The Sufficiency of Minimalism

Would you  be satisfied with a nearly deistic God? That's not saying He is, but considering how you'd react to a very minimally involved deity is an important thought exercise that can help you evaluate and strengthen your faith.

The Sufficiency of Minimalism

                What if God doesn’t intervene in earthly affairs? What if, after the conclusion of Acts, God neither acts through human nor supernatural agents of change, instead letting everything proceed according to physical laws and human decisions alone? What if every change in a person’s mind, from contrition to conversion to sanctification, is not the result of an active alteration of their mental substrate by the Holy Spirit, but merely a deterministic inevitability resulting from contemplating the truths of the Scriptures? What if God’s irresistible grace, as well as His sanctification, was accomplished not by an act of His in the present, but an act of His in the deep past, which continually effects salvation throughout all time, so that He is still the author of it all, despite no supernatural behavior on the individual or subatomic level?

                Would you still attribute every good thing to God? Would you still give Him the credit? Give Him the glory? Or would it cheapen your understanding of His goodness? Is your faith dependent on a belief in God supernaturally intervening to manipulate world events, subliminally, all of the time and everywhere? As if, perhaps, this is the only way that you can conceptualize Him being in control of everything, or deserving credit for the outcome? If your idea that God plays ‘cellular train conductor’ in people’s brains, or ‘atomic pool shark’ in the particles of earth and sky and sea, were challenged or undermined, would your faith fall apart? This is worth seriously considering.

                I’ll confess: my conception of God’s involvement does include the idea that He bumps this atom here, increasesthat action potential there, annihilates this positron here, raises the thermal energy of that molecule, breaks that peptide bond, induces magnetism in some metal somewhere, alters the velocity of some photon, pulls, shifts, breaks, combines, removes, replaces, diverts, and orchestrates an endless undetectable masterpiece of butterfly effects all over the world to minutely influence world events and accomplish personal and national histories without transgressing the boundary of personal autonomy that He intentionally limits Himself not to.

                But suppose this notion is incorrect? What if He doesn’t make a billion tiny interventions every second? What if He makes none? Or one every year, utilizing much more extended butterfly effects? Does my belief in God’s sovereignty and intimate care for human lives and world events rise and fall with this romantic view of Him as a maestro? No, it does not, and should not. It is my own idea, based on what I know about God’s power and wisdom, but my own idea, nonetheless. Him sovereignly ordaining everything that occurs does not need to mean that he flips a switch every time something happens. He could have planned it out a thousand years earlier, and being infinitely intelligent, perfectly predicted everything that would happen over that time period that led up to that moment. Or, He could have intervened the Planck-second immediately preceding. Whichever is the case, it changes nothing about the fact that it is entirely within His power to do either.

                In the interest of developing a satisfied faith in God, I’ve contemplated ideas like this from time to time, and considered that though God is probably very active—and must, on some level, be, because of His promise of the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit to believers—I should be able to find contentment with the possibility that He’s minimally involved in human affairs, and much more is due to chance and human agency than even I believe.

                When it comes to the bedrock of my faith, I know from the witness of history that He really did come in our likeness to die for our sins in our stead, so that justice could be served and I can be free from His wrath and reconciled to Him as a forgiven, redeemed and beloved son. That is ALL that is necessary to come to an unshakable faith in Him. Everything else is a splendid, wonderful continuation of His grace toward us, sanctifying us from now until the day of His return. But even without this, I have everything I need in order to be accountable to Him, to believe in Him, and to trustingly persevere to be obedient from this point on until the future consummation, even if, hypothetically, my faith received no further encouragement whatsoever, and life was one big struggle to resist despair from constant flaming arrows and assorted spiritual anguish.

                This is being content with as little as possible. When you are content with the least, you will be ever more grateful, the more you receive. The sufficiency of minimalism is not something that should characterize your faith—as resisting more than the essential doctrines of Christianity—but is something that should support your faith, being something in the back of your mind that tells you that no matter how your faith might be shaken as you go along, no matter how much it may be attacked, and how strong the temptation to despair, you know with full confidence that the core of your belief is stronger still, and no matter how wrong everything else you believe may be, no matter how effective the attempts to destroy your faith, nothing will ever be able to change the root facts of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Death Burial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and on this hinges everything else, so hold on to it no matter what!

                The most minimal truth is the most sufficient. Contentedness with this leads to a lifetime of confidence and overflowing gratefulness at whatever more you receive from God than this knowledge, to strengthen your faith. And when we’re in eternity, and God reveals to us just what the extent of His interaction with physical reality was, we’ll have an endless number of reasons to be awed, thankful and filled with an attitude of worship toward Him for everything He did that we never knew while we walked in the valley.

~ Rak Chazak 

Further reading (very interesting): The Expansion of Space--A Dark Science. Keeping in mind the link above to electron-positron (anti-electron) annihilation, these two excerpts stood out: 

Vacuum energy comes from the spontaneous emission of virtual particle/anti-particle pairs that appear momentarily from small quanta of energy from the vacuum, sort of a quantum foamy stuff, and then these particle pairs self-annihilate releasing the same quanta of energy back into the vacuum. Its energy density is non-zero, in fact, if you estimate it from electron/anti-electron pairs filling a volume on the scale of their Compton wavelength you get an energy density about 48 magnitudes higher than the estimated average mass density of the universe. From this it follows that the matter content of the universe is only a tiny fraction of the total energy, when compared to the vacuum energy. The particular choice of the wavelength one uses for the cut-off energy in the calculation of its energy density has led to a figure as high as 10,120 times the average mass density of the universe.

....

The quantum vacuum impedes the progress of photons through space to the speed, c, and hence it introduces the first “clock” and the forward arrow of time. Empty space would have meant unimpeded photons with infinite speed.

This last sentence is intriguing because of its relevance to Dr. Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, a model he lays out where the one-way speed of light is postulated to be infinite, in order to explain why we can observe distant starlight in a young universe. This might be worth devoting a whole article to, itself, some time. 

The Purity Principle: A Biologist's Perspective on the Timing of God's Wrath and Salvation

This'll be a long post with lots of pictures, yay! Make sure to click "Read More" so you don't miss out! 

The Purity Principle

Thesis abstract: my observation and speculation that the reason the Fall happened before Adam and Eve had children, and that the Flood destroyed all of mankind except Noah’s family, is that God chose those times to avoid the far more complicated consequences of what would happen if only a part of mankind fell at once, or how to keep the Messianic Line undiluted from Adam to Christ. They appear to be decisions made mainly on the basis of demographics, with respect to their relation to sinfulness and its effects on the righteous who are living, keeping in mind God’s respect for the deterministic autonomy of man.

How can I say that with simple words? = Specific points in history have seen God’s intervention, I speculate, because of an implied, but (to my knowledge) inexplicit, goal of maintaining the spiritual purity of believers: first the patriarchs, then Israel, and then the Church.

Here’s my big idea: have you noticed, for instance, that every single person in Jesus’ lineage as given in Matthew and Luke (as far as can be told from Biblical background information on them) were saved? What are the chances of that? Now, there must certainly be unbelievers in His ancestry somewhere, BUT nevertheless the fact that there is at least one lineage containing an unbroken chain of belief in God, from father to son, from Adam to Christ, is a very conspicuous observation. And it begs analysis of why this might be the case.

I should clarify how I am using the word purity. You may have gotten the idea from the last paragraph, but let me dispel any possible misunderstanding. My notion of purity in this article concerns itself with spiritual genealogy. The physical lineage doesn’t matter; this isn’t promoting nationalism or ethnic divisions between people. In the context of Israel and the Church, Biblically, purity means you have believers inside and unbelievers outside. Let unrepentant ones in, and the passage “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” comes true. The idea is that unbelief is, from a demographic viewpoint, infectious. Leave it alone without a purge of some sort (does not need to be violent), and over time it has the tendency to totally corrupt everything. We see this in the example of Noah, whose culture had become so far removed from God (from the impurity of the God-believing Sethites intermarrying with pagan Cainites, which tainted the succeeding generations with the Cainite godlessness) that he was the ONLY man alive on earth who walked with God!—out of the millions or possibly billions of people alive at that point. As a student trained in biology, this makes me think of serial dilutions. 

Right-click on any of the following images to see them in a full size view.

Faithlessness, if tolerated by the faithful, and absent God’s intervention, has the effect of diluting faithfulness over time so that there is less and less faith on earth, by proportion of the total population, by every succeeding generation.

This is obviously a bad thing, and if God does not desire (as I believe the Bible gives us strong support to believe) for faithfulness to ever disappear completely from the earth, at any one time, then He would have to do something to protect the diminishing remaining faithful from the corrupting godlessness around them.

And this is, I believe, a supporting reason for God’s decisions in history to a) send the Flood, b) call Abraham out of Ur, c) the Israelite Exodus, d) the Zionistic theocratic laws for Israel that forbade intermarriage with foreigners, and ultimately why Jesus came at just the time that He did.

Naturally, the main reasons from a theological point of view, and a historical point of view, are different, more obvious, and more important. But every good thing done has more than one good reason for doing it, and I’m going to use the space after the jump to describe how God’s desire for the spiritual purity of the various people God has dealt with has, I believe, been a supporting reason for His decision making and His perfect timing.

What Was Jesus' Sacrifice? Using Infinity to Contemplate the Gospel

Originally posted in response to a post on an ex-mormon website. The blogger has fallen for the common error of rejecting Christianity after leaving a cultic false religion for very valid reasons. Just because someone lied to you doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist. But on to the subject. The claim is that Jesus didn't really sacrifice anything when He died if He could take it back by coming back to life just a few days later. How do we address this challenge? My answer is below.

*     *     *     *

The mistake here is in thinking that physical death is the focus. That's not what the Bible teaches (Reformed, here, not a Mormon). 

Instead it teaches that death is not the cessation of 'life,' but the unnatural separation of a living being from the source of its life. Man-God, Man's body-Man's soul, God-God.

It was not in dying that Jesus did His miraculous deed. That was just the necessary finishing touch, a bit of a technical requirement.

But what He really sacrificed was His relationship to the Father. For 3 hours, He was spiritually separated from the Father and they were not in communion, as they have/are/will be in all other possible places in time and space from eternity past to eternity future.

Monstrous Mosaic of Malevolence: A Synergy of Multiple Eschatological Predictions

I hadn't put in much thought when I was younger as to who the Beast system in Revelation could be. I remember initially reading through it in 6th or 7th grade and taking all of the symbolism very literally, to great imaginative effect, but total lack of clarity about what may actually occur. A short time later, I realized it would be a "One World Government" of some sort, but I didn't seriously recognize the religious aspect of it, and assumed, much like the Left Behind movies portray (never read the books, so I can't speak to that), that the Antichrist and his followers are essentially atheistic in orientation.

After delving deep into a study of Biblical Inerrancy, followed by Creation science, I was fully convinced of the truth of the Bible, but now had a few loose ends to tie up: what theological groups on the world stage are "with us," and which are not? Furthermore, I doubted that there would be any redeeming qualities to the religion of Islam, but I needed to study it to make certain. In the beginning of the summer of 2010, I came across the helpful website Answering-Islam.org and spent some time on it and others, steeping myself in their thorough Quranic expositions.

One of the most amazing things I came across on that website was an online hosted copy of Joel Richardson's book, The Islamic Antichrist. Please take the time to read it, it was one of the key 'aha' moments in my journey that has shaped my views of theological matters: in this case, eschatology.

Immensely thoroughly researched, and without a sign of quackery, the book made me initially, completely convinced that Islam itself was from ancient days past destined to be the vehicle by which the coming Lawless One would conquer nations and arise as the solitary ruler of all nations on earth during the Tribulation.

The understanding necessitates the realization that America is not symbolic Babylon the Great. For much of the 20th century, after America rose to a "superpower" status, many predictions about the Tribulation have held that America is somehow identified with Babylon the Great, which meets sudden destruction in the pages of Revelation. On the basis of the fact that the Bible, in its prophecy, has always been very Middle-East-Centric, I doubt that America has any implied mention in Scripture at all. But the identity of Babylon the Great is another article's worth of writing. Suffice it to say, a lot of modern views about who the Antichrist would be have also been colored by the peculiar experiences of those people who held those views. The Reformers nearly universally thought that the Roman Catholic Church was sure to be the Antichrist future world government, or at least affirmed that at that time, it represented the most obvious manifestation of Antichrist spirit in the world as they knew it.

I had an epiphany as I contemplated the candidacy of the two religions: Romanism and Islam. Would the Beast come from Rome? Would he come from Babylon, whose ruins lie within 100 miles, give or take, of Baghdad? But what about the hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists, what role do they play? Whether the Antichrist be Catholic or Muslim, would the other groups be subsumed into that religion, or would they be ignored at the periphery of prophecy (top score for that alliteration right there)?

Then I came to realize. The Man of Sin might hearken from one place to begin with, but how would he hope to unite all the peoples of earth underneath his banner?

There are two basic methods: Conquest and conformity, or Synergy.

 I was motivated to explain my current view on a recent post on The-End-Time:

The idea is basically that whereas the Antichrist will initially be some man from a definite place and with a definite persona, he will undoubtedly attempt to be "all things to all people" (in an evil way, opposite of Paul's motive) in order to reach all the diverse people groups of earth. Wouldn't the muslims be more responsive to a man who claims to be the Mahdi? Wouldn't atheists be more responsive to a man who claims to be the spokesperson for an intergalactic alien confederacy--which removed all those religious folks to pave the way for a naturalist utopia, a la Star Trek's view of the 22nd century? Wouldn't unrepentant Jews be more responsive to a man who claims to be the archangel Michael, their defender--since the Antichrist will initially bring peace enough for the Temple to be built? Wouldn't Hindus be responsive to a Shiva-the-destroyer figure who is coming to aid humanity to nirvana through destroying all 'discordant' thoughts and people? Etc etc and many etc.

Consider the world today. We don't get all our news from one place. One 'truth' can be told to America, one to China, one to Europeans and so on. I am nearly certain that the final Antichrist will utilize the world's-best-ever PR machine to present himself as the preferred messiah of each and every religious strain of thought on earth.

Therefore, there will be several rapture explanations. Your above suggestion is attractive as a "conspiracy-theory" one [the Christians got together, dug up their friends, and went into hiding]. I'm certain many atheists, especially atheist spiritualists, will buy into the "Wiser Alien Civilization Removed Those Pesky Christians to Bring Peace and Science to the Galaxy" explanation. Muslims will cheer as they hear the Mahdi exclaim that the enemies of Allah have been destroyed and the global Caliphate can now be achieved. After all, isn't one of the most common descriptions of the unsaved in the end times as those who turn their ears every which way and who believe what they choose to to suit their desires, which are opposed to the truth?

Synergy. I think the best eschatological predictions will all play out in the actual future, in some way, on some level. It will be a monstrous mosaic of malevolence.

I'm sold on the Islamic Antichrist being the primary vehicle for the Beast System to rise and take control over the world. But in order to control the People, operating on the assumption that Islam doesn't actually succeed in subsuming all other strains of thought in the world today: roman catholicism, atheistic spiritualism, rationalistic materialism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc etc; operating on that assumption, the Antichrist would have to work as a Centralized Federal government: he'd give marching orders to the Pope and Bishops, who would pass them on to their constituents. He'd give a slightly different set of directions to the Western Universities, and to the Islamic Imams. All would be marching in lock-step, but they'd be compartmentalized. I think there will probably be very many different explanations for who the one-world government's leaders are, as there will be many explanations for where the Christians went. In fact, as observed on another post, many people who are left behind will be considered "christians," and so one of the explanations will be that the Rapture didn't even happen, because look at all the christians that are still here.

It will be a time of unparalleled confusion. The main message of my article here is simply this: there are a lot of good scholarly theories out there for how the event may play out. We should not be so narrow-minded as to suppose that only one could be true. In a sense, yes, one will be true, and I anticipate it will be the Islamic Antichrist--but this need not mean that the Papacy does not also oppress the Saints as one arm of the Beast, and it need not mean that many other stories would not be offered as explanations for those still living. On this level, of what will be said, I think there will be a lot of people this side of the Rapture who were at least partially right. But the final orchestration will undoubtedly be far more intricate and in that respect amazing than what we even now can anticipate.

I wonder if God will let us watch from heaven, while we're partaking of the Wedding Feast? It would be quite a show to see.

~ Rak Chazak

Intimacy in Heaven

I had a dream about Taylor Swift.  And it was lovely. Let me explain.

Article rambles about the presumably non-sexual nature of future relationships, touching on the subject of sex, by comparison, as necessary.

In the late fall, when I first ran into an old high school classmate who was pregnant, I remember her offering as a prayer request some relief from bad dreams. Apparently she too has active dreams, and something to do with hormonal surges while pregnant--or even perhaps spiritual attacks on account of being recently joined in Christian marriage--had been giving her very vivid, upsetting dreams. That stuck out to me, because I too have, on occasion, very vivid dreams. It is rare that I remember dreaming but can't quite describe what I dreamed about. More often, my brain will give me a detailed exposition or adventurous plot and as long as I remain lying prone when I wake up and recall it, I'm able to remember it afterwards. For some reason, sitting up makes it harder to remember what you were just dreaming and then *poof* off it goes into a memory black-hole and you lose the chance to recall it.

In the last year or two, I've had dreams where I was jumping 30 feet in the air, escaping a rampaging dinosaur; saving people from a burning building while an enormous walrus shot lazers at it; fighting the xenomorph from the Aliens franchise with explosive coloring pastels; catching an airplane's landing gear with one arm while holding my dog in the other, to escape a roiling sea of sharks; floating down the Nile and eventually waking up right before becoming crashed into by a wide-eyed hippo riding a tsunami a la Poseidon in this clip from the Odyssey....

And those are the good dreams. Immersive adventures, plenty of imaginary exercise and heroism.

Then there are the bad dreams. I felt a bit reassured when I heard that young woman talk about bad dreams, without going into details. From that, I got an anecdote to support my reasoning that the kinds of things I sometimes see in dreams are not necessarily reflective on my character, or thought process. I don't really have "night-mares," in terms of things that frighten me, anymore. If I wake up wanting to forget it happened, and relieved that nothing I saw was real, it's invariably because I've had extremely explicit dreams of a sexual nature. You see yourself doing certain things with certain people that you just wouldn't ever want to or consciously choose to, in real life. The upsetting part is the reconciliation--while asleep, trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance; coming to grips with the psychological aftermath of what you've committed. In the midst of the dream, I'm having a personal crisis and trying to stop freaking out about "what I've done." Waking up is a sweet relief when you recall that you actually never went against your conscience. Even so, I never remember getting a choice. In bad dreams like those, I'm always launched into the middle of it, where my deeds have been scripted and I don't even have the privilege of exercising refusal. It is absolutely cringe-worthy on every conceivable level.

That's why my dream about Taylor Swift was so refreshing. It was nothing like that.

Phreniology: Theory of the Mind-Brain Interaction

I've had an idea that the body is a machine, the brain is the computer that controls it and runs subprograms, and the mind is the "user" component that "operates" the brain-body system to get the living human being to perform the actions desired by the operator. As an allegory for how our bodies, corporeal and incorporeal, actually work together. I was interested when I picked up a magazine from the leisure-reading rack at the YMCA and read this:

Credit for the information: National Geographic Magazine, February 2014 edition.

"Caltech and UCLA scientists use pictures of celebrities to study how the brain processes what the eyes see. In 2005 they found an individual nerve cell that fired only when subjects were shown pictures of Jennifer Aniston. Another neuron responded only to pictures of Halle Berry—even when she was masked as Catwoman. Follow-up studies suggest that relatively few neurons are involved in representing any given person, place, or concept, making the brain staggeringly efficient at storing information."

I fired off a text to my college friends telling them what I thought:

This is interesting, and seems to confirm my phreniology theory (+10pts for using big words!) that the brain is not the thing that stores memories--the mind(the spirit/soul) is--it is merely the biological machine that allows our complete human form to have access to our spiritual-identity-associated-memories for the purpose of conscious, mind-and-brain thought processing of these memories. How's that sound?

If the brain itself doesn't store memories, then the one-neuron recognition finding would be consistent with this: the memories associated with identifying and recognizing Jennifer Aniston as a singular individual need only be accessed by a single neuron "tagged" as the gateway for the brain to interact with the mind's memories. The rest of the brain's activity, beyond this one neuron, makes up the biological "processing" of this connection, that allows you to consciously realize that you're looking at Jennifer Aniston.

Side thought: In other words, every individual you can recognize is represented by one neuron. So, it seems likely, is any given place, any given major event in your past experience, and any given major concept that you understand or believe in. They are like locked gates that your brain holds the key to; it opens each gate when prompted, and proceeds to open up related thoughts through that particular memory-jogging avenue. (Your mind-brain therefore has an almost infinite capacity for remembering things, since you have hundred billions of neurons. It would seem necessary, if we're going to live forever, and remember a near infinite amount of things, wouldn't it?) Have you ever found that, for example when remembering song lyrics, you can only remember some things if you first "go through" the associated stored memories that come before it, in a sequence? I've heard the old poets of old held a remarkable amount of history in oral tradition, and perhaps this is how.

This makes further sense when it comes to mentally impaired or brain-damaged individuals. Their brain-mind connection is hampered because the brain is damaged. The brain therefore can't interact with the mind properly, and conscious thought is hamstrung and takes place less efficiently. Even more interestingly, this can explain why seemingly smart people can make such mind-numbingly (points for relevant adjective!) idiotic decisions and go from reasonable starting points to impossibly bizarre and false conclusions. In this case, their brain isn't damaged, but their mind is. The Bible says that those who rebel against God and do not have the Holy Spirit in them have a 'natural mind' and a 'seared conscience.' (1 Timothy 4:2, 1 Corinthians 2:14) My understanding of this is that unbelief literally makes you unintelligent, and perhaps that's because the mind fails to interact with the brain properly--it's the reverse of the previously discussed circumstance, except in this case it's your fault for it. Romans 1:21-22 further buttresses this notion, that prolonged and obstinate refusal to repent before God will literally make people stupid. The smart choice, in more than one way, it would seem, is to submit in faith to Christ.

If my phreniology theory is right, then an interesting conclusion results: you don't actually lose your memories. You may forget them, but you've merely lost access to them. You'll be able to access them once more in the eternal state, when your whole human form--mind and body--is repaired to full capacity. Unless, that is, you never submit your carnal mind to Christ.

~ Rak Chazak

Further reading:
http://www.gotquestions.org/seared-conscience.html
http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/2-14.htm

Treatise: What Made the Red Planet Red? A Theory of Planetary Colonization and What Could Have Been

I have an idea about the possible explanation for how distant, habitable, yet lifeless planets fit into a Biblically Christian framework of cosmic history. It’s based on the three points I mentioned already—the distance, the habitability, and the lack of any evidence of other sentient life among them. I’ll unpack them. First, why should there be any planets that could be habitable by humans, other than Earth, if humans were only planted on Earth initially? It seems like a simple conclusion that, given enough time, we were expected to live on them as well. Otherwise there would be no point in them being habitable, from a purposeful-universe-by-design perspective. But why should they be so far away? Well, the universe itself is vast, so if there were no habitable planets in distant reaches of the universe, then large parts of it would by definition be uninhabitable. And how then could mankind fulfill its role of exercising dominion over all creation?—assuming, with reason, that the Dominion Mandate would be extended from just the Earth to encompassing all of the universe, at some point. It does appear to be the intention that humanity would have,upon fully developing the Earth, have been given dominion over the stars as well, and told to spread out to distant planets so as to govern the entire universe that God created. But something prevented this from happening.

The reason that other planets don’t have life is very simple. It’s not just that we haven’t found it, or that it’s sparse throughout the universe, but that it isn’t there. There are very good reasons for believing that no intelligent aliens exist, or life of any kind beyond the Earth for that matter. Here are a few:

* Sentient aliens would either have spirits or not. If they did not, they would have no hope of life after death. Why would God create self-reflective beings like humans but make them otherwise just like an animal, denying them eternity? And if they did have a spirit, then are they perfectly sinless or sinful? If they are sinless, then they suffer from the Curse which is over all creation, which is unjust to them—what did they have to do with Adam’s sin? And if they are sinful, then they are also fallen, and according to the developed concept of a kinsman-redeemer, needed God the Son to be born as one of them, live a perfect life on their behalf, and die in their place for their sin. So Jesus would suffer and die an untold amount of times for an untold amount of aliens. But the Bible said He died once for all. Is this reasonable? Alternatively, if the Bible doesn’t only restrict the Atonement to humans, (though none of the language implies this to be true), then how would aliens learn about it so as to believe and be saved? And why should humanity have been the one place where Jesus came to be incarnated, and not one of the multitudes of other alien races? These are all important questions to consider before accepting that alien life can coexist, even as a concept, with orthodox Biblical Christianity.

* The Bible strongly implies that everything that was created is for the benefit of mankind. If there were unknown lifeforms on other planets, what good would these do for Man if he couldn’t even know that they were there, much less utilize them? If this doesn’t sound convincing, then what do you make of the utter lack of any mention of other planets or life forms in the creation account in Genesis? The Earth is the only place described where plant, animal and sentient life were created, and at the end, the record concludes with the declaration that ‘thus was (the heavens and the earth, that is, everything) created, in all its vast arry,’ which means that no other life was created elsewhere afterwards. The circumstantial evidence is strong that there are no aliens anywhere. And it is such a strong implicit case, like the Trinity is also, that a scientific test to prove or disprove Scripture would come down to the question of whether alien life will be found outside of earth. If our faith can’t be disproven, it isn’t meaningful. A faithful Christian can with confidence say that the discovery of sentient alien life, such as that in Star Wars, Halo, Star Trek, etc, would invalidate the Bible. And that same Christian would have no fear because of his confidence that that will never happen, because of the strong Scriptural case against it, and his preeminent trust in the Bible as the word of God.

So what prevented mankind from being given the commandment to spread out among the stars and have dominion over them? It’s the same reason Mars is red. Key to the understanding of the universe as it is today, is the knowledge that “all creation groans and travails in birth pangs together,” and the knowledge that that is happening because of Adam’s sin as recorded in Genesis 3. The entire universe is wearing down and breaking to pieces. There is some aspect in which this has to do with the second law of thermodynamics, since it concerns the increase in entropy, that is, disorder, which means that energy tends from more usable forms to less usable forms over time. Stars become dust. Buildings become rubble. It takes energy to maintain things in a specific condition. It takes no energy at all for things to fall apart. It happens on its own. There is one form for a wineglass when its molecules are all ordered together, but an infinity of ways for those molecules to be arranged if the glass is destroyed. Pure statistical probability, then, guarantees that, given the opportunity, things will randomly break down rather than remain in “high energy conformations.” But please note that the second law of thermodynamics describes things like friction and the release of energy due to food digestion. It would be incorrect to say that the law was not in effect at all in the initial creation that God made. But there appears to be some aspect of the universe now—a general trend of decay—that wouldn’t have been the case before.

What’s my point in saying this? Fairly simple. Mars is red because it is rusted. The whole planet is rusted, which means that the whole planet at some point was covered in water. It is an amusing irony that astronomers are willing to posit a global flood on Mars, a planet with nearly no surface water, and none in liquid form, but unwilling to accept the claim of a global flood on Earth, a planet 75% covered in water, to depths of several miles in places. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and it’s posited that it was blown away by solar winds that were undeterred by the planet’s weak magnetic field. Earth’s field reflects charged particles from the sun all the time, which “keeps the atmosphere safe,” and intact. Water evaporates and becomes part of the atmosphere, given temperatures above freezing point. The Red Planet’s water would then have blown away also, and any water that now remains would be the amount that had not yet evaporated when the temperature permanently plunged below zero degrees Celsius.

What’s the point, you ask again? Simple—Mars is red because its magnetic field decayed and its atmosphere was blown away by the intense radiation given off by the sun. And why should the field have decayed rather than maintained at its primeval initial state? May I suggest that God is the one who ‘holds all things together,’ and that while He keeps everything material in existence to this day, has as one consequence of Adam’s sin chosen to remove, partially, His activity of maintaining the creation in pristine conditions? Mars used to have more water than it does today. How much, we can’t be sure, but the channels on its surface are considered evidence of gouging by large amounts of fast-moving surface water. We could have eventually settled on that planet, but even if we can now, it seems like it’s going to be much more difficult on a frozen rock with nearly no atmosphere.

Because of the Fall, the universe is in decay. Because of the Fall, we no longer have the opportunity to settle the universe this side of eternity. We could try, but the end of history as described in Revelation will come long before we get very far at all. What remains is the evidence of the planets that could have been colonized if we had been obedient to God. What remains is a faded picture of what could have been, and what one day may be the reality yet again, for those who repent of their sin (since sin is, after all, why our universe is so uninhabitable and generally messed up) and put their faith in Christ—they will one day live in a new universe, one that won’t see decay. Maybe we can have fun playing a game of galactic colonization with the other saints. Who knows what God has in store for us. But make sure you don’t miss the boat. The Ark was the ‘door of salvation’ to those who survived Earth’s global flood. Now it is Jesus who says, “I am the door…” and will save you from the second and final time that God destroys the Earth. Mars is red, because we sinned. Who would have thought?

~ Rak Chazak

Related reading:

Is the Bible Falsifiable? And Would a Real Live ET do it?
Did God Create Life on Other Planets?
Will We Have Any Work to do in Heaven?
What is a Kinsman-Redeemer? - GotQuestions
The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields - CRSQ
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