“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.” John 1:1 (King James Version)
Somewhere, somehow, everything we see and everything we are was started by something. I choose to believe it was God.
George Gilder, writing on evolution, concludes that all of life inclines one to believe in intelligent design. He notes that wherever there is information, there is preceding intelligence. “Information does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup. It comes from mind.”
Tom Wolfe, in “Kingdom of Speech,” points out that all of the studies and seminars on evolution over 150 years fail to explain what makes us unique from all other species – Speech. Where does that come from?
Atheists run out of plausible answers to the penultimate question, “And what caused the Big Bang?” They offer, “A great outside force from another universe?” And where did that come from?
And what did this God/Great Outside Force create? We don’t know. We’re only beginning to understand how little we know.
Most of us, when we think about the vastness of space, think about the Milky Way Galaxy in which planet earth comfortably resides. For most of the history of mankind we believed that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun and planets revolved around us. And we, of course, were the consequential form of life on that earth.That was the scientific consensus until Galileo proved it wrong. He was found guilty of heresy and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. He had committed the unpardonable sin of questioning the consensus.
Today’s climate alarmists have urged criminal charges against those who question the climate consensus. They too are committed to the sophomoric notion that humans are the center of the universe.
We now know that the Milky Way is only one of 200 to 300 billion galaxies. A couple of years ago a bright, young new galaxy, PDS 456, was discovered. It is powered by a black hole whose mass is 12 billion times that of the sun. It sustains winds that emit more energy per second than a trillion suns. Its brilliant light, hurtling at us at 186,000 miles per second, will arrive to startle us in, oh, about two billion years. I can’t wait. Get the SUVs off the streets so as to not delay it.
We know a lot about planet Earth. We believe it is about 4.5 billion years old. We understand the movements of the sun and moon and can predict when an eclipse will occur. We know something about the composition of our atmosphere and the molecules that sustain us. We are being hectored daily to change the way we live so as to not alter today’s mix of chemicals and thus change God’s work.
In the last few months it was disclosed that there is a massive lake of molten carbon as large as Mexico under the western United States producing CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere. Scientists say that the amount of CO2 in Earth’s upper mantle may be up to 100 trillion metric tons. In comparison, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the global carbon emission in 2011 was less than 10 billion metric tons.
Still feeling important?
All of that it to say this: The world in which we live, whether created by God or a Great Outside Force, is so vast and complex that we neither understand it nor alter it. We are insignificant visitors in an incomprehensible world. For us to believe that we are dangerously changing that world is sheer vanity.
Some years ago my wife bought an ant farm for our grandchildren. They showed little interest in it, but their mother, our daughter Kris, enjoyed it.
The ants built a working colony. They separated a play area for the young ones and built a cemetery for their dead. They had a community.
One day Kris got tired of it and tossed it in the garbage. The ants likely were transported to greener pastures. The sun came up the next day.
In the overall scheme of things we may be marginally more consequential than ants, though they and other small insects have a bigger impact on the globe than we do, even when we burn fossil fuels. Insects create far more CO2 and methane than we do, but they too are visitors in God’s universe as they come and go.
So are we.
God shoulders on.
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