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 Review #4827857 |
 | Who owns the Planet?  [E] A writing for contest "To Grill a Christian." July 2025  |
| (3.0)| Hello Apondia . Thank you for entering this month's contest.
As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Who owns the Planet?"  Did you answer the question?At the start of the account, you seemed a little distracted by Michael Faber's theme of taking the gospel to aliens. I did not ask about aliens nor the challenges of moulding a gospel message for intelligent species who did not experience the incarnation of God as Man. But the rest of what you wrote was relevant to the topic at hand. Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?The text read a little like abbreviated notes on various themes at times, and it needed more work to integrate the various subjects discussed. I got the impression you abbreviated a larger AI-derived answer into your own words, but did not check your grammar or the flow of what you wrote. How consistent was your argument?At the beginning of your account, the implication was that God created our planet, but then, after that, He may have created other planets with other lifeforms on them. But later, you quote from Bible passages that make clear that God created the universe all at once, and that would surely also have included other planets then. Some of course have been visible to the human eye since life began on Earth, e.g., Venus (the morning star), Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Your text describes both progressive acts of creation and the ex nihilo main event. For some Christians, this is a contradiction. He either did it all at once and proclaimed it good. Or He is continually adding to what is now a broken universe (since the Fall, Flood, and Angelic Fiddling). If God is adding perfect creations to a flawed and broken universe, that would read a little like pouring new wine into old wineskins - a thing God says He does not do. The Christian hope is rather for a complete renovation of creation after the Judgment. My thoughts on the substance of what you saidIt was a good question to ask as to whether theology needs to change to accommodate new possibilities like space travel. In one sense, you are right that theology relates to a relationship with God that is not conditional on context. Even a Second Coming to a particular place on a particular planet does not change the impact of the event itself on the whole of God's creation, though it would give the event a geocentric and anthropocentric significance. Of course, if aliens exist and if they have alternate theologies, the remaking of the universe that follows the specifically human experience of the Second Coming is rendered somewhat complicated. You assume life evolved here and must therefore also evolve elsewhere. Chemical evolution is called abiogenesis and is different from biological evolution, which is what we usually mean when we speak of evolution. The Drake equation postulates, based on abiogenesis on our planet being a fact and the probability therefore that it occurs elsewhere, that there must be other inhabited worlds out there. But if the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground in a special act of creation, the assumption that He has crafted other worlds and created other life than that which we have experienced and labelled on this planet is speculative. Abiogenesis as a mechanism has no supporting evidence at all and has never been demonstrated by the scientific method. I liked your notion of timing being related to the problems that humans face and must solve. There is a time to be earthbound and a time to fly to the stars. You could have said more about what kinds of pressures might compel this endeavor. You mentioned curiosity as being a driver, but what about: mineral shortages; environmental catastrophes; asteroid strikes; wars; political or religious persecution; demographic pressure; or the desire for a better life? It is also possible that God has set limits we cannot cross - for example, extra-solar system travel to habitable worlds, that might not even exist, would take decades if not centuries with current technologies. Mechanical issuesThis sentence is too long and could be broken up into shorter sentences. Alternatively, since you are using an essay format, you could have made a numbered or bulleted list here. I’m influenced by the fact, when humans conquered trips to the moon, they began to send rockets into the suns burning aura, putting robotics on Mars, putting telescopes into space to watch for life, recording sounds which hit earth from outer space, basically collecting scientific data for lots of different ideas about space travel. Our ability to deal with what comes next in a way that follows the laws of the earth and universe are holding back our progress. Quillbot and other AI tools often get a lot of stuff wrong. A classic example is plural and singular in sentences that lack commas - the grammar tool sees the plural the laws of the earth and universe and applies an are to that. But the actual subject of the sentence is surely our ability, which is singular, so you need to use is instead. The corrected sentence reads: Our ability to deal with what comes next, in a way that follows the laws of the earth and universe, is holding back our progress. Unfortunately, the corrected sentence also makes no sense. Our ability is a positive that should surely solve the problem, but here it is regarded as holding back our progress. So I think you meant: Our lack of ability to deal with what comes next, in a way that follows the laws of the earth and universe, is holding back our progress. There are a lot of examples of poorly constructed sentences like this. This disrupts the flow for a reader and undermines the power of your message. Thanks again for entering. LightinMind
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 08/01/2025 @ 12:00pm EDT