Putting Our Faith in the Stars

We recently had the opportunity to go to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We went down there to see the last launch of the Endeavor space shuttle. We didn't have the opportunity to see the launch, because it was "scrubbed" about three hours prior to the launch time, but we had an great time at the Space Center anyway!

One of my favorite parts was seeing an IMAX movie about the Hubble space telescope. It was truly amazing! The film told us about the telescope, which is up in space, and then showed various images which the Hubble has captured. Sometimes, they would speed up the showing of the images, so that it looked like you were moving through space, among the stars. They chose a pink, milky-looking nebulus near the constellation Orion, and began zooming in closer and closer. Keep in mind that this thing is millions of light years away, and we're pretty much looking into the past, since the time it takes for the light at that moment to reach us is so long.

They described that from this nebulus, stars are "born." And, not just the stars themselves, but whole solar systems are forming and coming out!

I left that day thinking about the Big Bang Theory, which is the most widely supported scientific theory about how the universe as we know it began. I've read a little more about it since coming home, and this is my non-astrophysicist, lay-person's version. It makes some assumptions, like Einstein's theory of general relativity (which I am not an expert on!). We have observed that the universe is expanding, i.e. galaxies are moving further and further from one another. So, from that we deduce that at one time all the matter must have been closer together. So, at the moment of the "big bang", about 13.7 billion years ago, the extremely hot and dense state expanded rapidly. The expansion caused the universe to cool and continue expanding in its "diluted" state, even today.

This begs the question: Where did all of the matter in that hot, dense "ball" come from?

Joseph Pearce gave a talk at a conference I recently attended, and he made a great observation: Something cannot come from nothing. Humans can create some amazing things. Think about a beautiful painting that an artist might "create." But, it's not coming from thin air; he uses the ingredients that are available to him: paint, a paintbrush, the landscape that he sees, a canvas. The same holds true for our "recent" ability to imagine, design, and manufacture cars, cell phones, even space shuttles. We're using what we have available to us to make things.

There is only one person who can create something from nothing - God.

In closing, I came across the John Templeton Foundation recently, whose philanthropic mission is to support "discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality." They try to bring together science, religion, spirituality, etc. to encourage research in everything from "complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will."

Sir John Templeton observed that we have known so little about the physical and spiritual realities of our world, but that we are in a time of human history that our discoveries and our progress are speeding up. We have learned more about the "furthest" star and the "tiniest" cells in the human body in the last hundred or so years. And yet, we still know so little compared to what is unknown (yet still knowable!).

God has revealed himself over time to us. Perhaps at this time in human history, God is revealing himself to us by allowing us to learn more and more about what he has made.

I will thank you, Lord, among the peoples,

among the nations I will praise you

for your love reaches to the heavens

and your truth to the skies.

O God, arise above the heavens;
may your glory shine on earth!
(Psalm 57)