The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View. . .

OUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE

Some years back a woman philosopher concluded her remarks about the marvels of nature with “I accept the universe.” Some of her colleagues considered it an odd statement, one of them quipping, “My God, she’d better!”

In her defense I suggest that her attitude of acceptance has merit, not to imply that the universe is in any wise dependent on the acceptance of any of us. But the lady could have meant that as one stands in awe before the bewildering universe about all she can do is to accept it humbly. She may have been saying that one can accept it, with all of its mysteries, better than she can explain it. Perhaps she was saying that the universe doesn’t have to be explained, but simply accepted, in faith. Even scientists “walk by faith” more than they may realize.

Shakespeare may have thought like that woman when he wrote, “In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, A little I can read.” But it was Blaise Pascal, who was eminently Christian, who said it best of all:

All this visible universe is only an imperceptible point in the vast bosom of nature. The mind of man cannot grasp it. It is vain that we try to stretch our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; We bring before the mind’s eye merely atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, the strongest proof of God is that our imagination loses itself in the conception.

Awed as they were, Shakespeare and Pascal lived in an age when man supposed his own universe (our galaxy) was all there is, which was clearly enough! But now scientists speak of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of millions of galaxies. Each galaxy has billions of solar masses, some having as many as 200 billion. The distances involved are overwhelming, such as one galaxy that has been measured as being 1,200 million light-years from us. You know that a light-year is the distance light travels, at 186,000 miles per second, in a year, which makes a light-year about six million million miles. Multiply that by 1,200 million and you get some notion of what “space” is about.

But that is only a small part of the story, for space is apparently infinite, and the galaxies keep moving farther out into space, farther from us and farther from each other. And there are billions and billions of stars even in our own galaxy, multiplied trillions throughout the universe. And astronomers figure that there are galaxies beyond the known galaxies, ad infinitum. Pascal was right in saying that infinite space is beyond our comprehension. It is baffling to imagine a space ship off course moving endlessly into space, forever. I suppose Einstein would say that the ship would move in a curve rather than a straight line since space is curved, assuming the ship to be mobile. But what is infinite curved space?

Everything is moving, turning on its axis or rotating or both. Our little earth, hardly of respectable size in this larger picture, does both. Not only do we make a complete turn every 24 hours, but we travel 186 million miles in our journey around the sun every year. How shattering it must have been when Copernicus laid bare the fact that this earth is not the center of the universe with everything revolving around it, but hardly more than a speck that revolves around the sun, along with other planets. And now we know there are countless suns (stars), solar systems, and galaxies. Should we be tossed at random into our larger universe with the power to move as fast as light, we might search forever and never find our earth. It should humble us, to say the least, that in terms of the vast physical universe we do not count for much.

We have come a long way since man believed that this earth was the center of all reality, mounted on an elephant’s back that stood on a giant turtle. One wonders if anyone bothered to ask what the turtle stood on!

Perhaps things have happened too fast. Much of what we call “modern civilization” --- the printing press, the cotton gin, the steam engine, the telescope and microscope, the automobile and the airplane, radio and TV, and finally the space age --- are of recent date. Jesus and those who walked with him knew of no such world, and we may presume that they viewed the universe as did other prescientific men. Maybe it doesn’t matter, for the kingdom of God does not depend on modern science, even if the kingdom might use modern science. Some of us may feel as did Herbert Hoover at the launching of Telstar: “The electronics men have gone beyond my comprehension. I belong to a generation that just doesn’t grasp all that.”

Among the things beyond my grasp is that there are these distant stars that may have ceased to exist millions of years ago, but still we see them! And I can hardly believe it when astronomers tell of distant galaxies that send out radio waves that they can now read on their receivers! Man spent centuries inventing ways to send out radio waves, but the stars have been doing it all along, without any help from us! Then there is gravity everywhere, they tell us, otherwise the galaxies would run together in one vast mass of matter! And everything is moving, rotating, evolving, changing, some things very slowly and others very rapidly, as if they were on schedule, and it is more orderly than chaotic. The evidence would suggest that there is someone in charge, whom Aristotle was content to call the Unmoved Mover, but the scientists do not concern themselves especially with that question.

Harrison Brown, an expert on the composition of meteorites, is my favorite physical scientist, perhaps because he concedes that life may be a miracle. He thinks we might one day find life on Mars or Venus (the moon is too small and Jupiter too large; Mercury is too hot and Neptune too cold), and in that event the implications would be staggering. He points out that there must be a million billion stars or suns that have planets traveling in orbit about them. So if there is life on Mars, Brown insists, there could easily be a thousand billion planets in our visible universe with intelligent life of some kind!

The Creator could, of course, have many, many kinds of beings besides human beings and angels. And if there were other beings similar to our physical and mental makeup they would not necessarily have to be flawed by sin like human kind. The Creator could well be conducting dramas of infinite variety on stages throughout the universe. And since the promise is ours of “new heavens and new earth” it may be that distant galaxies will playa part in the blessings of the redeemed. Wouldn’t it be something to visit the Father’s glorious handiwork in an eternity of galaxies, moving from one to another as rapidly as the mind can think? And since it is virtually certain that we will have work to do in eternity, we might have assignments on these distant planets, which will no longer be distant.

All of this is of course speculation, but speculation is in order in the face of the universe of which we are a part. The poet David speculated as he was awed by such wonders as we are now discussing. “When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers,” he mused before the Creator, “the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him.” (Ps. 8:3). And if the psalmist had known of the far reaching galaxies, he would have been sure that God had not only placed them there but that he was there, for he could write:
 

Where can I go from thy Spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend into heaven, thou art there;

If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning,

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there thy hand shall hold me. (Psa. 139)

Here we have the only answer we need regarding our place in what we now know to be an immense universe: God is its creator and he is in control. And as for our insignificant little earth that insignificance is our glory, for the Creator himself has visited our planet and made us in his own image. Whatever he may have done elsewhere in the universe, nothing detracts from that great truth. “God so loved the world that he gave his own son” shows us where we stand, regardless of the measure of his grace elsewhere. And what can excel the gift of the Father giving himself? So we must conclude that no other creatures are as wonderfully blessed, perhaps because they do not need to be.

That modern science helps us to believe in an ordered and purposeful universe may be illustrated by facts recently discovered about the lowly atom, which is a universe all of its own. One scientist, so as to show how tiny an atom is, observed that if all the atoms in an average human body (an octillion in number) were turned into garden peas it would take not only the earth and 250 planets of our own system to hold them (at a depth of four feet), but 250,000 planets in the farther reaches of space, each the size of the earth, to hold them all, an octillion peas! So we can see that we have a complicated universe of minute realities within our own bodies.

This is especially evident when we move inside the atom and take a look. This same scientist noted that if by some magic pill a human body grew to be 150 million miles tall (he could hold Venus in one hand and Mercury in the other!), an atom would then be about the size of an indoor football stadium. Stepping inside this expanded atom, one would see some twenty luminous balls the size of footballs, moving in great circles like planets around the sun. These are electrons, and they are held on course by a tiny whirling point of light the size of the head of a pin, which is the atomic “sun” or the nucleus of the atom. This is the center of atomic power, which, even when the atom is expanded to the size of a football field is still no larger than a pin head.

The rest of the atom, which is most of it, is empty space, which means that if our bodies had all the “space” squeezed out we would be a bare speck!

Recent study of the atom reveals that there is more going on than orbiting neutrons. There are ripples and waves, such as one sees when a stone is thrown into water, and these fill the entire atom and form wave patterns. If we could put on an atomic hearing aid we would hear music like a hundred great pipe organs playing at once. One atom “sings” and it is answered by all other atoms, so that the total human body (and all matter) is music. The old philosophers had a point, according to modern science, when they spoke of “the music of the spheres.” Atoms are music, which means that everything, including the vast recesses of our universe, is one grand musical concert!

Scientists do not know what this music is, but it is evident that there is more involved than mere mechanical processes. While science once supposed that the whole is the sum total of the parts, they now see that the whole is more than the sum total of the parts. They now speak of “spark of life” or “spirit” or “soul” in explaining the nature of things. Now that we can view the universe as “a new invisible world of music,” as one scientist puts it, we can see that there is a place for faith.

And all this magnanimity should have some impact on our everyday life, at least in the way it did on Sam Golden, who told this story years ago in The South Carolina Israelite. The waitress had brought him lima beans instead of the green beans he ordered. In his fury he insisted that she get his order right, but while she was doing so he got to thinking about the universe --- the speed of light, the distant stars and galaxies, the movement of the planets. By the time she returned he was saying to himself, “What the hell does it matter whether I got green beans or limas!” Perhaps more of that kind of “universal” thinking would stop quarrels at home and at church before they ever start.

The Christian’s affirmation has always been what science now confirms: about five billion years ago (or however long) there was an initial event, a time when everything started, a time of creation. Since all these things seem traceable to light, the answer is in Scripture: in the beginning God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Do we really need any other answer, regardless of the immensity of the mystery?

And this gives us faith that God has not only put purpose and order in all things, but that he remains in control and will use them all to his glory.

While writing these words a neighbor, who is a teacher, showed me the wasp nest a little one gave to her, awed as he was by its intricate design that no hands could make. The God that put purpose and design in the atoms of the naughty wasp, who can build its nest without a single lesson, has endowed the vast universe with something of himself.

If we see nothing else in this kind of thinking, we can at least realize that, like that little boy, we ought to be awed. And if we can be sufficiently awed by God’s handiwork, that may be enough. That might be reason enough for him hanging it all out there for us to see, study, and explore.

What a tragedy it is if we never look up and wonder! --- the Editor

All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures . . . From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. --- Sir James Hopwood Jeans