The Christian astrophysicist Deborah Haarsma was standing alone in the New Mexico desert beside the Very Large Array, a vast field of twenty-seven radio dishes stretching for miles. While her colleagues worked inside the control room, tracking signals arriving from halfway across the universe, she stood outside in the cold, looking up with her bare eyes. The sky was thick with stars, and the words of Psalm 19 came to mind: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The team was studying gravitational lenses—places where massive galaxies bend space itself. In moments like that, ordinary measurements felt useless.
As a young researcher, Haarsma found familiar atheist arguments surfacing in her mind. Carl Sagan once wrote that we live on “an insignificant planet of a humdrum star…tucked away in some forgotten corner” of the cosmos. If the universe is this vast, where do human beings fit? And where does God?
Astronomers estimate that our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars, with hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond it. Even more striking, everything we can see—stars, planets, atoms—accounts for only about 5 percent of the universe. The remaining 95 percent is dark matter and dark energy, real and powerful yet largely unexplained. Some conclude that that God must be distant and impersonal.
But Scripture proclaims that the Creator of all things did not remain removed from what he made. In a universe vast beyond imagination, the incarnation declares something astonishing: the God who made the cosmos chose to come flesh and dwell among us.
