The Question of Dinosaurs and Aliens

...and all the other things that make me tremble

But this isn’t really about the ancient terrestrials or the extraterrestrials at all. It’s about the big questions that haunt us in the middle of the night, because we don’t have answers for them and we know it.

Deidre Braley

Simple Christmas is back!

Dear ones. I have spent the last two weeks running around town and being an Amazon Prime warrior in an effort to complete my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. ‘Tis a lofty goal (and one I fail to accomplish every year), but this year, I’m INTENT on savoring the lovely bits of the Christmas season, without the anxiety.

If this also sounds good to you, you might enjoy Simple Christmas: An Advent Guide. It is a 56-page (digital) book that I created to help protect your inner peace during this dazzling season of anticipation, with *very* short daily devotions, practical ideas for gifts and decorating (plus a how-to for making a BOMB charcuterie board), and gentle encouragement to do things like slowing down, saying no, and drinking a second cup of coffee.

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The question of dinosaurs and aliens

The topic of dinosaurs and aliens came up the other night in the hot tub. Ethan and I were neck deep in turbulent water, and it roared and frothed around my ears as I looked up at the cold expanse of stars: a universe unperturbed by the unexplained.

Me, on the other hand—I trembled. “I hate the question of the dinosaurs,” I ventured. “And aliens scare the crap out of me.”

Ethan laughed. That man is solid: perhaps his faith is built on sturdier stuff than my own. We began to talk in circles, kicking the cans of theology and history and philosophy and trying to break free of the prisons of our own preconceived notions.

I’m not new to this practice of trying to answer the unanswerable, as evidenced by this post from earlier this year, Three-Year-Old Theology:

Three-Year-Old Theology

“I mean—there are dinosaur bones,” I said. “But scientists say those are from like a trillion bajillion” (yes, that’s an estimate) “years ago. And when you read the Bible, it tells you how long each of the generations lived. You can do the math. And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t reach back a trillion bajillion years.”

We began to debate creation. Would we be purists, and believe that God created the whole world in 7 days—24 hours a piece? Or would we take a more figurative approach, and reckon that a day was just a unit of measurement that the author of Genesis used to help mere mortals fit the creation of the universe into our limited little minds?

And—brain bender—who wrote Genesis, anyway?

We couldn’t solve all that, so we moved on to aliens.

“I used to think aliens were a non-issue, you know?” I said. “But now everyone’s talking about them. And I watched this press briefing from some military guys and I gotta say—it freaked me out.”

Ethan told me what he knew on the alien front. We looked up again at the sky, tried to imagine that there might be whole other worlds. Worlds that God had also created, and living beings (green ones?) that Jesus also loved. I shook my head to shake the image.

What if it’s not at all like we thought?

Still, an existential doom began to settle over my mind. It’s not that I don’t want to share the love of God with Martians, or that I have anything against the stegosaurus. It’s just that these things don’t fit into my pleasant understanding of the world and how I play into all that. They also don’t jive with what I’ve interpreted from the Bible, and, since I’ve based my whole life’s meaning on the Bible being true, I feel reasonably upset when it’s called into question. It makes my insides all leery and trembly.

So as we talked about these unknowable things, doubt crept in. [That old, crotchety bedfellow.]