Cosmological and Astronomical Theology
When the sun has finished its daily chores and its light has diminished its patiently waiting celestial neighbors become visible. The moon begins its shift and serves as our planetary nightlight. It is accompanied by tides and loneliness as it surveys the earth's surface.
When you point your eyes over the horizon and focus your vision upwards at the long enduring and slow moving night time sky what do you see? I see beauty and fear, hope and despair. I see a painting that endears hope and shatters dreams, an illusion that is capable of stealing a person's breath or sending chills and goose bumps down their back. The polarization is immense and it forces some to wonder whether or not there was an Artist behind the painting.
From earth the aesthetic beauty and the worth of the awe inspiring night time sky is tough to equal. That is undeniable. Its beauty is the inspiration behind poetry, its slow moving and constant pattern serves as a navigational guide. Its demeanor invokes feelings of adoration. It is no wonder that a psalmist believed "the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands." Likewise, it is no wonder that a man believed by many to have been a prophet relayed the Artist's instructional words which suggested that we "look up at the heavens and ask ourselves who created all these?"
This is only half of the story, however. As with a coin, this story has a flipside. The statements of the psalmist and prophet were uttered in a time long before we unlocked the unsettling secrets of the nighttime sky. Now the sky is no longer a fixed dome above the earth. It is a huge cosmic arena filled with massive black holes that engulf their celestial neighbors, supernova explosions that would incinerate the earth in an instant, dark, empty and almost absolute zero in temperature space. The universe seems oblivious to our existence and passing. Our 80 year lifespan pales in comparison to the life span of stars whose duration extends for billions and billions of years. We are but a blink in the universe's eye. Our meager and feeble duration is a tiny and insignificant fleeting moment in the universe's view.
This tiny pebble we live on in is a speck in comparison to the largest planet of our solar system. The colossal king of our planetary neighbors, Jupiter, finds itself 318 times the size of earth. The great red spot of Jupiter is larger than the entire earth! But Jupiter itself is a speck of dust when compared to the gargantuan dimensions of our sun which possesses a diameter of 865,000 miles. Our sun which seems so huge is but a speck of dirt amidst our 100 million light year galaxy. That is a huge number! A light year is almost 6,000,000,000,000 miles. We are nothing but an atomic speck of dust in our galaxy. But even our galaxy finds itself vulnerable to the vacuum cleaner donned by the universe's maid. It is one of billion if not trillions of other galaxies spread throughout our universe. Between all these galaxies is nothing but frigidly cold, dark and lonely space. The emptiness and lifelessness stretches on for light years and light years as most of our universe and even our bodies are empty space! That our bodies are mainly empty space may seem hard to imagine as we feel solid enough but if you remember back to chemistry atoms are mostly empty space. The electrons whiz around their orbital and the protons and neutrons do their thing in the nucleus but other than that we have a lot of room in an atom. The vast majority of the universe is nothing but empty space.
Our sun is roughly 93,000,000 miles from us. That may sound like an impressive number and it is but how well do we understand it? The number is so large it males little sense to us. How long would it take for a person to count to one million? The answer may surprise you: over twenty days! That is nonstop without time for sleeping, eating and showering. You may be inclined to be skeptical of my numbers and if you are I challenge you to confirm them by getting out your calculator. Say you counted to a million at a constant rate of one number a second how long would it take you? 11.6 days. Just divide 1 million by 60 to get the number of minutes. Then divide that number of minutes by 60 to get the answer in hours. Then divide the number of hours by 24 to convert it into days. The 11.6 is too lenient however because it takes more than one second to say each number out loud in a sequence such as (543,284…543,285….543,286). The majority of the numbers counted will be multiple syllable numbers like those above and this has to be factored into your computation.
To get some perspective think and compute how much room a million boxes of Captain Crunch would take up or how much mass and space would be accompanied by a million dollars all in one hundred dollar bills. How much space would a million cars or houses take up? Remember that the millions we speak of concerning astronomical distances are measured in miles. Run a mile and you may be fatigued but you'd have to run 93,000,000 million to reach the sun. A million is a huge number itself but it's a fraction on astronomical scales. If the sun is roughly 93 million miles away how long would it take to reach on a nice family drive with a constant velocity of 60 miles an hour? It would take 1,550,000 hours which computes to 64,583.3 days which itself breaks down into roughly 177 years. The distance to our sun which seems so huge is but a mere fraction across the universe.
Now what if we were to raise the stakes to say a billion, how long would it take a person then to count that high nonstop? Five years, maybe ten? Not even close. It has been mathematical ascertained that it would take 95 years! A person in their whole lifetime could not count to a billion because of complications like sleeping and eating. Now do all the same examples as above. How much room would a billion boxes of Captain Crunch take up etc. If you are skeptical of my number grant 1 second per number and calculate it. You should come up with around 31 years but note that we are dealing with numbers that are much larger and take even longer to count. Compare the above set with this one: (372,543,284…372,543,285….372,543,286).
Raising the stakes even further to a trillion increases our counting time to thousands and thousands of years. Just use the one second per number rule and you come out with almost 32,000 years. Note that are numbers are even larger here and take even longer to count so they actual time is much longer. Again, compare the sets above with this one: (873,372,543,284…872,372,543,285….872,372,543,286). It is ridiculously large. A trillion is a huge number but it too pales in comparison with the distances between objects in the universe.
Distances in space are measured in something called light years. A light year is simply how far light travels in a year. Light clocks in at almost 200,000 miles a second! Using more exact numbers it been calculated that it takes the sun's light 8.3 minutes to reach us. So if the sun were to instantly disappear right now we would not know about it for over 8 minutes. It takes so long for the light to reach us from some stars as they are so far away it can be said that we are really looking at an illusion when we gaze upwards. We are not looking at the present so much as we are looking at the past. If a star is 3,000 light years away then the light we are seeing from it is also 3000 years old. The brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere is Sirius in the constellation Canis Major which is 8.7 light years from us. The light we see is 8.7 years old. The difference with the second brightest star, Canopus of the Carina Constellation is much greater. Canopus is 1,170 light years from earth and this means that its light is 1,170 years old. The light we see left the star thousands of years ago before any of us were born, before the last thousands of years of history transpired. Note that also Canopus is almost as bright to us as Sirius yet it is roughly 6,814,177,881,500,000 miles further away from us. What does that tell you about its actual brightness when compared to Sirius? Canopus is actually a much brighter star. This is why astronomers classify an object's brightness in terms of absolute and apparent magnitude. Apparent magnitude is how bright a star appears to us earth creatures. Sirius is not actually brighter than Canopus. It appears brighter because it is closer. But Canopus' absolute magnitude is higher. Absolute magnitude is simply a measure of how bright an object would appear if it we were at a fixed difference from us. The scale astronomer's use is 10 parsecs which is roughly 32.6 light years. A chart giving the absolute magnitude of stars is giving their luminosity under the pretense that they were 32.6 light years away. For informational purposes, a parsec is roughly 3.26 light years. Astronomers didn't simply make this number up to be confusing or sound complex; it actually has a valid reason. The scientific definition is somewhat technical and superfluous to the idea I wish to convey that the true luminosities of stars are measured by absolute magnitude because the distances involved are so immense.
The sun is the closest star to us. We already mentioned its distance above but what is the second closest star? Though we can't see it with the naked eye, Proxima Centauri is our closest celestial neighbor past the sun. It is roughly 4.3 light years from us. Using rough figures we get 25,560,000,000,000 miles. That is roughly 26 trillion miles. How long would it take to drive to Proxima Centauri at 60 miles per hour? Roughly 48,630,137 years. It would take fifty million years to drive to the closest star outside our sun!
The galaxy our solar system calls home is roughly 100,000 light years in length which is equivalent to 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles! That's 600 quadrillion miles! That number is everything but understandable to us yet the galaxy itself is miniscule in comparison to the universe as a whole. It finds itself amidst billions if not trillions of other galaxies all containing billions of stars. Yet, despite the enormous number of stars, comets, planets etc., the vast majority of the universe is space which is dark, cold and empty. One thing that dwarfs the size of galaxies is the empty lifeless space in between them.
The universe itself spans at least 15 billion light years. Remember that one light year is 6,000,000,000,000 miles. Multiply that number by 15,000,000,000 and we get a rough estimate of the number of miles the universe covers. 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles! It is unimaginably large and that's not the half of it! The universe is getting bigger as we speak. The universe is expanding and some newer theories are actually advocating the view that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating! It's growing at a larger and larger rate.
When we look up we see a beautiful night time sky but what if we were transported to a random location in the universe? What would the conditions be like? The odds favor that we would be in a location where the temperature (when measured in degrees Fahrenheit) would find itself in the negative 400's very close to absolute zero. The coldest spot on Earth does not even remotely come close to that temperature. At that temperature the gases in our atmosphere would cease to be gases. The oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. would all have long solidified. It would be unimaginably cold in that random location and there would be no matter (save a few very sparse particles here and there), no air, no water, no heat. Nothing at all with the exception of darkness and the invisible fabric of space-time. Would we at least see a beautiful starry host all around us? After all, there would be no pollution from streetlights and other man-made objects obscuring our view. No, remember that stars are found inside galaxies and the most substantial part of the universe is empty space in between its galactic islands. You'd find yourself in an oppressive inky blackness permeated only by extremely tiny pinpoints of light, which are not the images of stars, but of galaxies.
The environment of the majority of the universe is unwelcoming and very inhospitable. The size is so large that it intimidates and humbles us miniscule earthlings. How on earth can there be any real significance to what happens on this atomic pebble that dizzily revolves around an average sized star that has no special value when catalogued next to its trillions upon trillions of other celestial neighbors? Why, if there was an Artist, would she make the painting so big? If she was aiming for impact she got it but it seems like overkill! If the universe were a tenth of its current size it would still be unimaginably large to us and drive home the same point with the same impact. Why all the, dare I say wasted creation? This picture is not exaggerated in the least. These are empirical facts about the world around us. Such a picture of the universe hardly seems like the work of a carefully crafting personal God preparing the way for our arrival.
We find ourselves here as the climax and crowning achievement of four billion years of evolutionary development wondering whether or not there is an actual (transcendent?) purpose and meaning to our existence. Notions of a pre-existent Garden or paradise on earth without death have long been defeated. Science is clear on this point. Nature is red in tooth and claw and it has been so since the beginning. We are also left wondering whether we are a freak accident in the universe. Is there life out there somewhere in the huge void known as the universe? Some popular science writers and readers have embraced the unscientific illusion that the universe is teeming with life. There is no evidence that this is the case and despite the enormous number of stars and planets, and Drake's equation not withstanding, so many factors must converge for life to be able to form that the evidence leans
against extra-terrestrial life in the eyes of many scientists. I grant that it is possible for some form of elementary life to have developed somewhere else in the universe besides earth but any complex and advanced creatures are extremely unlikely. A few examples cited from Dr. Hugh Ross' book The Creator and the Cosmos explain why;1 average distance between galaxies
if larger: insufficient gas would be infused into our galaxy to sustain star formation for a long enough time
if smaller: the sun's orbit would be too radically disturbed,
2. galaxy cluster type
if too rich: galaxy collisions and mergers would disrupt solar orbit
if too sparse: insufficient infusion of gas to sustain star formation for a long enough time
3. average distance between stars
if larger: heavy element density too thin for rocky planets to form
if smaller: planetary orbits would become destabilized
4. gravitational force constant
if larger: stars would be too hot and would burn up quickly and unevenly|
if smaller: stars would be so cool that nuclear fusion would not ignite, thus no heavy element production
5. ratio of number of protons to number of electrons
if larger: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation
if smaller: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation
6. supernovae eruptions
if too close: radiation would exterminate life on the planet
if too far: not enough heavy element ashes for the formation of rocky planets
if too infrequent: not enough heavy element ashes for the formation of rocky planets
if too frequent: life on the planet would be exterminated
if too soon: not enough heavy element ashes for the formation of rocky planets
if too late: life on the planet would be exterminated by radiation
7. white dwarf binaries
if too few: insufficient fluorine produced for life chemistry to proceed
if too many: disruption of planetary orbits from stellar density; life on the planet would be exterminated
if too soon: not enough heavy elements made for efficient fluorine production
if too late: fluorine made too late for incorporation in protoplanetThere are tons of other technical parameters that need to be just right. Others are easier to understand by non-science people and I'd like to go through a few things, some of which we might take for granted. Only certain types of galaxies can harbor stars capable of supporting life. Of those galaxies only certain regions are hospitable to life. The centers of most if not all galaxies are dominated by gigantic black holes which obviously rules out life there. Also, in the vicinity of a galactic center, the radiation is far too intense for life to exist. A galaxy has to be the right type, have the right size, and be in the right location in order for life to be possible. Stars themselves must fit these criteria. For instance, a red giant star is incapable of supporting life. There is way too much radiation in the vicinity of a red giant star. A binary star system cannot support life either. The star has to be in the right spot in order for it to be able to support life.
Planets themselves must meet a number of requirements. If a planet is too close to the sun it will be too hot to support life (e.g. Mercury and Venus). If it was too far away it would be too cold to support life (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). If the earth rotated at a faster rate the wind speeds would be too great for advanced life. If it rotated slower the daily temperature differences would be too great. If the earth's magnetic shield were stronger electromagnetic storms would be too severe. If it was weaker the ozone shield would be inadequately protected from hard stellar and solar radiation.
There are tons of other parameters that needed to be just right in order for life itself or advanced life to have been able to develop here on earth. To many the precision involved is so great that it implies a designer. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle has commented that a "common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology ." Astronomer John O'Keefe at NASA is on record as saying, "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in." In what is a very famous and notable quote, Robert Jastrow has said, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Much can be said about the big bang as well. It's informative to trace the history of the big bang and note the opposition to it stemming from ideological bias. A study of the big bang falls into the category of cosmology which is the astrophysical study of the universe's structure, history and its built-in dynamics.
The Biblical notion of a finite and created universe was at odds with the philosophical conjecture of the last two thousand years. From the day of Aristotle, over 2,000 years ago, "scientific" theory held the universe to be eternal. One of the most influential thinkers of all time, Immanuel Kant, supported the notion of an infinite static universe. In 1826 the tide started to shift with the advent of Olbers' paradox. Heinrich Olbers' asked, "If the universe is infinite in extent and filled with stars, why is the sky dark at night?" This child-like question warrants more attention than one might think. As Hugh Ross(Creator Cosmos p 50) tells us, "In the context of an approximately static, infinitely old, and infinitely large universe, the light from all the stars would add up to an infinite brightness." In 1915 and 1916 general relativity was introduced, a theory that would later become the most accurately tested theory in all of physics. Einstein's equations of general relativity encapsulate a simultaneously expanding and decelerating universe. This data suggests an explosion. Reversing the flow of time we would see the universe contracting from its present size all the way back to its beginning. Something Einstein was not willing to concede. The equations of General Relativity point to a creation event and therefore a creator. Einstein 's view of an infinite universe kept him from adopting such a conclusion. Instead, he concocted a new, hitherto unknown, force of physics that would perfectly cancel out the deceleration and expansion of the universe required by his equations and this "cosmological constant" would help inoculate any scientific and religious quandaries that would have arisen in a finite, created universe. According to Gerald Schroeder (Science God p. 23), "The cosmological constant was no more than what a college freshmen would call a "fudge factor," a totally subjective modification of the objective solution he was seeking." Years later, Einstein considered this to be the biggest "blunder" of his professional career. Even before Einstein tampered with his equations, Vesto Slipher "reported astronomical evidence that the universe was expanding. Slipher's data rested totally on Einstein's own laws of relativity." Einstein's preconceived notion of an isotropic, static universe prevented him, at first, from objectively viewing the data presented by the scientific theory he introduced. He rationalized away Slipher's findings and fudged his equations. This historical lesson, from someone who is considered by many to be the most brilliant man of all time, perfectly illustrates the principle that, "no observation is perfectly objective." That notwithstanding, we must do our best to lay aside our own biases and preconceived notions. Facts should be derived from the data and not read in from preconceived notions lest our work should become unscientific and therefore, futile.
In the early 1900s, Edwin Hubble spent three decades measuring distances to galaxies and the spectrum shift of light emitted by the stars of these galaxies. Hubble took Slipher's redshift observations a step further. In 1929 he demonstrated through observational evidence from what was then the largest telescope in the world, all the galaxies are receding away from one another. Hubble's expanding galaxies behave in a manner similar to those required by general relativity. The notion of a static, isotropic universe began to crumble. Through Hubble's work, the realization of an expanding universe came. "This realization fit well with the expanding models of the universe based on the general theory of relativity that had been developed by Willem de Sitter (1917), Alexander Friedman (1922), and George Lemaitre (1927). (Hubble, A New Window to the Universe, Daniel Fischer and Hilmar Duerbeck, page 17)." In light of the mounting evidence, Einstein abandoned his cosmological constant and acknowledged the necessity for a beginning. Einstein even went so far as to recognize the necessity of a superior reasoning power. Einstein, however, did not believe in a personal God. He had trouble understanding the concept of reward and punishment for free will beings given and omnipotent God.Understanding the redshifting of the galaxies isn't as daunting as it may seem. I am going to take you through a quick visual demonstration but you will need a balloon and a magic marker. If you do not have a balloon at this time you can proceed to the next paragraph and come back to this at a later date or try to follow along mentally. Take the balloon and blow it up slightly. Next, with the magic marker, mark around 10 dots on the balloon. A random or isotropic pattern will suffice. Observe the distance between a few of the dots. Blow the balloon up a good amount. Now look at the distance between the dots. Each dot got farther away from every other dot on the surface of the balloon. These dots represent galaxies in our universe (the balloon). Hubble observed all of the galaxies receding away from one another. They are doing exactly what the dots on the balloon did. This means that our universe, as was the balloon, is getting bigger and bigger. It is expanding. This means that yesterday the universe was smaller than it is today and smaller the day before that. Well, what if we go back billions of years? We come to a point that is many times smaller than a pinhead, yet it contains all the mass and energy of our universe. That is not science fiction, it is Big Bang Cosmology. We are left with a created, finite universe that strongly suggests a personal, transcendent creator.
If the Big bang model accurately describes our universe then we should see a uniform glow of microwave radiation all around us. A corollary of the Big Bang is that "in every cubic meter of the universe- including the one you now occupy- there are, on average, about 400 million photons that collectively compose the vast cosmic sea of microwave radiation, an echo of creation. (The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene, page 349.)" The necessity of leftover background radiation was realized in the 1950s by George Gamow and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann. Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles in the mid 1960s also noted that the "present-day universe should be permeated by an almost uniform bath of these primordial photons, which, through the last 15 billion years of cosmic expansion, have cooled to a mere handful of degrees above absolute zero.( Ibid. page 348.)." While working on the antenna of a communications satellite in 1965 at Bell laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the afterglow predicted by the Big Bang model of the universe. Calculations tell us what the background temperature that permeates the universe should be. NASA constructed the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite in hopes of measuring the background radiation of the universe. Discoveries by the COBE satellite verified the hot big bang beginning for the universe. The experimental background temperature discovered by COBE coincided with the necessary and predicted one. In 1992 an American research team reported the COBE results. These results were so profound that newspapers around the world heralded this discovery. It was even given forty minutes of prime-time news coverage. There was some initial skepticism regarding the COBE results but that has long since dwindled. More measurements and experiments were performed and the evidence accumulated rapidly. Hugh Ross, in his book, The Creator and the Cosmos, reports that around the same time of the COBE discovery seven other cosmological breakthroughs were found that verify big bang cosmology. Today, the Big Bang model of the universe is widely accepted by scientists. The evidence attesting to its veracity is astonishing. Here are 30 lines of evidence in support of the big bang adapted from an issue of Facts For Faith :
1. existence and temperature of the cosmic background radiation
2. black body character of the cosmic background radiation
3. cooling rate of the cosmic background radiation
4. temperature uniformity of the cosmic background radiation
5. ratio of photons to baryons
6. temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation
7. power spectrum of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation
8. cosmic expansion rate
9. stable orbits of stars and planets
10. existence of life and humans
11. abundance of helium in the universe
12. abundance of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) in the universe
13. abundance of lithium in the universe
14. evidences for general relativity
15. space-time theorem of general relativity
16. space energy density measurements
17. ten dimensional creation calculation
18. stellar ages
19. galaxy ages
20. decrease in galaxy crowding
21. photo album history of the universe
22. ratio of ordinary matter to exotic matter
23. abundance of beryllium and boron in elderly stars
24. numbers of Population I, II, and III stars
25. population, locations, and types of black holes and neutron stars
26. dispersion of star clusters and galaxy clusters
27. number and type of space-time dimensions
28. masses and flavors of neutrinos
29. populations and types of fundamental particles
30. cosmic density of protons and neutronsDespite the insurmountable evidence favoring the hot big bang creation model of the universe, pious scientists sought ways to circumvent the beginning of our universe. Sir Arthur Eddington, a now deceased British cosmologist, once stated: "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant. . . .I should like to find a genuine loophole." In 1948, three British astrophysicists, Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and Herman Bondi formulated the steady state model of the universe which was supposed to reintroduce the concept of an infinite, creator-less universe. They objected strongly to the notion of something transcending the universe. Hoyle was not shy about his opposition to the beginning. In his mind, "the Universe is everything" and to suggest otherwise is "crackpot." The steady state theory (hypothesis) has been largely dismissed by the scientific community due to a lack of evidence.
After the dismissal of the steady state theory, many cosmologists and astrophysicists who rejected the philosophical notion of a beginning adopted a new view of the universe: a reincarnating one that was proposed thousands of years ago by Hindu teachers. The oscillating universe, as it was called, would explode from a singularity in the same manner as our universe did but its expansion would be halted by gravity. All the mass in the universe would be sufficient enough to halt the universe's expansion and reverse it. The universe would collapse back into itself in a "big crunch." Proponents of the oscillating universe trade in science for science fiction when stating some unknown bounce mechanism creates another big bang after the universe collapses onto itself. The primary idea of this theory is that the universe could have gone through an infinite number of these cycles that would eliminate the problem of a beginning. "In 1965 when the oscillating universe model first emerged as a serious theory, many astronomers launched an-all out effort to find sufficient mass to halt and reverse the expansion of the universe. All the evidence, however, both observational and theoretical, pointed (and still points) in the opposite direction.(Ross, ibid p 64)" they According to the standard model the universe will embrace one of three fates: it will expand forever, its expansion will slow to a crawl but never actually stop, or it will collapse back on itself. The total mass of the universe determines it fate and shape. The amount of mass in our universe appears to fall short of the amount required by the oscillating universe theory. The most serious problem with this theory, however, lies in its mysterious bounce mechanism and the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law, the entropy of our universe increases with time. This means that with each successive bounce, if the oscillating universe model was correct, there would be less energy available to perform mechanical work. This means that the universe will expand farther out in each successive bounce. On the other hand, if the universe is somehow bouncing according to proponents views of the oscillating universe, imagine what happens when you drop a tennis ball. Does it bounce as high as the height it was dropped from? No, it does not, it loses mechanical energy through friction as the ball makes contact with the ground. The universe also behaves in the same way. It would lose mechanical energy needed for rebounding with each successive bounce. In 1983 and 1984, three American astrophysicists, Marc Sher, Alan Guth, and Sidney Bludman demonstrated that even if the universe had sufficient mass to halt and reverse its expansion, it would end in a thud, not a bounce. Sher and Guth entitled their paper, 'The Impossibility of a Bouncing Universe.' "Reality is not described by infinite cycles of cosmic reincarnation. (Ross)"
Current day researchers are now using superstring theory in attempts to find ways to circumvent the beginning of our universe. Thus far, all such attempts have failed. As we stand now the scientific consensus stands behind a universe emerging from nothing and to put it quite simply, from nothing nothing comes. We find ourselves here created. We find ourselves here in light of overwhelming odds that suggest we shouldn't be. Human life is truly a rare gift in the universe. Compared to its hostile and inhospitable celestial neighbors the earth is an oasis. It seems that our designer for whatever purpose went through a lot of trouble crafting and cultivating it for our development. While searching for the purpose and meaning of life, cutting edge scientific findings indicate that we stand somewhere between apes and angels.
Written by Vincent Sapone, 2002.