Mystery and Wonder Alongside of Knowledge

Recently I wrote that knowledge, even of a definite sort, is completely compatible with mystery, wonder, and worship. Today I experienced it. This morning at our church's regular Tuesday men's breakfast, a NASA scientist gave a cognitive, rational, scientific presentation that left men weeping with appreciation for the greatness and glory of God.

We're located near the NASA Langley Research Center, so when people joke, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out..." we have church members who could answer, "Well, if it did, I could be of assistance." One of them (who would never actually say that) brought printouts of this ultra-deep-field Hubble telescope image to breakfast this morning. (Click on the picture for a larger version, or here for a very large, 3100x3100 jpg.) He shared several fascinating facts about it. All of the bright points of light you see there are galaxies--there are no individual stars visible there. The full-resolution version shows a total of about 10,000 galaxies. This comes from a slice so thin that if the Hubble were used to survey all of space at this scale, it would require about 1.43*10^14 (143 trillion) pictures to cover it all. It could never be done, though, for this was a 1 million-second exposure--it took more than 11 days to capture this distant light.

Now, look at one of the tiniest dots of light. It's a galaxy (they all are). If the one you've chosen is approximately similar to our galaxy, as many of them are, it would take 100,000 years for light to travel from one side of that tiny dot to the other, at 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. Now, I'm hoping that if light has that much time to spare, you might have a few seconds also. Take a few unhurried moments with this picture in the largest resolution your computer can manage. (It's a gorgeous piece of art.) Just pause to reflect on the immensity of what this represents. How far apart do you think these galaxies are from each other? They look like such close neighbors. (Our own nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is about 2 million light years from the Milky Way.) How far do you think it is between galaxies at opposite sides of this image? Yet it's such a tiny portion of the sky!

My friend, the presenter this morning, said an atheistic colleague had told him, "I just can't imagine a God big enough to make all this happen." My friend was at first inclined to disagree. But then, he told us, he came full circle: "I, too, cannot imagine a God big enough to do this." Not that God couldn't do it, but that his vastness, his glory, his power, his wisdom are beyond all human imagining.

He coupled this with some Scriptures, of which I'll share a few:

Psalm 19:1-3
The heavens declare the glory of God;
         And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Day unto day utters speech,
         And night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language
         Where their voice is not heard.

Psalm 8:3-4

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

What is man that You are mindful of him,

And the son of man that You visit him?

Psalm 103:11-12

For as the heavens are high above the earth,

So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him;

As far as the east is from the west,

So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

This great, vast, unimaginable God has seen fit to show us his glory, to share part of it with us, to fling our sins, as it were, into the farthest reaches of the cosmos. What indeed are we, that God is mindful of us? Yet we have his Word to show that he knows us and loves us.

After this presentation today we had a few minutes for each table group to reflect on it all. Then another church member--a NASA engineering supervisor, this time--got up to close our time. Even though we have a strict rule of ending on time so men can get to work, we almost shouted him down. We all wanted to remain in the glory of what we had seen. He himself was struggling, for he had been moved to tears.

As I said, today I experienced the way knowledge can lead to worship and wonder. I've tried in a meager way to share the experience with you, to remind us all that knowledge--even certainty--does not "put God in a box," as some say. It magnifies him.

Posted: Tue - June 19, 2007 at 09:33 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Mystery and Wonder Alongside of Knowledge

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson