The Torch
There have been many cherished times in my youth where I have found myself, flat on my back, lying on a luscious bed of warm grass, blanketed by the cooled breezes of an early summer evening, with nothing to do but simply stare up at the billions and billions of stars. They were so beautiful, brilliant diamonds set against a blackened tapestry that decorated the night sky. There has always been something about the summer sky that pulled existential thoughts from my mind, randomly popping like popcorn on a heated skillet. As I comfortably rested, my thoughts and feelings would haphazardly ebb and flow like waves gently kissing the shores of my consciousness, bringing treasures from distant lands to entertain my youthful mind. The meaning of life, my future, God - they would all converge on my pubescent mind in a collision of learning to be an adult, developing my own thoughts, and the desire to maintain my youthful innocence just a little bit longer.
I don’t recall exactly when I started contemplating the possibility of extraterrestrial life. There were no mysterious revelations after tapping into the “collective consciousness” or channeling someone named Dave from a far off planetary system or an astral projection of my soul into the center of the universe, but I do recall a distinct sense that I was staring back at myself as I gazed up into the night sky. When I looked at the sky, I never focused on the blackness that separated the tiny points of light. I focused on each star being a sun, most likely encircled by minuscule balls of mud, each representing yet another possibility for life, as I could understand it to be.
In some circles, life began in a tiny pool of sludge. The evolutionists have the faith to believe that specific key conditions all aligned, just so, into the exact combination that created the spark that lit life’s torch. Since then, life has faced perilous odds of extinction with continuous mutations in order to maximize the chance of just one more generation. On the other hand, creationists believe that some benevolent creature dances around the glory of its creation, ever hiding in the darkened nooks of reality, waiting patiently to bestow the final secret after life, as it is known, is over. I, for one, believe neither. It is an argument where the truth probably settles somewhere close to the middle. Either way, faith in either is just that… faith.
What I find most perplexing is the fact that creationists rest their laurels on the fact that we are the sole creation. In fact, the creationists seem to be completely closed to the idea of extraterrestrial life; as if the proof of life outside of this tiny, blue orb would somehow negate, lessen or belittle their faith. Would it stand to reason that a being, so in love with creating, would willfully not continue this process? Why stop at one tiny planet in a vast, endless universe. Then there are the evolutionists. Those that fall along this line seem to be considerably open to the idea that nearly impossible odds of creating and maintaining life could be replicated over and over again and that the universe is teeming with various forms of life. With odds that fall into the trillions to one scale, evolutionists do not find it a stretch that life could miraculously start on some far away planet in a far away galaxy zillions of light years away.
As for me, I am still undecided. Perhaps I just don’t have the faith, knowledge or desire required to make a commitment one way or the other. I find it hard to believe tiny disks, filled with little, green men topped with big, round heads, whisk their way around the sky, abducting people and generally being a nuisance by disrupting the focus on the real problems we face in this world. I find it equally hard to believe that a loving being, sitting off in some “higher plane”, watching its only creation suffer through this life, seemingly unwilling or completely powerless to alter the direction that said creation has been moving toward. But maybe, just maybe, there are beings who, like us, look up into the heavens and wonder about the possibility of life somewhere… out there. Maybe this is the me, a part of the vast plan of creation, staring back at creation on a summer’s evening in some far away galaxy, in some far away solar system, on some far away planet. Or maybe we are all alone in the universe. Perhaps we did beat the odds and crawl out of the sludge from which we were born. Either way, my faith falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
