Stephen Hawking recently made a documentary in which he declares that aliens probably exist and it would be better for us if we didn’t make contact with them. He says that there are 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, creating the potential for an absurdly large amount of planets, some of which could be hospitable to life, even intelligent life. The odds, he says, are for it.

Growing up I was always afraid that, if aliens existed, that must mean that God couldn’t. I’m not sure why those dots were connected in my mind, but I thought that the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe was a slam dunk case against the existence of God. It would certainly mean that humans aren’t special, and if we’re not special, then don’t all of Jesus’ claims fall apart? It’s a slippery slope, you see.

I may be speaking from a position of ignorance (I’m not a scientist), but I thought the probability of evolution (from single-cell organisms to intelligent beings) was as close to mathematically impossible as you can get. Operating from that assumption, it occurred to me that the existence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, rather than being the final nail in the coffin of theism, would actually be the greatest proof that there is a Creator. Surely something mathematically impossible couldn’t happen twice (or more) without outside intervention.

Of course this is all light-hearted speculation, but what if aliens showed up and, after learning to communicate with each other, we discovered that they have a tradition very much like our Jesus-tradition? What if their stories mirror our own? What if they told us of a God who Created everything and then, when it all went wrong, became one of the creatures in order to set everything right? Isn’t that at least just as likely as them coming to blow us up and take all the resources of our planet?