Space Truckin'

"Space, the final frontier....." When I was a boy, I eagerly awaited those words each week. I became a "Trekkie" from watching the first episode debut when I was 11 years old. In school, science was my favorite subject along with mathematics. These subjects came easily and naturally for me. Science was the study of our environment and mathematics was the universal language of it.

I also had a deep love for science fiction. I was insatiable when it came to reading science fiction comic books and stories from authors like Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others. Science fiction takes a scientific concept, as well as political and social ideologies, and expands on the ideas into a possible future where those ideas are fleshed out into that future's reality. In the scientific field of quantum physics, those are realities somewhere in a different dimension. If that is the case, could God exist in a different quantum dimension? Or could it be, as God puts it, we exist in Him?

Jules Verne predicted submarines and space travel. H. G. Wells wrote of time travel and a future One World Government. Star Trek gave us a vision of a United Federation Of Planets that respected religious beliefs and shunned racism. I believe, as portrayed in the movie CONTACT, the day may come when we find out that we are truly not alone in the universe. I also strongly believe that this is why mankind may be so completely diverse. We need to find ways to respect each other's beliefs and have civil dialogs rather than destroy each other. Otherwise, mankind will only find themselves spreading war throughout the universe, as in the movie ENEMY MINE.

Unfortunately, many science fiction writers, and many scientists, believed that religious faith was a superstition that needs to be eradicated from the planet. To them, we are merely biological machines, descended from apes, that live and die with no meaningful purpose other than to survive by instinct. C. S. Lewis blasted H. G. Wells for such ideas in his book entitled That Hideous Strength. The movie EXPELLED exposes the bias among the scientific community against the concept of Intelligent Design. I highly recommend reading The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. His recent book, A Fine-Tuned Universe, is also a very good read. While on his site, you can download The 2009 Gifford Lectures free of charge.

Granted, I have seen my share of flaky Christians, spurious "Winds of Doctrine," and outright weirdness during the "Charismatic Movement" of the 80's. I recall once that there was a short lived movement to forgive the Devil. My response to a bewildered friend was, "Forgiveness requires repentance on his part." I soon heard no more of it. Like the flaky people portrayed on the movie Contact, Christianity has it's share.

This reminds me of a time I spoke to a Grand Wizard of the KKK while I lived in Texas. He happened to be the uncle of a girlfriend of 30 years ago. I had no idea who he was until the next day when she told me. He asked me what I thought of black people and Jews. I told him that there was good and bad in every race. You can't just broad stroke an entire race of people for just a few bad ones. I also said, "For the most part, people are good just not perfect. That is why we all need a our Savior, Jesus Christ." This is also true of Christians and non-Christians alike. This gave him something to think about. He also asked what denominational background I was from. He had no clue what a Lutheran was, so I got to tell him the story of the Reformation.

Today, I consider myself to be a Charismatic Lutheran.

I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I believe in unconditional agape love. I have also been accused of being an "evil," bad tempered fundamentalist by people who do not know me very well. I am just a joyful modern hermeneutic literalist. Bad tempered? Not really. I sometimes encounter people who need a wake up call as I recently did on a CommunityBeliefNet forum. Like Jesus, I'm not afraid to use a little tough love with some people as He did with the Pharisees, publicans, scribes and money changers. I just gave a couple atheists some information from Y-Jesus. com about the evidence for the real historical Jesus recently. They went into a frenzy of personal attacks against me rather than give me any substance in return. They were playing head games and I let them know directly and politely that I was aware of it. It caused such a firestorm that the "UnBeliefNet," as I now call it, blocked my site and my blogs. So much for freedom of speech! Trust me, I will not lose any sleep over it. Don't worry, be happy!

Galileo was a devote Christian whose discoveries upset the religious and scientific dogma of his day. When he published his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

In her book, A History Of God, Karen Armstrong writes, "During the ninth century, the Arabs came into contact with Greek science and philosophy, and the result was a cultural florescence which, in European terms, can be seen as a cross between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. A team of translators, most of whom were Nestorian Christians, made Greek texts available in Arabic and did a brilliant job. Arab Muslims now studied astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics with such success that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, more scientific discoveries had been achieved in the Abbasid empire than in any previous period of history. A new type of Muslim emerged, dedicated to the ideal that he called Falsafah. This is usually translated "philosophy" but has a broader richer meaning: like the French philosophes of the eighteenth century, the Faylasufs wanted to live rationally in accordance with the laws that they believed governed the cosmos, which could be discerned at every level of reality."

Like Galileo and the Faylasufs, many Christians, including myself, believe that science can only reveal God's creation and the qualities of it's Creator. "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - His eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Romans 1:20 NIV

Even now, the science of Quantum mechanics is shaking up the scientific community as the work of Galileo did in it's day. In the video series, What The Bleep Do We Know, science and religion may be speaking of the same thing in different terms. If you look at the vast universe through the Hubble telescope, you will see just how infinitely wonderful our universe is. As in the movie, Contact, without life on other planets, our universe would be just a waste of space. Yet here we are, like the Whos in Whoville living on a snowflake, listening to the bitter Grinches who say there is no God, the Flat Earth Society that says the universe revolves around us and those who say there is no life on any other planet but our own. This, to me, is the sheer ignorance of pride.

There are literally countless planets we have yet to find. I believe the day will come when our technology reaches the level of being able to detect smaller planets and possibly see lights on the dark side of one. The man who invented the technology to see other plants outside our solar system, Guillermo Gonzalez, was EXPELLED! So, will the Star Trek vision ever come to pass? I certainly hope so.