Are We Alone? Part 2 The Micro and Macro

"He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them by their names." Psalm 147:4

When we turn our attention to our own world, we find that there is hardly a square inch of the planet that is not teeming with life. In the frozen desolation of the north and south poles we find plant and animal life. As the scientists devise new and more powerful instruments our knowledge of the physical world has vastly increased every few years. At the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the submersible, the Challenger Deep found simple celled life at 36,201 feet below the surface, that's over seven miles below sea level, folks.. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) is able to record images of individual bacteria and it is estimated that 50 million bacteria live on the average square centimeter of human skin.

"But the very hairs of your head are all numbered" Matthew 10:30

With each year that passes scientist are able to probe deeper and deeper into the heavens and the astronomers are continually revising their estimates as to the size of the universe. It is believed that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around a 100 billion stars. And that is just for starters. The Hubble Deep Field observations reported the discovery and recording of about 3000 new galaxies. That number starts to be more impressive when the field observed is a small patch of the sky and it would require 27,000,000 such patches to cover the whole sky. It is estimated that there are 100 billion Milky Way like galaxies. This would place the number of stars at ten billion trillion. If you want to do the math, that's 22 zeros.

As we expand our knowledge of the vastness cosmos and increase our understanding of the world on which we live, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the probabilities of intelligent life on other worlds. Even if we accept the idea that the infinite vastness of the grand universe were the result of some freak accident or a chance Big Bang, and that all life on Earth just happened, without design or plan, the laws of probability would demand life on other planets.

I am not capable of truly understanding the unknowable or knowing the exact nature of the original cause for the ever expanding universe nor do I give a flip as to what others believe. However, my reason demands that I believe that there is Good Orderly Direction in the evolving universe. From the infinitely small to the infinity of the heavens there seems to be a coherent structure and evidence of creative order and design. I do believe that a Supreme Being is the cause of all causes and the Creator of this and more that we can possibly imagine. But since the scientists need proof, they are still scratching their collective head and saying "we don't know", "we think that it might" and "we need more data".

I was taught that the world was created in six days and then God rested on the Seventh. As a child this bothered me. If he is God, why does he need to rest? and what did he do on the eighth, ninth and tenth days? What has he done since then? I could not understand an all powerful Creator that put world in motion and then just rested on his throne. As I learned more about our solar system and that the stars in the night sky were also suns, I came to believe that surely God had plans for the rest of the universe too.

When I was 14 I got my hands of a couple of books about UFO's and I was totally convinced that we were not alone in the universe and that the Creator had placed thousands of Adam and Eves throughout the universe and that Creation was still in progress.