The big picture

 

Most of us look at the world based on the here and now. The community that we are part of, the area we live in, the country we inhabit. Religion is seen by many as a thing of the past in today’s technologically advanced western society. But are we in danger of being a little short-sighted?

We often get so preoccupied with our issues here on Earth that we forget we are part of the grand cosmic arena.

Let us zoom out from our planet and observe our actions and values from a distance. In the words of astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, seeing Earth from space causes one to “develop an instant global consciousness…” He goes on to point out that “From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ 

 

Zoom out again.

In 1990, when Voyager 1 was some 4 million miles from Earth. NASA engineers turned the spacecraft around for one last look at Earth from 4 billion miles away.

The picture that was taken depicts Earth as a tiny point of light—a “pale blue dot,” as it was called—only 0.12 pixels in size.

BigBang

One of the objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is to to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang  which is thought to have happened some 13.8 billion years ago. The diameter of observable universe has been calculated to be 4.6 billion light-years.

The Big Bang started from a single point, and has expanded ever since into something that previously did not exist. The distances and concepts that are involved are beyond our comprehension.

Of course, from our vantage point of our “blue dot” in the unimaginable vastness of space, we know that the Christian notion of a creator can’t be true………………….can it?