The Bible and Astronomy

The bible says: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” John 2:15.

Those sacred words could have been written only by an inspired superstitious primitive who knew nothing of stars and planets and suns and galaxies.

According to the science of astronomy, the largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter. Indeed, 1,000 of our planet earth can fit inside Jupiter. But it would take 100,000 of the planet Jupiter to fit inside the sun. The sun is not that big of a deal either. A bigger sun has been discovered. Astronomers called R. Doradus. This huge red star is 370 times bigger than our sun.

We humans live on a mote of dust of which we are a speck under the immensity of space and the eternity of time. For inspired authors of God to write in the bible something like: “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have life everlasting life,” surely makes divinity really look supernaturally silly.

According to astronomer Carl Sagan: “a handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”

Who are we? Where are we? Astronomers have discovered that we live on an insignificant planet – one of the 400 billion stars and planets called the “Milky Way Galaxy” tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than there are six billion people on this earth today.

If all that were all so gloomy, here’s something rather cheerful from Bertrand Russell: “To those who live entirely amid terrestrial events and who have given little thought to what is distant in space and time, there is at first something bewildering and oppressive, and perhaps even paralyzing, in the realization of the minuteness of man and his concerns in comparison with astronomical abysses. But this effect is not rational and should not be lasting. There is no reason to worship mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less than the larger beast. The size of a man’s mind – if such a phrase were permissible – is not to be measured by the size of the man’s body. It is to be measured, in so far as it can be measured, by the size and complexity of the universe that he grasps in thought and imagination. The mind of the astronomer can grow, and should grow, step by step with the universe of which he is aware. And when I say that his mind should grow, I mean his total mind, not only its intellectual aspect. Will and feeling should keep pace with thought if man is to grow as his knowledge grows. It this cannot be achieved – if, while knowledge becomes cosmic, will and feeling remain parochial – there will be a lack of harmony producing a kind of madness of which the effects must be disastrous.” POCH SUZARA