hughbiquitous

Presented here is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The subject is disk galaxy NGC 5866. On a clear night, you might be able to spot this galaxy with a four-inch-wide telescope in your backyard—but it would look like a fuzzy wisp and you’d have to really know what you were looking for. It is about 63,000 times dimmer than the planet Jupiter.

This galaxy is almost 50 million light-years away—what you see here is the way a sliver of the universe looked 50,000,000 years ago.

This galaxy is 60,000 light-years across. That means that a star could explode at one end of the disk and an observer at the opposite end of the disk wouldn’t see it for 60,000 years.

How big is a distance of 60,000 light-years? Let’s suppose you had a map of this galaxy with a scale of 1 atom on the map = 1 meter in space. Got that? 1 atom = 1 meter. Represented on such a map, our entire solar system would fit within one and a half football fields’ area. The USA would occupy a half a millimeter. You and I would need about an atom and a half.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

— Psalm 8:3-4

But how big would the map be? It would cover 1/3 of the distance from the Earth to the sun. Such a map would be so big, you could use it to gift-wrap all of the planets in the solar system over 25,000 times. And each one of us takes up about an atom’s worth of real estate on that map.

Sorry, that’s the best I can do to make the size of this faraway galaxy even remotely comprehensible.

Then Job answered the Lord and said:

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
    I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
    twice, but I will proceed no further.”

— Job 40:3-5

But there’s more to it than sheer size. Click on the image above to see a large version. Or if you’re really ambitious, download the 11-megabyte full-resolution version.

Look in the background, far beyond NGC 5866. What do you see?

More galaxies. Lots of them. Literally hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. With millions, maybe billions, of stars in each of them. And those background galaxies are millions-to-billions of light-years farther away.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

— Psalm 19:1

There’s more. Look closely at the dark edge-on view of the disk. What do you see?

You see tiny dots of bright, bluish light. Those “dots”—barely visible unless you look at the full-resolution version—are clusters of a million stars. Each. Our entire solar system would fit inside one of those dots many, many times over.

We have one star, a wimp by cosmic standards, and it lives a hundred million miles away. It takes light from our sun less than ten minutes to reach us.

In one dot that you can’t see unless you download a gigantic photograph taken by a satellite with a 2.5-hour exposure time, there are millions of stars that put our sun to shame. And their light is just now reaching us after a journey that took 50 million years.

You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
    like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
    and your years will have no end.

— Hebrews 1:10-12

No more words… I am undone. O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Update: Get Google Earth and view NGC 5866 as it appears in the sky, just west of the Big Dipper.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think Nietzsche was right about this much: “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” When all is said and done, I think the Salon.com interview with Paul Davies may go down as an example of this — even though it is more careless than deliberate. In that interview, Prof. Davies suggests that he’s found a way to reconcile cold, hard science with all the meaning and purpose that humanity craves. He does it with faulty arguments, but in so doing, he shows that arguments don’t always carry the day.

But this raises an important question: Why the need for reconciliation? The answer, I think, is that Davies is desperately trying to escape the fact that his preferred worldview — philosophical naturalism — necessarily renders our existence meaningless.

The Nature of Necessity

A thing is necessary if it could not have failed to exist. If a thing could have failed to exist, then it is not necessary, but contingent. Therefore, anything that starts to exist is necessarily contingent, because at some point, it did indeed fail to exist.

This is important for the questions Prof. Davies is raising, because he’s discussing the origin of the universe. If the universe has an origin, a starting point, it is contingent. But contingent on what? Here’s where the absurdity in Prof. Davies’ thinking comes in. He is saying that the universe is contingent on itself:

We can — if we try hard enough — come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naïve theist who says there’s a mysterious, unexplained God.

He affirms there must be an explanation for the universe, but he insists on finding that explanation within the universe.

The Line of Despair

The way I understand it, Francis Schaeffer used the term “Line of Despair” to describe what happens to a person when he “escapes” from reason and takes a “leap of faith” to make sense of the world. This isn’t faith in the biblical sense — biblical faith is about trust in objective realities. The leap of faith that accompanies despair is unconcerned with reality.

What is this despair? It arises from the abandonment of the hope of a unified answer for knowledge and life. Modern man continues to hang on to his rationalism and his autonomous revolt even though to do so he has had to abandon any rational hope of a unified answer. Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of a unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair — the despair of no longer thinking that what has been the aspiration of men and women is at all possible. (Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape From Reason, found in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, p. 236)

It strikes me that Prof. Davies has plunged beneath the line of despair and embraced it, taking a leap of faith into the unreal, non-rational world of convenient fictions that enable his “autonomous revolt.” It is at first irritating to hear him talk about a universe that created itself and in the next breath deride theology as naïve, but it becomes pitiable when you realize what’s going on in the darkened corners of his soul. He is in intellectual rebellion against God and against reality.

Paul Davies’ Leap of Faith

The interview with Prof. Davies is filled with the language of teleology. “Meaning and purpose” seems to be the overriding goal of his research — which is odd, considering his philosophical naturalism. Whatever else you say about him, you’ve got to agree that Prof. Davies is intellectually honest about the implications of his worldview: “Davies acknowledges that if we are stuck with philosophic naturalism, we are robbed of unique value and dignity, and we become one of many living organisms that are qualitatively indistinguishable,” Greg Koukl wrote in the Stand to Reason article, Chance & Dignity.

But the way he overcomes the incompatibility between teleology and philosophical naturalism is to embrace ideas that are wildly implausible, if not patently absurd. What makes a highly intelligent person make such a leap of faith?

I think it’s because the meaninglessness and purposelessness of naturalism is unendurably empty. You can’t live there. He knows it, and he can’t embrace it. But given a choice between a theological answer and a leap of faith into the absurd, he chooses the absurd.

The Tragedy

This is profoundly sad, because he is so palpably close to the truth. “All my career, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the universe looks not just beautiful but in some sense deeply ingenious. It looks like it’s been put together in a way that makes it work exceptionally well,” he said. Then, when asked if he wants to stay away from God, his answer is an elaborate “yes”:

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that’s just a naïve, silly idea that doesn’t fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn’t fit the scientific facts. I don’t want that. That’s a horrible idea.

Likewise, when asked if these wild theories became popular to “keep the whole idea of God at bay,” his answer was far less elaborate — “Yes.”

I can only turn to Paul for an assessment:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-22a)

In my last post I was incredulous. Now I’m just sober. The beauty and genius revealed in the creation, together with the oppressive meaninglessness of living life as a cosmic accident, cannot overpower a sinner’s appetite for autonomy. Sin is a much bigger problem than anybody realizes.

Thank God for an invading Savior who has overridden my autonomy and revealed Himself as the ultimate reason and reality in the universe. May His fame spread far and wide.

Take some time and read Salon.com’s interview with Paul Davies titled “We are meant to be here.”

Basically, Davies says that there was no creator of the universe — he “wants to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician,” calling that a “naïve, silly idea.” However, he has no problem asserting that the efficient cause of the incredible order and precise fine-tuning of the universe is… (drum roll please)… us.

I’m. Not. Kidding.

Yes, li’l ol’ you and I are behind the laws of the universe. This is like saying that a baby is the efficient cause of its parents’ existence. “The emergence of life and observers causes the universe to have the laws that it does. In the causal sense, it puts the cart before the horse,” Davies said. That’s quite a horse.

Davies continues: “The difficult point is that we have to explain why life today can have any effect on the laws that the universe emerged with at the time of the big bang.”

Well gee, that is sort of a problem, isn’t it…

More from Davies:

We’re trying to construct a picture of the universe which is based thoroughly on science but where there is still room for something like meaning and purpose. So people can see their own individual lives as part of a grand cosmic scheme that has some meaning to it. We’re not just, as Steven Weinberg would say, pointless accidents in a universe that has no meaning or purpose. I think we can do better than that.

It may come as a shock to Dr. Davies that this has been tried and found wanting…

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

I’ve got a lot more I want to say about this, but I just don’t have time to blog on it now — maybe another time. Still, I’d love to get some discussion going.

A while back I “quoted” J. P. Moreland very casually that he went back-and-forth on the age of the earth. I came up with the proper quote:

It is unproductive to try to believe something beyond your grounds for believing it and dishonest to act as if you believe something more strongly than you do. Overbelief is not a virtue. For example, I am far from certain on many Christian beliefs I hold. I lean toward the view that the days of Genesis are vast periods of time and not literal twenty-four-hour periods. But about two days of the week I flip-flop and accept the literal view. Based on my study, I cannot convince myself either way, and I’m about sixty-forty in favor of the old-earth position. Other beliefs of mine have grown in certainty over the years—that God really exists, for example. We should be honest with ourselves about the strength of our various beliefs and work on strengthening them by considering the issues relevant to their acceptance.

– J. P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind, p. 107

This bears a distant resemblance to something I found by D. A. Carson (author’s emphasis):

Francis Schaeffer wrote a little book that I have often found useful in helping some Christians move beyond entrenched positions. That book was called Genesis in Space and Time. He asked, in effect, a simple question: What is the least that Genesis 1-11 must be saying for the rest of the Bible to cohere, for the rest of the Bible to make sense and be true? That is not the same as asking what is the most that one can reasonably infer from these chapters. Rather it is one particular application of the old analogia fidei argument: the appeal to “the analogy of the faith” as established by the rest of the Scriptures is one crucial way to let Scripture interpret Scripture.

Taken together, the wisdom of these sages heightens my interest in boundaries over answers. Here are some candidates off the top of my head:

1. Any explanation of the age of the universe must affirm the authority of Scripture.

2. Any explanation of the age of the universe must account for the fact that physical evidence exists that suggests an old universe.

3. Any explanation of the age of the universe must reconcile the testimony of Scripture with the physical evidence; neither fideistic nor naturalistic solutions will suffice.

That’s a start, but what I’m increasingly struck by is this: If both J. P. Moreland and D. A. Carson are slow to make ambitious, definitive claims about answers to the age of the universe, then who am I to do so?

I don’t even go by my initials!

In my last post I wished for an even-handed approach to the various theories about reconciling science and the Genesis account. I found one. Vern Poythress’ Redeeming Science is available online as a free PDF.

I’ve read bits and pieces and this is a great book. Of the portions I did read, the material on “Mature Creation” was probably the most fascinating. For anyone who thinks that it would be deceptive of God to create the universe with the appearance of age, consider this: was it deceptive of Jesus to turn water into wine, given that wine requires an aging process? (It was also the best wine at the party, and from what I know about wine, the older, the better.) I confess I’ve had hangups about the “appearance of age” issue, but after reading the chapter on that subject, it’s not such a big deal to me.

A word about the author… here’s what Justin Taylor has to say about Dr. Poythress:

At first glance one might think that a professor of NT is not qualified to write a theological treatise on science. But Poythress is not your normal NT prof. This man gives a new meaning to the word “smart.” He majored in mathematics at CalTech, then went on to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics at Harvard. After teaching math for a year at Fresno State and studying linguistics and Bible translation at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, he went to Westminster Theological Seminary, where he earned an M.Div. and a Th.M. in apologetics. He then went on to get an M.Litt in NT from the University of Cambridge. Between the M.Div/Th.M. and the M.Litt, he taught linguistics at the Summer Institute of Linguistics. He then earned a Th.D. in NT from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. For those who are counting, that’s one bachelors degree, three masters, and two doctorates.

Oh, and I’ve been told that while he was at Harvard he memorized virtually all of the NT.