Stars

Stars

Psalm 19:1-4

Albert Einstein once said:

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

One of the tragedies of modern man is the loss of mystery. We have grown so accustomed to breakthroughs, discoveries and technology that we have become perpetually unimpressed. Startling new advances barley capture our attention. And why should they when they are announced everyday? Mystery has become something of an endangered animal in our world. And the tragic result is that we have become inoculated against awe and resistant to a sense of wonder.

Think about it. When was the last time you took time to pause in wonder, and stand in rapt awe as you stared into the night sky? I am not talking about just a fleeting glance. I am talking about a long lingering look into the heavens.

For as much as we know and as advanced as we have become, there is still one place where mystery is the rule and not the exception, and that is the sky. But the problem is we hardly ever look up anymore. We scurry around from task to task so preoccupied with the little things in front of us that we never stop to take in the majestic things above us.

How long has it been since you laid in the grass and looked for Orion’s belt or pointed out the big dipper to your children or grandchildren. Taking valuable time to stare at the stars seems wasteful, frivolous, maybe even childish to our overscheduled selves.

But if we don’t stop to ponder and wonder. If we never pause long enough to be overwhelmed with the size and grandure of the universe then Einstein is right… we are as good as dead.

Psalm 19 we read

1 The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

2 Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

According to Psalm 19 The heavens show us the handiwork of God. The stars are a display of his creativity and his power. The universe is a testimony to his wisdom. If what we see in the sky was made on purpose, then it was made for purpose.

But the past couple of centuries of scientific observation seem to have proven just the opposite.

For thousands of years it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that sun and planets and stars revolved around us.

Then in 1530 Nicolas Copernicas, the father of astronomy shocked the world when he declared that the earth revolved around the sun. The catholic church rejected his findings.

Copernican Principle became the…

Principle of Mediocrity

Our location and status are mediocre or unexceptional. Therefore we should not assume that we are privileged or that the Universe was designed with us in mind.

Over the years the Principle of Mediocrity was continuously. Up until the 920’s it was believed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, wasn’t just another galaxy, but the universe itself.

But at the Mount Wilson Observatory Edwin Hubble began photographing patches of indistinguishable light. These fuzzy patches of light were thought to be nothing more than collections of gasses and dust. But Hubble proved that each one was a completely different galaxy, some even larger than our own. And the the universe got much much bigger almost overnight. How big?

This picture was taken with the Hubble space Telescope it shows almost 1500 galaxies. What is remarkable is that the telescope was focused on a speck of sky the size of a dime located 75 feet away. This is a keyhole view of the universe.

In 1991 Voyager 1 turned back toward the sun and snapped this picture. That tiny dot framed by the sunlight is the earth from 4 billion miles away. In 1994 Carl Sagan wrote a book called Pale Blue Dot and in it he uses this photo as a metaphor for our insignificance.

“Because of the reflection of sunlight the earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it is just an accident of geometry and optics. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” Carl Sagan

According to Sagan and the popular thinking we live on a pale blue dot, that orbits an unremarkable star located in a galaxy that is no different from a million others throughout the universe. The only think the stars tell us were small, insignificant, and purposeless or that _____ Other than that We mediocre and without meaning. And they certainly have nothing to say about God or a Creator