying on 1,000 planets.” These quotes point to a different spectrum of Christianity, one where the belief system is not quite as biased or critical as the