KNOWLEDGE IN THE NIGHT
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” (Psalm 19:1,2)
If we lived in a world without night, we would never realize that we reside in an immense universe of breathtaking elegance. After dark when the lights are on inside our homes, the normally transparent windows become just a black, opaque wall. Only when the lights are off can we see through them.
By comparison, what we call the sky is really like a window. In a world of perpetual sunshine, we would perceive only a blue dome overhead, but on a sphere marvelously designed to feature both day and night, we are able on clear nights to see through the window of the sky and gaze into the vault of heaven. And what we behold there sends out a constant proclamation.
What is it saying?
SIZE
The universe is a place of unimaginable scale, staggering dynamism, and piercing beauty. Consider, for example, that light travels at a blistering 186,282 miles per second. Now imagine that if you could ride on a beam of light, it would still take you 45 billion years or so to traverse the space that is visible from earth.
At that rate, of course, units like miles become useless as a means to measure things. On an astronomical scale, a piece of paper (not to mention the human brain!) simply cannot contain all the figures. The cosmos around us is like a spotlight that is shining on the greatness of its maker with an intensity that should be hard to miss.
NUMBERS
So much for size; what about numbers? As man has pointed increasingly powerful telescopes into the immensity of space, he has discovered far more than the already impressive several thousand stars visible to us (and Abraham) with the naked eye. We now believe there may be as many as 300 sextillion stars. That is a three followed by twenty-three zeroes!
How can we grasp such a figure? Try writing it out on a piece of paper. Better yet, next time you are at a beach, survey the expanse of sand around you. Scoop up a handful and run the grains through your fingers, while letting it sink in that there are perhaps tens of thousands of stars in space for every single grain of sand on the entire earth.
Then try and imagine the staggering size, temperature, and energy of even one of these blazing suns. Our own sun is a convulsing cauldron of unimaginable power. Though humdrum by stellar standards, it could contain 1.3 million earths; it reaches 27,000,000 degrees F at its core; and it emits the energy of one hundred billion exploding hydrogen bombs every second!
ORGANIZATION AND COMPLEXITY
It is astounding that at the very instant of creation, everything that was ever to exist had to be perfectly planned, and all the laws governing reality had to be already in place. There would be no time afterward for amendments to the constitution of the universe.
From the beginning God had to build into the very substance of reality the precepts that govern physics, chemistry, and biology. Among these rigid prerequisites are constants like the force of gravity (too strong and we would be crushed; too weak and we would float away from earth), the ratio of protons to electrons, the mass of protons and electrons, the velocity of light, and countless other parameters.
That our universe does exist just so, with all its various dials turned exactly to the right setting, has been seen as an enormous “coincidence” by many scientists. Some have referred to it as “the Goldilocks effect” – the idea being that the universe must be exactly as it is, just as the porridge in the children’s story had to be neither too hot nor too cold.
The non-Christian astronomer Fred Hoyle observes:
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.
A FINE-TUNED INSTRUMENT
Have you ever heard a musical instrument that is out of tune? For a beautiful chord to sound from a guitar, all the strings have to be tuned to exactly the right frequency. If any is out of tune, the resulting sound is not simply inaccurate; it is simply awful!
In the same manner, the universe is like a majestic, unspeakably complex musical instrument. There are innumerable variables that could exist in any potential universe, but if any of these factors had been off just a small amount, if any of the “strings” had been out of tune, the result would not have been simply cacophony, but uninhabitable chaos.
At the striking of the first chord, when God said, “Let there be light,” the magnificent instrument of the universe had to be precisely tuned for the music of creation to sound into the formless void. This harmony is regulated by what scientists call laws.
A law is just a reproducible truth, an inherent property of nature that seems to determine how the material world is allowed to function. Such laws are discovered by observation and experimentation and are typically expressed as either mathematical equations or verbal descriptions.
For example, probably the most well-known scientific law of modern times is Einstein’s relativistic formula that demonstrates that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing:
E=mc2
Such dictates appear to be embedded in the very makeup of creation, ratified by a force beyond nature from the beginning of time. For instance, your math teacher did not just decide that 2+2=4. That fact was already built into reality, and we simply figured it out.
The laws of science are universal and immutable. They seem to hold true at all physical locations and at all points in time. For example, the genius Isaac Newton made the leap of insight that the same force that pulled an apple down onto his head also regulates the orbits of all the celestial bodies.
His theory was later proven through experiments, so that today when an astronomer studies a heavenly object, he or she can be confident that the gravitational laws governing it are identical to the ones we see in an orchard on earth. Without this universality, science would have no basis to conclude anything.
Humans can discover laws like this, and at times even use them to our advantage, but we can neither create nor violate these injunctions. Beyond and before nature, somewhere there must be a prime lawgiver. Considering what we have just learned, what must he be like?
BACK TO EARTH
“Look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them,” God challenges Abraham (Genesis 15:5). This dare is issued in the context of God’s covenant with Abraham to fulfill His promises through a son.
But this is a command given not simply to answer a question. It is to address a wrenching emptiness. We can feel Abraham’s heartache behind his plea: “O Lord God, what will you give me, since I am childless?”
Do you have a similar phrase in your own heart that you repeat regularly – something like, “What will you give me, since I am ____.” Fill in the blank: infertile, guilty, depressed, worthless, tired, unappreciated, sick, forsaken, confused.
Yet as Abraham obeyed God’s instruction, turning his wondering gaze up to a canopy of twinkling lights, the message must have become clear. Whoever created all of this will certainly make good on any pledge he gives!