A follow-up to the last post

I think about this more often than not, actually. I briefly touched on it in the last post, so I wanted to talk about it more fully.

Our scope of the world--even the universe--is so limited. We only base our future discoveries on what we already know. But what if we began to look for things in creation that go outside what we already know?

When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine threw out the idea that in heaven, things don't have to be made of atoms. The laws of physics and chemistry don't have to apply. That blew my mind. I still cannot wrap my head around that, simply because we as humans do not know any other way. Everything we know and see is made of atoms and follows the laws of physics and chemistry. Therefore, trying to imagine a new system of matter is nearly impossible.

This also extends to our quest for extraterrestrial life. We need to qualify that we are searching for life as we know it. Scientists look for evidence of running water on other planetary bodies to determine the possibility of life. But what if there was another system of life that wasn't reliant on water or oxygen for sustainability? We wouldn't know to look for it, because we only know what we experience. Who knows--life could very well exist out there that is completely impossible for us to even detect at all. Just like how for a long time, we never knew about all the different types of light emissions outside of the visible spectrum because we couldn't detect it. (Speaking of which, what if there are types of light beyond gamma rays and infrared?) But I digress. The point is, trying to imagine other forms of life which operate completely differently from systems on earth is nearly impossible.

But God can imagine it.

God could create it.

Maybe he already has.

God is so much bigger than our understanding of the universe.

It's interesting to see how our understanding of the universe frames, and therefore limits, what we can and will discover in the future.