Love the pic. Tell me you made that yourself.

I’ve never had a hard time dealing with the hypothetical possibility of extraterrestial life, extraterrestrial intelligence, or intelligent species yet undiscovered on earth. I’m skeptical, but confident it wouldn’t require a radical reworking of my faith; it would be incorporated within the sounds and silences of Scripture, somehow.

Your point about Romans 5 (and Romans 8 similarly includes all creation) is quite interesting, though. I’d have to consider the ways we might find an extraterrestrial intelligence treated under that rubric. If, that is, I ever see any evidence one exists.

But, hey, there’s always Kolob.

Peace,
PGE

“But, hey, there’s always Kolob.”

If we could hie to Kolob. . . *giggle*

When I was a kid, I preferred Lewis’ space trilogy to the Narnia books. So for me, any talk of alien life immediately calls to mind that setting and redemptive story.

Hurg. Well, that actually -was- Romans 8. I’d originally intended to cite Romans 5, then switched verses without changing the text introducing it.

I have a mind like a steel sieve these days. . .

My faith wouldn’t be rocked by aliens either. The existence of angels demonstrates that we aren’t the only sentient creations which God chose to create. I’m just -really- skeptical that we have any sentient “brothers” on this plane of existence.

Oh, and nah, I didn’t make the pic. I’m a little too free with Fair Use when it comes to pics sometimes…

OK, yeah, I let my brain fuzz, too. Ya bluffed me. I *thought* that phrase was very Romans 8.

If it had been L. Ron Hubbard, and not Joseph Smith, who wrote the Pearl, I’d have accused him of ripping off COBOL.

Perelandra is one of the finest books ever written. That hymn with which it ends, with the references to the interstellar dust no one ever sees proclaiming by its very extravagance and gratuity the magnanimity of the Creator! Great stuff.

Now you mention it, I did think I’d seen that picture somewhere. I bet someone’s grateful for re-use.

Cheers, da both of youse! Hope the health’s holding up under busy-ness.

Not only does it subject them to frustration through man’s fall, but there’s no redemption for them — assuming they’re morally responsible (and it’s hard to fathom non-morally responsible sentient creatures.) I mean, there’s only one Incarnation, right?

So I find the whole thing difficult to buy, also. My faith wouldn’t be undone if I found out there were other sentient beings, because the main ideas would still be undisturbed, but I’d have some major questions about some pretty important things that I thought were true, but apparently aren’t.

The only way out, ISTM, is a hierarchy that puts man at the top of all sentient beings, so that they too could be redeemed by the Second Adam. But believing in other sentient beings and then believing that they must be subject to Adam, seems a whole lot more “complex” an answer than no other sentient beings at all.

Well, I think the example of angels, already mentioned, points to the reality of created beings not operating under the same “rules” humanity is. And I think Lewis, in Perelandra did a remarkable–imperfect, sure, but still remarkable–job of attempting to imagine what an interaction between humans and other rational creatures who operate under different “rules.”

If you really have to grapple very hard with this one (I don’t see that we do), try this: suppose the UFO landed today and they got off. You see them. Now, how would you read Scripture, given that real experience? If you have to reject the actual language of Scripture, full stop. If you have to reject your usual interpretation of Scripture, just make a note to check that interpretation. If you have to modify the alien to fit the parameters of the actual language of Scripture, do so. If it ceased to be an ETI, then either your imagination has run out of options or something about ETI is incompatible with (your best understanding of) Scripture.

It’s less useful with the obviously speculative, of which we are all skeptical, than with something closer to home. But the phantasmagorical nature of the experiment makes it easier to fiddle with, less stressful, which is why we also might discuss the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, if we were scholastics.

Cheers,
PGE

a quick speculation about an alternative would simply be that God has a larger plan for Creation than we have hitherto had cause to know, that includes every feature presently revealed as well as every feature revealed to ETI, and which cannot be completed for either of us until the redemptive history we are experiencing has reached fruition. Thus ETI is subject to frustration during God’s long-suffering to us, as indeed Christians are during God’s long-suffering to the rest of the world.

And one need not imagine that Incarnation and the whole human redemption history would be the way for ETI. This sort of reasoning about what is necessary for God is well off into “the secret things”; the “things revealed” are what God has, in fact, done in us and for us through Christ.

But the problem is that the angels aren’t redeemed. There is no hope for them.

Given the choice between believing that there are worlds full of sentient beings without any hope of redemption, and being intensely skeptical about such, I’ll take choice B. However, “I was been wrong about how I understood scripture” never comes off the table for me. Until I have an actual reason to doubt my understanding, though, the speculative possibility that something that I believe highly doubtful might, in fact, be true, isn’t going to cause me to question my current understanding.

the speculative possibility that something that I believe highly doubtful might, in fact, be true, isn’t going to cause me to question my current understanding.

That seems healthy enough.

In fairness, angels would be part of “all creation” and yet were, by all conventional accounts, consigned to their fates by a separate Fall from that of humanity. . . . there may be an error, there, and our angelology / demonology is certainly to be held lightly (very low density of Biblical data on the subject), but FWIW.