May 2008
OUTER SPACE
BY ALAN MACROBERT, BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS,SENIOR EDITOR, SKY AND TELESCOPE MAGAZINE
Where does astronomy, the study of the heavens, leave a location to put God? Where, in the vast, blazing, inhuman, uncaring cosmos, can God fit?
Space is beautiful but hostile. It is almost always unimaginably cold, empty, and changelessly dull—or unimaginably hot and violent. Whole galaxies are sterilized by x-rays blazing from their cores where stars happen to fall together—without regard for any living things that may be in the galaxy—blind, uncaring, ignorant. The outer heavens, so beautiful and inspiring from a distance, have zero moral content. This certainly seems like no seat of a caring God.
To find qualities we think of as God-like you have to come down from the sky to Earth. Only here do things get remotely friendly and supportive. Only here do you begin to find anything that could at all be seen as a sign of a benign God’s presence.
If anywhere in the universe you want to find such things as values, compassion, direction, purpose, a sign of anything higher, you have to look to people. There is no other place you will find them.
And not many people show these godly presences very much of the time. These usually come out only in our better moments—and at times when we deliberately pay homage to them. “The Kingdom of Heaven is among you.”
The exact location of God, as best I can tell, is in those small, close places where the unnatural, unphysical values of compassion and love and truth and justice and higher direction and purpose are present—there can be found God. And—from an astronomer’s perspective—nowhere else.
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Last updated May 12, 2008
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