Imagine an alien intelligence whose capacity to think and do extends so far beyond what we can imagine it becomes quasi-magical. Arthur C. Clarke, the famed science fiction author, once famously remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If you don’t think that’s true, just try to imagine what a smartphone would look like to someone three hundred years ago, or even one hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago!
So, imagine an alien whose capabilities were so advanced compared to our own that the only way we could possibly fathom his deeds would be to say they were extra-ordinary, super-natural, even “impossible.”
Right now, human beings have the capacity to split the atom. In fact, that’s a skill we’ve had in our hip pocket for nearly a century (April 14, 1932). By means of a particle accelerator, you can split uranium into two smaller elements, krypton and barium, expelling a ton of energy in the process. That’s nuclear fission. Do that enough times, in a chain reaction, attached to a warhead, and you get Little Boy and Fat Man, the two bombs that ended World War II.
We did that.
Now imagine an intelligence far beyond human capacity. What might such a mind be able to do? A powerful being like that could do things that would leave us in such awe we would call those deeds supernatural.
But the thing about splitting the atom is…we needed an atom. Humans are remarkably skilled at manipulating our environment to suit our purposes. What we’re not so good at doing, and what in fact seems impossible to do, is creating those things to manipulate in the first place. In other words, we can vulcanize rubber, we can make bricks out of straw and mud, and we can create powerful explosions to serve as propellants that can carry us to the moon and back…
But we can’t make the moon. We can’t make the grass. We can’t make the oil.
Those things were already there for us to play with. Now imagine a being powerful enough, not only to manipulate the things of the natural world, but to create them from nothing. We might say that’s impossible, but once upon a time, “impossible” is what they said about going to the moon, or flying an airplane. The Wright Brothers did the “impossible” as recently as 119 years ago. “Impossible” is just what we call doing something by means we can’t (yet) fathom. Going to the moon was “impossible” a century ago. Today, terraforming Venus is “impossible.” Who knows what will be “impossible” in a century?
So I say again: Imagine a being powerful enough, not only to manipulate the things of the natural world, but to create them from nothing. In light of what we can do that others before us regarded as impossible, isn’t it rather small-minded of us to dismiss such a powerful being as “impossible”?
Now let’s set aside possibility and pivot to plausibility. Is it not plausible that such a being could have made the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the other things of nature, including humans? And, is it not plausible that, if such a being did create these things, that such a being might wish to communicate with us? I think that’s plausible.
I think such a being did, and I think such a being decided not only to make man but to communicate with man. I think such a being leaned down to one such man, long ago, and said “take this down…In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”
Impossible? Maybe to me. I can’t do it. I can barely even fathom it. But imagine a being who not only could fathom it, but who could do it, too. Now imagine what else He could do. A being that can make anything is a being that make anything happen.
And He loves you.
Imagine that.
~ Matthew