A little more sciencey than religiony, but one hypothesis for the first life on earth is that it was seeded from somewhere else (like a meteor/comet that crashed into it), and a chunk of mars that was thrown off the planet by a big meteor strike is a part of the hypothesis -- assuming that chunk held a little bit of Martian life. Science is weird, yo

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mars is the fourth planet -- further from the sun than Earth.

There's science to part of your statement, but it's not about proximity to the sun, it's about not having a magnetosphere