God & man on Mars

...It may be a reaction to Galileo or the Scopes trial: they want to show that Christians don't always react as if their core beliefs had been threatened...

...When a fragment of rock which might have been knocked off Mars and years later landed here was found to contain a possible fossil of bacterial life, scientists were admirably cautious: the life could be (but probably isn't) a later contamination, and might not really be a fossil, but if it is, life might be something that has occurred in places other than earth...

...Our modern view of other lives, and other kinds of intelligent life, is not nearly as rich as that of the ancient and medieval worlds...

...I couldn't understand why the principle that made my balsa-wood plane fly could not, on a larger scale, get a vehicle to the moon...

...How big, exactly, did they think God was...

...A couple of theologians of good repute, neither of them a fundamentalist, actually said that this news, if true, shows (and I quote) that "God is bigger than we thought...

...I don't much, these days, except for the brilliant work of Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. LeGuinn (if you want to write well in this field you need K. as a middle initial...

...My mother tells me that when she woke me one morning with the news that the Russians had launched the first satellite, my waking question was, "Spherical or conical...

...It could be that we grow excited about the possibility of life elsewhere because we have lost this world, and something in us needs it...

...Our ancestors lived in a world in which there was God, as well as angels, demons, djinns, and those other strange beings, fairies, leprechauns, creatures inhabiting glades and lakes, and tales of whole cities that flicker in and out of existence or rise from the waters...

...When I was older and knew better I was intrigued with the possibilities suggested by earth-orbiting satellites and read everything I could get my hands on...

...but it is hardly new...

...But by offering the notion of a God who expands with our discoveries they threaten a truly core belief: God's essence is truly unknowable, and the mere fact that we draw our next breath, or can know anything at all, is more profound a miracle than life on Mars...

...This is the only recent sizing up of God that I can recall, until now...

...If those theologians who spoke of God being bigger than we thought meant no more than that this discovery offers us one more reason to wonder, they could not have chosen a more unfortunate way to express the idea...

...JOHN GARVEY GOD & NAN ON NARS Spacey ruminations When I was first able to start getting excited about any-thing in an independent way, what I loved most divided into two directions: mythology (the Norse kind, especially) and space travel, including science fiction...

...Remember a few years ago, when God said that he would kill Oral Roberts (well, this is what Oral said God said) if Oral didn't come up with enough money for one of Oral's projects...

...Although it is true that our ancestors believed these other kinds of life all inhabited this particular planet, the planet itself was bigger, multi-valent, and mysterious...

...You hardly know where to begin...

...Would they experience the world as a fallen place, as we do...

...The idea of a God "bigger than we thought" implies that we can have an idea of God in the first place, and this is to be avoided...

...I read science fiction through a lot of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood...

...Of course if there is life elsewhere, life possessing the sort of intelligence we are capable of understanding, it does invite some intriguing thoughts...

...I was about seven when I designed a space ship which consisted of a huge rubber band twisted around a shaft ending in a propeller...

...All of this qualifies me as much as anyone is qualified to address the theological implications of the possibility that life might exist elsewhere in the universe...

...But I loved the space program throughout all of this...

...It is only since the Renaissance that we have slipped into a rather boring, two-tiered view of the universe, in which there is a material world in which humans are the only intelligent life, and then there is God, who may or may not exist...

...This set off an avalanche of understandable excitement, but the statements made about its religious implications by people who ought to know better showed either a willingness to pander to secular listeners or genuine silliness...

...It is this God whose "center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere," to quote Pascal...

...Or, to quote another philosopher, Wittgenstein, "It is not how things are in the universe that is mystical, but that it exists...

...The photo of earth seen from the moon continues to move me...

...We believe in the God revealed in Scripture and in the experience of the church, but this is not a God with a size...

...It is a God who revealed himself as unknowable, and then became flesh to show us that love means the cross, and that death has been overcome in resurrection...

...None of this, however, has to do with how big God is, but with the narrowness of our ordinary ways of looking at the universe...

...God was, if I remember right, about as tall as three football fields stood on end...

...I have never understood the problem believers are supposed to have with this...

...We are so far from needing an answer to these questions that this sort of thinking is still, in some sense, idle...

...Is there a fundamental error built into the whole universe, or does what we know as the Fall happen regionally, and not everywhere...