Psalm 8:1-9: God and Cosmos – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 2

Imagine that you’re lying on a beach. You’re lying on your back and your eyes sweep upward. What do you see? The mighty luminescence of the sun. A few cloud tufts wisping in the breeze. And then you look beyond. You strain your eyes as your vision sinks into the distance, the impenetrable distance that seems to have no end. The magnificence of the heavenly vault impresses itself on your soul.

Now, imagine that you are lying on this beach 3000 years ago, perhaps in ancient Mesopotamia or the Indus River Valley. You’ve never seen an electric light bulb or a cell phone; you’ve never watched a tractor plow a field. What might you think? Our ancestors thought of this sky as powerful, overwhelming, regnant. It’s easy to put ourselves into the shoes–or maybe better, the sandals–of an ancient Egyptian and view the sun as the sky god who delivers energy to our Earth.

It’s easy to put ourselves in the shoes of someone 3,000 years ago shuddering at the destructive power of lightning and cowering at the blast of thunder. Ancient cultures told myths about a great war being fought in heaven. The lightning bolt was the spear of a great sky warrior, whose voice roared in the thunder. He was called Marduk in Babylonia, Indra in India, Thor in Northern Europe, Zeus in Greece, and Jupiter in Rome.

When I was a small boy growing up in Michigan–a state which really knows what a thunder storm can do–the sky frightened the wits out of me. When the thunder would clap, I would run to my bedroom and hide under the bed.

My mother would come in, laughing. “Why are you under the bed?’

“I’m scared of the thunder.”

“Oh, don’t be afraid of the thunder. It’s only Thor up in heaven rolling his bowling ball.”

It is into this ancient world where our biblical ancestors were born. Our Bible was written under this sky. The Holy Spirit may have inspired the Bible’s authors, but these authors could only write about what they understood.

What the Bible’s authors understood was that the sky is overwhelming in its magnificence, its beauty, its awesomeness. But they added something. The Bible’s writers said there is no battle going on in heaven. There is no war between gods up there. The sun is not divine. Nor are thunder clouds and lightning sky gods or goddesses. Rather, these heavenly phenomena are mere finite creatures of an infinite God, a God who comes from well beyond the sky.

Remember Psalm 8 we read a couple of moments ago. God manipulates the sun and the moon and the stars with divine fingers. Or think about the first day in the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, where God just whispers and nothing becomes something. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Well, this is all ancient myth, right? We modern people no longer fear the sky or even respect the sky, for that matter. We have conquered the sky through science and technology. We can fly in a jet at 30,000 feet and look down on the thunder and lightning. No Thor or Jupiter can send us crawling under the bed in fright.

In addition, we watch weather reporters on our televisions. Meteorologists read the technical instruments that tell us what the sky is going to do tomorrow. No matter how frequently their predictions are wrong, we still trust the meteorological report each day. We modern scientized and technologized people no longer need to think of Earth’s measly little sky as infinite or powerful or holy.

But, much to our surprise, lurking just behind our sky, is another sky. A second sky. This other sky is outer space. Today, it’s outer space that elicits from within our soul a sense of infinity, grandeur, and awe.

Let’s call to mind the passage many think of as the gospel-in-miniature. John 3:16 NRSV: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Now the Bible’s Greek word for “world” here is cosmos. Our world today is no longer limited to Planet Earth and its measly sky. By the word cosmos we mean the Big Bang; we mean our sun and the solar system; perhaps 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, many of which have planets like Earth, and then perhaps another 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars, and countless more planets, stretching 11 to 13 billion light-years distant from us. Our word cosmos means big, unimaginably big. Is God still bigger? Is the God of Psalm 8 now manipulating galaxies with the divine finger?

An article in a recent issue of Astronomy magazine asked the question: how large is our universe? There seems to be a scientific consensus that our universe is at least 93 billion light-years across. This means it would take you, flying at the speed of light, 93 billion years traveling time to visit your relatives on the other side of the universe. And, of course, another 93 billion years to get home again. You’ll need a generous vacation policy if you do this very frequently.

Now some scientists disagree with this estimate. They contend that the universe is infinite. It has no size, no limit. Now which is it? 93 billion? Or infinite? Well, regardless of who’s right, we can certainly conclude one thing: the cosmos is big. Is God still bigger?

Space is big, not only in space but also in time. Most astrophysicists agree that our universe began with a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. It may expand for another 50 to 100 billion years before it burns out like a candle.

What is so fascinating for Bible-believing Christians is that this scientific account of cosmic history looks a lot like what a Jew or a Christian would expect. What the Bible tells us is that God’s relationship to the world of nature is historical in character. The world begins. What follows the beginning is a history, a drama, a story. God makes promises; and then God fulfills these promises. Among those promises is this one: a new creation is coming! This new creation will consummate and fulfill the entire history of the present creation. This new creation will include a resurrection of the dead and abundant life in God’s everlasting kingdom. You and I are still awaiting fulfillment of this divine promise.

God is the Alpha and the Omega of all things. We’ve just talked about the Omega. Let’s go back to the Alpha. Let’s go back to the beginning of creation.

The beginning of all things is most puzzling to scientists. The initial conditions at the time when the Big Bang first banged contort and flabbergast the human mind. There seems to be a beginning to time, a moment when Time = zero, when t = 0. What were the conditions at the first moment, when t = 0? Curiously, these initial conditions were finely tuned so that we here on Earth would eventually come into existence.

This fine tuning is called the Anthropic Principle. According to the anthropic principle, the initial conditions were such that intelligent life would eventually evolve. It appears that our early universe was fine-tuned so as to prepare physics for evolving biology and prepare biology for evolving intelligence. Try this for an example. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by just 1 part in 10³⁰, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist, making life impossible. Or try this one. If the initial explosion of the Big Bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 10⁶⁶, the universe would have either collapsed or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. This list of “accidents” or “convenient coincidences” goes on and on. And these facts stun our scientists.

One scientist, Freeman Dyson, who is a physicist at Princeton University, sees a connection between the Big Bang and your and my life today. “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known we were coming.”^[1]

Another scientist, Owen Gingerich, emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard University, sees the fingers of God at work. Let me quote Dr. Gingerich: “I accept that the physical constants have been fine-tuned to make intelligent life in the universe possible and that this is evidence for the planning and intentions of a Creator God.”^[2]

Instead of lying on the beach sand looking at the sky, we today look through telescopes and monitors and computer graphs. Yet what we see is just as marvelous and awesome as what our ancestors saw. The universe is as intricate as it is massive, as mysterious as it is understandable, as wondrous as it is glorious. And today we realize something the ancient Psalmist missed. It’s not merely the sun and the moon that are moved by God’s fingers. God’s fingers lit the fuse on the Big Bang, hurling galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies through time, creating space. Asteroids and comets and black holes and cosmic background radiation and dark energy–and perhaps even earthlike exoplanets with earthlike creatures–all belong to God’s dynamic and changing creation.

But the Psalmist made another point that remains true today, namely, regardless of how large our cosmos might be, God still loves you and me individually and intimately. When Martin Luther wrote his Small Catechism about five centuries ago, he commented on the opening of the creed–and you know how it goes: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Luther then asked: What does this mean? Here is his answer: “I believe that God has created me together with all that exists.”^[3]

Now it may sound arrogant to put “me” prior to “all that exists.” But, think again. God is both beyond and intimate. God is both cosmic and personal. Regardless of how big the cosmos, God is fully and without remainder present in the depth of your soul and my soul. “God is closer to me than I am to myself,” said St. Augustine.

Our cosmos is big. But God loves each and every creature, including you and me, directly and eternally. Our God does a lot of loving.

Let us pray. O God of our creation and our redemption, you’ve created a cosmos of such beauty, magnificence, and mystery. We thank you for our very existence, for the privilege of living as your beloved creatures. We thank you also for the message of the gospel, for the promise of the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection into your new creation. Inspire within our souls a divine love for all that you are making. Amen.

Note: Rev. Dr. Peters’s sermon is part 2 of 8 in a series on Faith & Science from Day1. For more information about the series and a transcription of a conversation between Rev. Dr. Peters and Peter Wallace of Day1, see this link.