“And we know that Burnouts are prone to fighting; it’s just a matter of time before they attack us.” Channing had heard these reports a hundred times… - Ken Wharton

It was an awfully persuasive theory, he had to admit. And even if it was wrong, he was starting to realize that God had to be an alien. There just wasn’t any other possible explanation. And that really scared him. All his life he had been so sure of his religion. When his daughters had died, it was the only thing he had left to hold on to. But had the devotion of his life to religion been misplaced? No, it couldn’t be. God couldn’t be an electronic alien. There had to be another explanation.…
He forced a stop to that line of thought. He knew a rationalization when he saw it, and he considered himself pretty good at keeping his mind from coming to false conclusions just because of his beliefs. He used to be a scientist, after all. Not someone who would rationalize away clear evidence of aliens just because of some statements in the Journal. He had always told Katrina that if new scientific proof surfaced that his religion was wrong, he would admit he was mistaken. Well, now that had happened. There simply were intelligent aliens in the universe, and he would have to come to grips with it.

"No, no, no," Paul said, shaking his head "Occam's razor. This is getting far too complicated. The simplest explanation is that"—he waved his hand up at the moon—"that God doesn't know what he's talking about."

Feelings of desperation clouded his mind. Could this be? Was this the final trap of a “provable” religion based purely on science? Was it inevitable that advances in scientific knowledge would disprove any religion, given enough time? And if science kept advancing, if they could never know everything, then no religion could ever be eternally true. In his last sermon Paul had claimed that science had backed God into a tiny corner of the unknown; but what if known science was the tiny corner, and the unknown lay vaster than anyone had imagined? If so, how could any religion ever claim to be compatible with science?