Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series contemplating our place in the cosmos. Part 2 will run next Monday, July 7.

Spoiling a Beautiful Sunset

For decades, rockhounds have combed the beach just north of Grand Marais, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, looking for Lake Superior agates—translucent, semiprecious gemstones with intriguing colors and designs.

The rockhounds have apparently been very successful, because Judy and I have walked the beach a number of times and not found a single agate. But it doesn’t matter. The beach is full of other equally beautiful stones. We laugh and tell ourselves that God must be a rockhound and own a tumbler, ever-polishing stones in heaven and dropping them on this beach. We find orange feldspar, red-banded magnetite, rose-colored quartz, green unakite, and black-spotted diorite. The beach is a kaleidoscope of stones and we sometimes take some of these colorful stones home to decorate our garden.

As evening approached on one particular day at Agate Beach, Judy and I and the other rockhounds walked to a large deck to watch the sunset. Bound together by a common interest and a common space, we relaxed and bantered with one another. Our eyes followed the water toward the horizon, and there were a few “oohs” and “aahs” as the fiery sun touched the water, flamed out, and festooned the low hanging clouds with ribbons of violet, salmon, orange, and red. 

I remembered something that I had read years earlier in The Universe Story by Brian Swimme, He wrote that despite knowing better, most of us tend to view the universe as geocentric, and suggested we could break out of this tendency at sunset by water with an uninterrupted view of the horizon. There we could see that the sun was not sinking but the earth was rotating on its axis. And sure enough on Agate Beach that evening, I looked at the horizon, and saw the water occluding a stationary sun as the earth rotated and carried us into darkness.

Excitedly, I turned to the others and said: “Look at the sun. Don’t think of it as moving. We know it doesn’t move. Think of the earth as moving. You can see the sun disappearing as the earth rotates.”

The conversation stopped. One couple got up, and as they were leaving, the woman turned and glared at me: “Thanks for spoiling this beautiful sunset for the rest of us.” Whatever common interest had bound us loosely together was lost. The others also walked away without another word.

Judy looked at me with a wry smile and said, “That went well, Tom.”

Immensity

Despite the social awkwardness, I reframed my view of the sunset and experienced the earth rotating on its axis. I was startled by the effect of this reframing. My knowledge of the solar system was no longer abstract but personal, no longer a thought in my head but a throb in my heart, pulsing with its own peculiar energy and heightened awareness. I began to feel the immensity of the solar system and the universe in which it is embedded.

• Our universe flared forth from a single source approximately 14 billion years ago
• Our solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust in which our earth, one of eight planets, lies 93 million miles from the sun
• Our solar system is 2.8 billion miles in diameter
• Our sun is one of 100 billion stars revolving around a supermassive black hole and forming a galaxy
• Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter
• The Milky Way is one many galaxies that make up the cluster called Virgo
• Virgo is one of the clustered galaxies that make up the Laniakea Supercluster
• The Laniakea Supercluster is part of still other systems that are, for all intents and purposes, beyond our capacity to see and comprehend
• Among the known superclusters there are thousands of exoplanets, some of which have conditions that could support life

I began to feel not only the immensity of the universe but also the power and speed at which it moves. Our planet is a quiet backwater in the raging current of the universe. Earth rotates on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour, orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, swirls in the Milky Way galaxy at 448,000 miles per hour, clusters with other galaxies, and rides on the membrane of a rapidly expanding cosmos.

Those numbers are almost incomprehensible. We live and move at much slower speeds—few of us range more than 80 miles on an ordinary day and we seldom travel at speeds above 80 miles per hour. Our world is large, but not too large for us to circumnavigate. We have constructed economic, socio/political, and religious systems on small scales, and these systems provide a canopy under which we enjoy some measure of security and safety.

I will never know exactly why the rockhounds walked away upset on Agate Beach that evening, but I have an idea. I was suggesting they think about what they were experiencing. Trying to understand our place in a universe whose properties are measured in units we cannot comprehend makes our small world appear insignificant and vulnerable.

As a person of faith, I affirm that God oversees a created order far beyond anything that I or my spiritual ancestors could imagine. Because of the immensity of the universe, I have difficulty maintaining the conviction of a personal and loving Creator who attends to my daily concerns–counting the hairs that fall from my head and keeping my tears in a bottle. I struggle to account for the biblical cosmology in which there is a door between heaven and earth and a passageway through which angels and Christ travel back and forth. I ponder whether that most famous verse in the Gospel of John could possibly mean that God so loved a universe of clustered galaxies that he sent his son to a miniscule planet to save them all.

Like my Agate Beach companions, a part of me wants to walk away. I am reluctant to gaze at an immense universe, contemplate its meaning, and adjust my theology accordingly. I fear that I cannot make sense of it. I fear that the new wine of scientific discovery will burst the old theological wineskins. I feel like I am wandering in a cosmic wilderness, vulnerable and on my own. I find myself singing along with Paul Simon:

God only knows

God makes his plan

The information’s unavailable

To the mortal man

We work our jobs

Collect our pay

Believe we’re gliding down the highway

When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away

Gazing at the Moon and Stars

David looked up, perhaps as king from his palace in Jerusalem or as a shepherd from the pastures of Bethlehem, and saw the milky-white array of stars. Beneath this vast canopy, he felt small and far from God. He uttered words that have been repeated by believers for thousands of years:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

   the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

   mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

David was looking at the 4,548 stars visible to the naked eye on a clear night, and marveled that the creator of this vast array was mindful of frail humans made of dust. As Psalm 8 continues, David wrote (most likely with amazement) that God had chosen to give humans a place in the hierarchy of governance, a place in what we sometimes call the great chain of being–a little lower than the angels and a little above the sheep, oxen, beasts, birds, and fish (8:5-8). Humbled and comforted by the realization that he belonged to God despite his low estate, he declared: “How majestic is your name in all the earth.” In David’s understanding of the cosmic order, God, angels, and humans all collaborated in the governance of earth. He found intimacy in immensity. 

As the millennia passed, humans learned to dress the naked eye with instruments that enhanced their vision. Hans Lippershey, a spectacles maker from the Netherlands, devised the first spyglass, which helped sailors avoid both rocky shorelines and pirates. A few years later, Galileo refined the spyglass and directed a telescope to the heavens, seeing for the first time the solar system and upsetting the geocentric cosmology of his day. Soon after that, Blaise Pascal looked through a slightly more advanced telescope and gazed at the stars of the Milky Way. Like David before him, he felt small, but, unlike David, he was unsure of God and his place in such an immense universe:

When I consider… the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright…. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me? (Pensees 68).

In 2021 scientists launched the James Webb Telescope and in 2023 the Euclid Telescope into space. These instruments conduct infrared astronomy and view objects too old, distant, or faint for earlier telescopes to see. All of us can now view the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and galactic systems beyond our ability to count, more stars than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of earth (a comparison first offered by Carl Sagan). These telescopes also document the existence of an undetectable dark matter that played a major role in the formation of our cosmos. My universe is not only immense; it is dark, mysterious.

If David and Pascal felt small beneath the starry canopy, I feel nanoscopic. I look up and see heavens so vast and mysterious that I feel lost, wandering in a cosmic wilderness. The infinite immensity of space threatens to swallow me, and its powerful forces threaten to digest me. I’m quite sure my companions at Agate Beach did not want to think about these things.

All Truth is God’s Truth

One of the strengths of the Reformed tradition is its robust Trinitarian theology and the emphasis it places on God, the creator and sustainer of the world. Reformed believers celebrate the word of God manifest in the world and the word of God contained in the scriptures, two complementary books of revelation. They affirm that the truths in one book enhance those in the other and that together both books illuminate the pathway to God, affirming that God’s word is a lamp to our feet and light to our path (Psalm 119:105).

At their best, as Reformed believers learn more about the created order, they trust that the Holy Spirit will oversee their search for the complementarity of the books of revelation and give them the insight and courage to face the particular challenges of their generation. This is how Reformed believers understand the word of God to be “living and active.” They honor the dedication and work of both scientists and theologians, and they bring them into conversation with one another. All truth is God’s truth, we sometimes say to each other, or, in the words of Jodocus van Lodenstein, Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed, always reforming.

The belief in the complementarity of the books of revelation is a significant Reformed contribution to the Christian tradition as a whole, but it also represents a significant challenge. With the aid of advanced telescopes, we can see ever deeper into space/time and learn ever more about the origins of the cosmos. The created order is much larger and the place of humans within it much smaller than our spiritual ancestors ever imagined them to be. The challenge I and other modern believers face is reconciling the emerging scientific story of the universe with the biblical story. Can I, like David before me, find intimacy in the midst of immensity? Can I find comfort that I belong?