Provisional Belief

This morning I was listening to a Stanford scientist describe his experiences with patients—victims—who had been referred to him by three-letter agencies. They had suffered various injuries from exposure to top-secret and anomalous entities or materials. When asked for his personal opinion about what these suffering people had actually encountered, he said (and I’m paraphrasing): “I believe something else has been here longer than us. Maybe Earth is someone else’s property.”

Two things about this interview gave me pause. First, the scientist struck me—by both his words and demeanor—as an honest but unwise person. Second, he seemed to assume that, because of the nature of the encounter stories, the materials he studied, and the authority of the government officials who delivered them to him, we must be dealing with something that has evolved (a key hidden premise) far beyond us. From there, he made the leap that these entities (if they exist) must also be older than us, superior to us, and in some sense authoritative over us. The hidden premises in that line of thinking abound (and like I said, he seemed unwise). Still, the interview was so compelling that it left me questioning certain things about our place in the world:

Is my belief in biblical history provisional? Is my belief that the Bible is the Word of God—and not merely a record of it—provisional?