One thing I plan not to do here is jab at your Christian walk based on your belief of alien intelligence. :) My goodness.
God could -- in His infinitude, and because it pleases Him to do so, and since as His creation I cannot truly object to what pleases Him, and I must leave to Him to do according to the counsel of His own will -- create any number of planets with any forms of intelligent life that He saw fit to create. After all, before He created us, He created the angelic hosts. The realm(s) in which they exist
is fully His decision, just like He has determined where men shall live (Acts 17:26).
It does not shake my faith or belief one iota. In fact, in some ways I suppose it could increase my understanding of Him, and that is a blessing.
But, if He has created extraterrestrial-but-planetary alien intelligent life, I doubt we'll ever know it in this life. Why not?
First, we've been here this long and there's no reason to think they'll arrive, and there's no reason to think we'll reach them --- even by radio signals traveling at the speed of light through the cosmos.
Secondly, if He had intended to reveal Himself to us through that kind of creation by Him, it seems to me that He would've fit that kind of revelation up under the revelation of Himself to us in Christ. It would require a wholly new invention of exegesis and interpretation to make that work, and we're not up to task and never will be, IMO. Can you imagine? We can't even figure out if these recent "blood moons" matter or if there's a Shemitah up in here, and we sure can't agree on how to understand Scripture with those simple things. How could we ever hope that morons like us** would ever reach the knowledge of how alien intelligent life reflects the Scriptural revelation of God in Christ?(**NOTE, my tongue is in my cheek here!! I say that about myself as Chief Moron and the rest of you as lesser morons or comparative geniuses about life in general, although when compared to God Himself we haven't even learned to mumble coherently. Please don't be offended. I'm joking.)
Third, it appears the most we'll be able to do scientifically is surmise the existence of these intelligent beings. All of the instruments we've spent billions of dollars to float around the earth or to sail the seas of our solar system and beyond, and we've made enormous artwork of it. We are bedazzled by pictures and the oversimplified, crayon-written explanations by journalists. And, what we have are theories. Some theories are based on equations and probabilities all of which require that some variables are manipulated by sheer assumption or at least by presupposition that is supported by less than certain data. Other theories are arrived at by theoretical physicists who, as the very name implies, create theories for a living and have a vested interest in occasionally hitting upon something that they can make appear as actual. We don't even have the level of proof that it takes to convict somebody of a crime -- and THAT level of proof is expressly less than "scientific proof"***
(***NOTE: Proof beyond reasonable doubt is almost universally defined in the US as not requiring proof to a scientific certainty, although the CSI shows and Forensic Files, etc., would create the opposite yet very untrue impression.)
It is, in part perhaps, because we are willing to accept partial proof as total proof in areas of our common experience that we are compelled a bit to side with the scientists in filling in gaps between what is known and what is theorized. But, even the scientists do not have "experience" in these things since none of them has ever found an inhabited planet -- or a necessarily habitable one -- with intelligent life beyond this one. They get paid to a whole lot of looking for it, but there is no base of experience in their failed searching that will ever lead me to give them a benefit of doubt in their theories on this particular question.
