davidbowerkingwood

Alternate Universes

I am a reader, I love books, I collect books, I make books a part of my life; I still have the first recreational books I was ever given as a child. I don’t recall exactly how old I was but I was given two books on some occasion which seemed to be the catalyst for my life-long love affair with books. I believe they were given to me by my father who is reported to have been a reader also. I’m looking at them as I write this and they are quite a bit the worse for wear and age but are still readable. They are “The Mercer Boys’ Cruise in the Lassie” and “The Mercer Boys on Beach Patrol” by Capwell Wyckoff and published in 1929 by The World Syndicate Publishing Co. New York City. Can you imagine – I still have those books plus two others in the same series I got later?

I discovered science fiction by way of the Saturday morning fun club at the old Heights Theater on 19th Street in the Houston, Heights around 1938. The hero of the series was Flash Gordon and the spaceships captured my imagination. Each Saturday episode was a cliff-hanger that left Flash in mortal danger and one had to come back the following Saturday to see if Flash would survive.

It was not until the early 1940’s that I discovered science fiction pulp magazines; WW II was underway and the Boy Scouts of America collected waste paper for the war effort. As I would pick up paper for recycling I would occasionally see a magazine with a lurid science fiction drawing on it; a space ship or a dangerous looking alien which was sure to catch my attention. I started collecting them and would read and re-read them for hours on end. My wife reminds me that when we got married about the only thing I brought to our marriage, besides myself, was a small stack of clothing and a large stack of science fiction pulp magazines.

By now you are probably wondering where I’m going with this brief recitation of my early life and there is a simple answer; in all that reading of science fiction I encountered many different universes as created by the minds of many science fiction writers. That process has carried on throughout my adult life as well, as my enthusiasm for science fiction has not waned as I’ve aged.

This is a copy of the dustcover of a 1937 edition of “The Moon Colony” by William Dixon Bell which I have in my library.

The Human Imprint

Since I have read so many science fiction stories  set in worlds of the writers imagination it would be impossible to remember each of them in much detail. Suffice it to say that most of them have seemed reasonable and internally consistent. The worlds, and the universes of which they were a part had a familiar ring to them; they were something devised by the mind of man and man’s imprint could be seen on each of them. They fit in with human thinking and human priorities and felt familiar in certain ways; one could sense humanities imprint upon them.

It is this human imprint, this quality of human thinking and human reasoning that is conspicuously absent from the Bible. Although it is the story of humanity it is told from what seems to me to be a distinctly non-human perspective. The Bible tells the story of a world and a universe in a manner that is so completely alien to all of the other worlds and universes about which I’ve read as to suggest to me a non-human author; the Bible is different in profound ways that speak loudly of non-human authorship.

What does this suggest you may ask and my response is it strongly indicates to me the author is not a human being, the author is the Creator God of human beings. While it is true that God used human beings to do the actual writing it is also true that those human beings were led in their writing by the Spirit of God who fundamentally influenced their writing and its content. This has produced an overall style that is distinctly non-human in its reasoning and priorities and often runs contrary to human reason; this is to me one of the greatest proofs of the divine authorship of the Bible, it was not written from a human perspective on life and living, it was written from the Divine perspective.

The Biblical Scope and Vision

The Bible’s description of reality is far and away more extreme than any fantasy or science fiction book I’ve ever read. The Bible introduces aspects of the world in which we live that no human author would ever even dream of including in a world or universe of their creation; our reality is totally incredible when compared with the writings of any human author.

One of the more amazing points that is made in the Bible has to do with reality; in an earlier blog, What is Reality?, I described reality as it exists in our universe and it is wild enough to blow your mind if you try and grasp the enormity of our reality. The only uncaused reality is the Trinity, the triune God; all else in our universe is a creation of that one reality. All but the Trinity is a creation of the Trinity and exists at the will of the Trinity. That is an overwhelming thought that should play some tricks on your brain if you think on it. We are not independent entities but exist as created beings whose very existence is dependent on an outside power.

This outside power, the Trinity, determined at some point to engage in a creative act and the universe came into being. The Bible tells us this was done in six days and is being continuously sustained in its existence by the Second Person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible also tells us this universe is to be destroyed in the future and replaced with a new one. The new one is to be peopled only by those who have received the gift of salvation by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The present universe is a testing ground with one question and one right answer; it is a pass/fail test and there is no grading on the curve.

The question is “What do you think of Jesus Christ” and the one right answer is “He is the Son of God who died on the cross for my sins and I receive Him as my Savior.” This alone is what life is all about; everything else is fluff, window dressing, illusion! If you get that answer right then your life has been a great success; if you get that answer wrong then your life has been a sad failure.

Please don’t leave this life a failure!