We live in the Star Trek generation. Images of space travel are commonplace in movies and on TV. But most of us are oblivious to how drastically our world view has shifted during the past century. I have witnessed much of this shift during my own lifetime.
I grew in up the 1940's and 1950's with uneducated farmers and tradesmen who retained much of the perspective of earlier centuries. One of my mother's cousins questioned the idea that the Earth rotates around the Sun, because Old Testament scriptures in the King James Translation seemed to imply that earth is fixed at the center of the Universe.
Although I heard about the Russian Sputnik, the first satellite ever launched in 1957, my awareness of the stars and galaxies was minimal until I went to Harvard College.
I took a course in Astronomy in 1965. My Professor was Dr. Owen Gingerich. Little did I realize how profoundly this course would change my understanding of the universe. Nor did I realize that Professor Gingerich would become one of the better known and respected astronomers in the world.
Professor Gingerich explained the historical development of Astronomy and taught us the mathematical formulas that are used to calculate the size of the earth and to measure distances to the moon and to the other planets in our solar system.
We studied the great 16th Century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus whose mathematical calculations of planetary orbits demonstrated why the earth could not be the center of the universe as was commonly believed in his era. Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei extended this research which brought a stinging rebuke from the Pope.
But it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that astronomers discovered the full extent of the universe. This required new telescopes and other scientific instruments for observation. The distances of inter stellar space were so vast that entirely new concepts of measurement were needed.
The concept of light years still astounds me. If we could board a space ship and travel at the speed of light (roughly 186,300 miles per second) it would take us more than four years to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. However, traveling at the speed of our most distant space probe, Voyager 1, this journey would require 72,000 years just to reach this nearest star.
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, has an estimated 200 - 400 billion stars that are the size of our sun or up to 100 times larger. The Milky Way stretches about 100,000 light years across. Our neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda, contains about a trillion stars. The universe is estimated to contain 80 billion (or more) galaxies like the Milky Way. The total number of stars is estimated to be more than 50 billion trillion (50 sextillion stars, or 5 x 1022).
I sympathize with the 16th and 17th Century Vatican officials who rejected the revolutionary concept of a universe without the Earth at its center. And I understand the profound religious disturbance which is still being caused by a virtually infinite universe.
This radical development is upsetting the religious views developed over the past 3,000 years. Just when humans believed that we had figured out our World, our God and the Universe, new astronomic information has upset our view of the Cosmos.
The God which humanity had previously conceived of seemed powerful and ancient, but ruling only a single planet, plus some heavenly lights in the sky. (The lesser Greek gods were scarcely beyond the realm of mortals.)
But now we must either dispense with the God concept altogether, or else try to comprehend a Being that is billions or trillions of times larger. This development is profoundly challenging our religious and spiritual concepts. There have been at least four different responses:
1.This new information about the vast scale of universe has caused many people to abandon religion and faith altogether, particularly in the academic and scientific community. The world of faith and spirituality involves a different way of perceiving from the rational calculations of science. Some call this left brain and right brain. While some scientists have no problem using both kinds of thinking, others demand a single rational mode to make ultimate determinations. They want God to be proved by scientific methods, or else abolished completely.
2.Other people have retained religious concepts and practices as useful myths for our rites of passage, but for little more. They have become practical atheists with a nostalgic religious culture.
3.At the other extreme there are religious people who ignore or deny this new scientific information in order to hold on tightly to their historic faith. They view science with extreme skepticism. They see science as the enemy of faith.
4.Finally, some people refuse to discard either the new information coming from scientific observation, or to dispense with findings from the spiritual world. They hold both in dynamic tension. Albert Einstein was in this group and so is my former Professor Owen Gingerich.
He sees the hand of a creator at work in every aspect of nature, from interstellar space to the smallest aspects of the human gene. Dr. Gingerich remarked:
"As we look into the next millennium, we can see some redemption from suffering and evil in the hands of scientists. They can stem the scourge of plagues, can help bring forth more abundant produce from the earth, can tap the abundant energy of sunshine. Yet some of those same keys also unlock biological warfare, can generate monsters, can destroy our atmosphere.
"Salvation does not come from science. Salvation comes from age-old insights into human nature, and the on-going quest to be reconciled to God. It comes from Jesus not only reminding us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but with the parable of the Good Samaritan, where he told us our neighbors can be strangers anywhere."
So what kind of God can we try to imagine? God is not a billion times bigger than before, because God doesn't change. God was just as big when he called Abraham out of Ur and when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
I believe that God is the Source of all music, all inspiration, all knowledge, all design, all thought, all power, and the source of all matter and energy. He inhabits the affairs of the entire universe from immensely large to infinitesimally small. Even the most brilliant human minds today can grasp only a tiny fragment of all that God has created.
The most astonishing thing of all is that this immensely powerful God still communicates with us and nourishes us in more ways than we ever comprehend.