I’ve been a science fiction fan all my life.  I enjoy the imaginative places it can take us, the speculations on what might be.  Creative juices can run free as ever more improbable alien worlds unfold along with futures both terrifying and delightful. As a child I imagined myself in those worlds, furtively exploring like a stowaway aboard one of the many space vessels warping through my ever expanding universe as I read anything I could get.

But as I grew older, I began to see the fatal flaws in these fantastic stories.  Most of them launch from an unstable platform.  There is no foundation.  The gravity is artificial and it can’t hold anything together.  God is either missing, or he’s some kind of powerful alien, thus not really God at all.

I still enjoy it, but now with a tinge of sadness, because there is ultimately no life in most of it.  There is room for Christians to explore some of its themes and I have read a few authors who have done so, but I have yet to find anyone doing it as well as I think it could be done.

Recently I had a new thought about it.  I’m sure it is only a new thought to me, because it seems an obvious conclusion for anyone who believes that we are creations of Yahweh, intended for relationship with Him.  Much of science fiction expresses humanity’s desire for something greater than itself.  We crave relationship.  We recognize the insufficiency of other people to meet that need, so we look to the stars.

If there is no God, then surely there must be something.  We cannot possibly be alone in this great big universe.  If probability alone dictates our existence, then we ourselves should not exist, but that does not keep us from hoping that there is something more and imagining what it might be.

There it is, what I call the black hole in science fiction.  No construct survives it, because the truth of God cannot be denied.  It is appropriate that science fiction is often grouped in the same category as fantasy. The alien most likely belongs with the elf and the fairy, the ghost and the goblin.

Might God have created other worlds and other-worldly creatures to inhabit them?  If so, it raises some interesting theological questions.  What we are learning about the universe seems to make that unlikely, but despite what I’ve just written I would hesitate to say that he has not done so.  He is certainly capable of operating in realms and in ways that are beyond our understanding.