Space & Scripture

Science once seemed to challenge the miracles of religion. But in these early years of the Space Age, physics and metaphysics sometimes try to get into each other's act. The current issue of the magazine Analog Science Fact-Fiction, for instance, contains a 16-page attempt to prove that Old Testament Ezekiel's famed vision of the wheel may not have been a vision at all but a "careful, truthful and self-possessed" report of an earth probe by extra-terrestrial beings.

Ezekiel's "four living creatures." each with four wings, who came out of a whirlwind, writes Aircraft Mechanics Instructor Arthur W. Orton, were really space visitors equipped with four-bladed, backpack helicopters. They wore transparent space helmets ("And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living creatures was as the color of the terrible crystal"), and their "four faces"--of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle--were the prophet's description of their respiratory and walkie-talkie apparatus. The whirling of their jet-tipped helicopter blades made Ezekiel's fiery "wheels"--"and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted . . . And when they went. I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters." Above them hovered "the likeness of a throne," on which sat "the appearance of a man"--obviously, to Science-Fictionist Orton. a landing craft sent out by an orbiting mother ship.

Biblical scholars are not likely to take Orton's ingenious exegesis seriously, but it points up the serious theological issues raised by the possibility of life on other planets. Christianity has existed through the centuries on the assumption that man is the pinnacle of God's creation. What happens, asks Presbyterian Theology Professor W. Burnet Easton Jr., if it turns out that man is the pinnacle of only one of God's many worlds? Even so. writes Easton in Theology Today, all creation is under God's care. "He 'clothes the lilies of the field.' and not a sparrow 'will fall to the ground without your Father's will.' God's will for lilies and sparrows, and even for mosquitoes for that matter, is beyond my comprehension; but I am sure he has one. And if God can care for sparrows as well as people, it requires no logical break in our thinking to believe he can care personally for whatever life he has created on other worlds.

"Neither does an expanded universe and the probability of intelligent beings on other worlds destroy the uniqueness of Christ as far as we are concerned." Jesus' words, "And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold" (John 10:16), may be taken to "refer to other intelligent beings on other worlds."

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