57 Alien Species and Still Counting
We are not alone. We never have been. The odds are against it. According to Carl Sagan, former professor of astronomy and space sciences and director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell University, there are at least “thousands of millions of galaxies perhaps hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies, each containing a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how many stars that means… it’s something like one followed by 23 zeros… of which our sun is but one.” That is a number that is so larger that it is, for the most part, humanly incomprehensible. To think that out of all those stars ours is the only one that supports life is the height of creationist pride.
For centuries, Western religions have gotten it wrong. Catholicism put man squarely in the center of the universe and pushed God to the side so much so that when people began to realize that the earth revolved around the sun, they risked being burned at the stake for daring to speak the truth. Thomas Paine, pamphleteer and hero of the American Revolution, hit the nail on the head when he asked (in THE AGE OF REASON), “From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate and apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer?” The answer is “Yes” and the why is “Because the Bible said so.”
The Bible is a wonderful book that comes replete with extraterrestrial visitations. Jacob sees men descending a ladder from the heavens; Elisha is taken up in some kind of flying craft; and Ezekiel’s chariot of fire has engineers today sitting at the drawing boards trying to deduce what he saw.
With modern UFO sightings, you can reduce most of them to a misinterpretation of the thing sighted. The moon setting becomes a flying saucer landing or some other natural phenomenon tricks people into thinking they have seen something. But the concept of “flying saucers” did not exist before 1947 and the Roswell Incident. These men in the Bible had no point of reference on which to base their descriptions. The technology that allows modern man to think he has seen a UFO was still millennia in the future. These visions of flying machines to a culture that had no concept of machines that could fly had to come from somewhere.
But more importantly you can deduce the necessity of other planets from God himself. When Moses asks “whom shall I say sent me” in Exodus, God replies, “Tell them I AM THAT I AM has sent you.” (Ex. 3:14) I am. It is an interesting verb form. It denotes the present tense. There is no future. There is no past. There is only the now. It is that Plank moment of time in which existence occurs. And that’s where God places himself. In other places his now-ness is reinforced by the admonishment, “I am the Lord God. I change not.”
If God is eternal and does not change and if God is the now, then the “Now” is also eternal. This means that God is eternally creating. Somewhere out there, there is a new earth, a new Adam, a new Eve, a new serpent and a new redemption. Perhaps new is the wrong word. There is a continuing earth, a continuing Adam, a continuing Eve and a continuing redemption. All of this necessitates an infinite universe with an infinite number of suns with an infinite number of planets in order for an eternal God to continually be in the present.
