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Let’s talk about how this Cosmology, our understanding of the Creation and how we fit in it, and how it has changed over the last 3,000 years starting with King David. When King David stood under a starry sky one night and wrote “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” he most likely understood himself to be standing on a flat earth that was somehow fixed in a huge bubble that God had created in the midst of primordial waters. He would have believed that the sun and the moon revolved around the earth and that the stars were fixed in their places. He would not have known of the existence of other planets or even what a planet was. David lived around 1000 BC.
1,200 years later in the 2nd Century AD a Greek scientist named Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote a book called The Almagest in which he described the motions of celestial objects as he saw them. He was the first to really write down what is known as the geocentric or earth-centered model of the universe. Like David he believed the earth was flat and that the sun and moon and also the stars orbited around the earth. But, he also described the movement of some strange objects called planets or planets, which means wanderers. These wanderers, like stars, were lights in the sky but they weren’t fixed in place and seemed wander around. They even appeared to move backwards at times.
Apart from a few wackos, geo-centrism was the way nearly all cultures understood the universe, from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Hindi to the Europeans. But this all changed in the 1500’s with a few key events. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the globe proving that the Earth was round rather than flat. So, now we have a round earth not flat. Then in 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres and offered a heliocentric or sun-centered model of the universe in which the planets including the Earth and the stars revolved around the Sun making it the centre of the universe. He was also a proponent of the theory that Earth spun on an axis.
Thus, the beginning Copernican Revolution, a rotating Earth that orbits the sun. But it took a little over 50 years, Galileo’s Telescope, and Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets for the Copernican Revolution to truly kick in. Not surprisingly, the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and John Calvin all thought Copernicus’ theories to be heretical, contradicting Genesis One. The relationship between Church and Science is as embarrassing as the relationship between Church and State.
It took about another 150 years for the idea of a galaxy to come about. If you go outside on a clear, dark night, you can see a thick band of stars that crosses the sky called the Milky Way. In the early 1600’s Galileo was the first to say that the Milky Way consisted of stars rather than just being a very distant band of fire. In 1750 on the coattails of Galileo’s telescope and Sir Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity an Englishman named Thomas Wright suggested that our sun is just one of thousands of stars revolving around a central point and this galaxy looks like a mostly flat disk. He was spot on. Yet, little did he know that at the centre of the Milky Way there lurks a supermassive blackhole. It’s taken the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking and telescopes that see the light of Gamma rays and x-rays and radio signals to establish that.
Today, We have since come to accept that the Milky Way consists of of upwards of about 400 billion stars maybe even a trillion if you count proto-stars and it is between 100,000-180,000 light years across. If you want to think about planets, it would be a gross underestimation that there are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way and that 40 billion of those, like Earth, are in habitable zones creating a possibility for life as we know it. We know our Solar System is on an inner-edge of a spiral arm located 27,000 light years from the centre of our galaxy. It takes roughly 240 million years to make a full revolution. So, the last time Earth was here dinosaurs were just about to begin their dominance of life on earth.
Well, there’s more. The Milky Way isn’t alone. Almost 100 years ago Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the Hubble telescope, stared into the heavens from the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California through the then monstrous 100-inch mirror of the Hooker Telescope and discovered that what we had been calling the Andromeda Nebulae was too far away to be a part of the Milky Way. It was another galaxy all together, the Andromeda Galaxy. He then went on to discover more and more galaxies and also noticed that these galaxies were tinted red which meant they were moving away from each other and from us which meant the universe was expanding.
We have very recently, in the last twenty years come to know that not only is the universe expanding it is weirdly accelerating as it expands. It should be slowing down. Scientists believe the cause of this accelerating expansion is something called Dark Energy which makes up about 70 percent of the stuff in the universe. There is also Dark Matter out there making up about 25 percent of the rest of the stuff. Its dark because it doesn’t interact with the light particle, the photon, which means it doesn’t light up. Astrologist have also noticed that the Dark Matter seems to spider-web across the universe and where strings cross, so to speak, that’s where galaxies are.
Now think of this. 95% of the stuff in our universe (We may live I a multi-verse or be just one of an infinite number of universes) is Dark. We can’t see it, but we know it’s because of its gravitational effect on the 5% we can see. Did you catch that? We can only see 5% of all the stuff in our universe.
What do we know about the five percent? Well, the light from the furthest objects that we can see took almost 13.8 billion light years to get here. The estimate today is that there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe each of which contains anywhere from 1,000 to 1 trillion stars. We cannot imagine the number of planets that might be out there let alone habitable ones.
Because the universe is expanding most astrophysicists say that it began with a Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago and they will use the word “created” and the phrase “created out of nothing”. Many scientists today actually do believe in God and like David stare in awe and wonder at the universe God created. When David looked at the heavens, he didn’t have a clue and it’s likely that today’s science has only scratched the surface. But let’s stop there for a moment because David was looking at the vastness of the universe and contemplating how it is that the God who created it could love humans.
David asked a second question, “What is humankind that you are mindful of him, the son of Adam that you care for him?” he likely believed that his line of descendants began with a man named Adam whom God formed from the dust of the earth and a woman Eve from one of his ribs and from those two came humanity. He would also have believed there were other heavenly beings – angels and other gods. One thing he certainly understood is humanity’s insignificance, our weakness, our smallness before the greatness of the heavens, but also, that there is something remarkable about us. God made us a little lower than the heavenly beings, yet has given us dominion over his creation to be his vice-regent.
Well, even science says we have a special place in the universe. When we look at the universe from the infinitesimally small side, it is accepted that all the stuff in the universe, the energy and particles from which atoms are made were contained in one very small extremely dense super-particle that God created out of nothing that exploded to become this big universe.
Early on hydrogen and helium formed and then gravity pulled together super-massive stars that lived for a few billion years and then exploded. These massive explosions, or supernovae, provided the energy to form the dust of slightly heavier atoms one of these being carbon upon which life as we know it is based and blew this stardust across the universe.
This stardust formed into more stars and then planets. In fact, the particles which form the atoms which form the molecules which form the cells of which we each consist have been around from the very beginning getting rearranged by different forces until finally here on planet Earth there is life, life of varying kinds. Some life forms here on Earth eat rocks and some even need sulphuric acid to live. We humans are special in that we are the part of the universe that is able to understand the universe. Someone once said, maybe it was Carl Sagan, “The universe has an interesting sense of irony, in that you are the universe experiencing itself.” I won’t mention the strong possibility of alien life.
We are indeed quite wonderful. Just think of our eyes. In these eyes through which we stare at the heavens and behold the majesty of God, in just one of them, there are about 130 million photoreceptor cells. In just one of those cells there are over 100 trillion atoms, way more atoms than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, in one tiny cell of your eye. Get this. When we stare into the stars with these eyes we are actually looking back in time because it takes light time to get from there to here. We can actually see the very remnants of supernovae which we call quasars billons of lights years away that may have been the supernovae that provided the stardust out of which this solar system, this planet, and each of us is made. Wow!
With these eyes we cannot see the edge of the universe, but get this, with our ears we can hear it. The Big Bang produced a remnant of sound that permeates the universe. When I was a kid TV stations went off the air shortly after midnight leaving my little black and white TV hissing with static. This will blow your mind. About one percent of that noise was produced by the Big Bang. Through something as simple as our little black and white TV sets the very beginning of the universe can say, “Here I am.”
When we consider all this, David was indeed right when he wrote in Psalm 139:14 we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Yet, we are more than just stardust that has evolved to be able to observe and understand bits and pieces of this mind-blowing universe. We are the part of the universe God has created to know and love him and to give voice to the praise the Creation offers its Maker. Everywhere, from the biggest galaxy to the smallest particle, every part of the Creation when you take the time to look at it loudly proclaims, “If you think I’m wonderful consider the One who made me.” And when we do, we, like David, say, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name.”
The awesome God who created this inconceivably huge and wonderful universe loves us each. We here the static of the Big Bang. God hears the static of our prayers - and answers. Then there’s Jesus. In, through, and as Jesus Christ by the powerful working and presence of the Holy Spirit God became human and God continues to embody Godself by pouring the Holy Spirit into human community called the Church. But, try not to think the institution of the Church, think followers of Jesus in relationship to each other embodied by the Holy Spirit who can’t be seen. In Christian communities all over this planet God is making humans to look less like a virus in his good Creation and more like himself in the love we share, the love God demonstrated in Jesus giving his life for us and which God pours into our hearts with the gift of his very self, the Holy Spirit. Jesus, God the Son becoming human, his death, and his resurrection was a new Big Bang. Each of us in Christ are New Creation and the God of the universe calls us each his beloved child. If you think the universe is awesome, take a look at yourself and who you are in Christ Jesus and consider the awesomeness of that. Amen.
