One of the great things about Biblical scholars who are Christian—for sure, a good number of Biblical scholars are not Christian—is that, if they do it right, you’ll get raw commentary with a much narrower range of variation, free from church doctrine or tradition. That might sound anti-Christian, though it’s anything but. There’s a lot of denominational “folklore,” we could say, that’s either a fanciful elaboration on scripture, grabbing hold of conclusions located worlds apart from what the original writers of scripture would even reach for.
The idea of there being one explanation for all alien or UFO phenomenon can be a vast, erroneous assumption, and a lot of Heiser’s ideas on the matter are thoughtful and carefully measured, bringing in scripture where it’s relevant. Though, most popular “relevant” scripture is a lot of that assumptive folklore, both from religious and skeptical views, that try to make scripture say things that it was never meant to say. The Ezekiel 1 vision comes immediately to mind, and Heiser addresses it briefly at 59:20.
He addresses a skeptic’s argument against a divine origin of Ezekiel’s vision. But what about contradicting a religious view? Listen carefully to his explanation starting at 1:06:17 to 1:10:30. The Genesis 1:26-27 narrative only addresses what God did here on Earth, not what He could have done on other planets. That question wouldn’t occur anywhere in the ancient Hebrew man’s mind, because it didn’t concern what he needed to know. Mere head knowledge of what God did elsewhere in the universe was useless, because it didn’t tell the Israelites what was required of then to attain and maintain peace with God. God would have involved alien life in the equation in the first place, if that were the case. Heiser makes an important clarification here that intelligence doesn’t equate to being an image of God. Being an image of God is a title that comes with privileges and obligations. “Image” in this context is not a word describing a set of attributes. But I think Heiser didn’t go quite far enough with his explanation. I don’t think there’s a problem if God created other images of Himself on other planets. It wouldn’t matter if we weren’t special in that regard, as our obligations towards God remain the same. Scripture is silent on whether He actually created alien life or not; neither does it exclude or necessitate it. Jay’s controversial opinion on the topic: God’s original plan was for humanity to spread Eden over the whole Earth, which will continue after the close of our earthly history, a mission fulfilled by those of us who remained faithful to Him to the end. That’s the setup, and I’ll loosely propose here that we will spread Eden to other planets and rule over life that is created there. Why do I think this? Don’t know; it’s simply my conviction. It makes a peculiar sense to me that God wouldn’t want to us stop at one planet, but God isn’t in the business of meeting my expectations. I’m willing to be totally wrong on this idea.