So sapient species always go to the bad on the infinity of inhabited worlds from eternity?
Hi Kitty,
It is not about limiting God. I acknowledge that God can create multiple universes and intelligent aliens. What would give me trouble is reconciling that with what the bible (to me) seems to teach: namely our-universe exceptionalism and human species exceptionalism. I suspect I lack the intellect to cohere that with such discoveries.
Just started The Sparrow the other day. I don’t know what is going on yet, but the author sucks you right in, doesn’t she. It looks like it’s going to be good. Thanks for the tip.
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Have fun. It was @Merv who tipped me off to it. I found it a tough book to put down. The good news is there is a sequel and the story is far from over until you’ve read both, The Sparrow and The Children of God. I suspect Mervin might enjoy discussing it again as you go or when you finish, as would I. He started a thread here where some of us discussed it. Welcome to the club!
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Assuming #3, I should think it would be licit to preach to, convert, and baptize pagan aliens. (Or to convert them to Judaism or Islam, for that matter. Harlan Ellison wrote a funny story about the “blue Jews” of the planet Zsouchmoun.) Some adaptation might be needed for aliens whose skins react badly to water on them because it never rains where they live, or who have three sexes, or whatever.
I think Billy Graham must have meant that we have nothing to fear from aliens spiritually; that is, there are no planets full of devils out there (or angels either). But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to fear materially; on our own world, Christians have gone to war with Christians quite often, each proclaiming that God is on their side.
In Larry Niven’s sf about protectors (who are technically not an alien species, but very different from us), there is some discussion about how very high intelligence is mostly incompatible with free will: if you always instantly see the best thing to do and automatically do it, where’s your free will? This is theologically naive, but feels very compelling.
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Bumping this up for potential newcomers, as it is one of our top articles recently, given all the UFO buzz!
What UFO buzz?
Google ‘UFOs’, or ‘UFOs are real’. It’s been in the news for a week or more. There was a segment in 60 Minutes last Sunday on it.
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Er, what, there’s something new? This is the most recent I’m aware of from over a year ago. The first one looks, not for the first time in these things, like a beetle. As for the others. Uh huh. Analysis? Distance? Velocity? Size? Altitude? I’ve seen overwhelmingly, spine tinglingly better; there’s an Apollo one I can’t find on Google and there was a superb BBC documentary 40 odd years ago, with a guy on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico wetting himself filming something awesome out to sea, wish it was out there, the video, and whatever it wasn’t. You’d really have to see it, jaw dropping. And of course Somebody Else Is On The Moon. I’d love to believe, nearly as much as I do in God, but unless they’ve got woo - and they haven’t; there is no woo kiddies, no warp, no subspace, no hyperspace, no EPR wormhole, no vacuum energy drive, no you name it - they’re not here. Interesting that they’ve got woo, they get seen, but they never talk. I mean they never talk from home on Radio Woo, let alone say hi on the street. Because radio itself can never do the job. I spoze we need woo receivers to pick them up. Uh huh.
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News has been all about the government acknowledging UFOs.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/19/politics/barack-obama-ufos/index.html
Thanks. Until they’re identified as alien woo incursions they’re simply unidentified natural phenomena or our technology one way and the other.
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Yes. That is true. But over here, the buzz seems to be around the idea of “if the government is acknowledging that they exist now, what else are they not telling us/what do they already know about aliens, etc.”
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Yeah, they can’t win.
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I’m not going to waste my time or yours with hypothetical scenarios. The truth is we are being visited, and it is not ‘alien’ as the world assumes, but it is ‘extraterrestrial’ in origin. Those who are given faith in Christ are the Sons of God, and we have supplanted those elder sons who have left the family in rebellion. They hate us. They have hated us since the beginning. They hate us now all the more because of the redemptive work in the LORD Jesus Christ who has put them to eternal shame and will enact His judgement upon them in His time.
They are here. This is nothing new. The only new thing is how the liars choose to appear to us as they visit. Some visitors may be true and loyal sons still, but most visitors do not seem to be. I won’t use the term ‘angel’ here because they may not necessarily be of that particular group of those who were born in the heavenly realms.
My question would be, what if they come and openly say to man, “your Bible, your perception of God, is flawed, and we know the truth better than you”?
Would you believe them?
Because they are doing that exact thing, and they will do it more in the days to come.
If you are here to hear them, and you choose to believe them—you are going to burn with them.
Test the spirits.
Make up your mind and heart now if you believe the Word of God more than you believe anything else.
I missed this thread earlier. The questions are interesting from many viewpoints, so I hope you forgive me that I will respond to some older posts with a long delay.
By the way, thanks for the reading tips!
Bible have more references on that.
In the book of Daniel, there is a passage that seems to refer to a conflict between angles (Daniel 10: 13).
Revelation has passages that tell about a war in heaven and angels thrown to the earth (Revelation 12: 7-9).
Interpretation of these passages depends on the reader. Too often, we see what we want and interpret passages so that they support our current worldview. What if these are really telling about conflicts between angels? What if these conflicts are not just a play written by God but a symptom of decisions made by angels themselves?
You seem to have rather strong opinions about this. I would rather think ‘never say never’ when we are talking about future technology.
I agree that we do not yet know how interstellar travel would be possible, except generation ships. I assume that we do not have perfect knowledge of all phenomena related to this. Perhaps further study of quantum physics will open up some technological advancements that are now considered impossible - who can say that (s)he has perfect understanding of the phenomena happening at the quantum level.
Not all opinions are equal. No one can achieve interstellar communication, let alone transport. Because if they could, we’d know. QM cannot provide FTL or ER bridges or raging jets of zero point energy or any other woo. Because it hasn’t. Anywhere in the past hundred million years. We know that.
PS the window for inhabited worlds will be bigger than that by an order of magnitude. Anywhere in the past billion years. Which means anywhere. If woo exists then intelligent life should find it within ten thousand years of civilization. Meaning it has been used from a billion years from a billion worlds. Space opera. Without a trace.
Not that I disagree with your point, but those are hardly compelling arguments and are in fact each a logical fallacy. And I bet you could give us its Latin name without looking it up.
I would make a distinction beween ‘extraterrestrial’ and angels etc. that could perhaps be called ‘extradimensional’ or something else.
Extraterrestrials live on or in some objects outside our globe. Mostly we think of creatures living very far from earth, in other stellar systems. Might also be organisms living on space ships or comparable structures. So far, we have no evidence of extraterrestrials although we have observations of potentially habitable planet systems. Habitable planet systems are not a proof of intelligent life outside earth.
I would not call angels and demons ‘extraterrestrial’. I don’t know what they are or where they live. What is told could perhaps be interpreted as something that is not tied to the same dimensions as we are, at least not as tightly tied. In that sense, ‘extradimensional’ creatures. ‘Extradimensional’ is just a potential label, it does not necessarily mean that angels live in other dimensions. I think that ‘spiritual creatures’ or something like that is a bit too vague label in this context, although we could talk about ‘spiritual realms’.