Stars

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

To give these verses some perspective, the distance from one side of the universe to the other is an incredible 93 billion light-years. Using this as our measure, God likens the distance between our thoughts and his thoughts to the distance from one side of the universe to the other.

To put that immense number another way, 93 billion light-years is 544 septillion miles (544 followed by 20 zeros). Even if we tried to travel from one side of the universe to the other at the speed of light (5.88 trillion miles a year), it would take an infinite amount of time. That's because the universe will continue to expand whilst you are travelling, even at the speed of light. So, the edge of the universe will remain forever sealed off from you — even travelling at the speed of light.

That means that your best thought on your best day is ninety-three billion light-years short of how great God really is.

Possible Preaching Angles: Greatness of God; Omniscience of God; Trusting God – The immense wisdom, insight, and love of God should calm our fears. You may not understand your current crisis and worry about the outcome, but God is in control, His love for you is everlasting, His plan for you will happen, and you can rest secure that your Father is watching over you.

Author Philip Yancey writes:

Where I live in the Rocky Mountains, you can see several thousand stars with the naked eye on a clear night. All of them belong to the Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars, including an average-sized one that our planet Earth orbits around—the Sun.

Our galaxy has plenty of room: 26 trillion miles separate the Sun from the star nearest to it. And traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 25,000 years to reach the center of the Milky Way from our home planet, which lies out in the galaxy’s margins.

Until a century ago, astronomers believed the universe consisted of our galaxy alone. Then, in the 1920’s, Edwin Hubble proved that one apparent cloud of dust and gas in the night sky, named Andromeda, was actually a separate galaxy. Now there were two. When NASA launched a large telescope into space for a clearer view, they appropriately named it after Hubble.

In 1995, a scientist proposed pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at one dark spot, the size of a grain of sand, to see what lay beyond the darkness. For ten days, the telescope orbited Earth and took long-exposure images of that spot. The result, which has been called “the most important image ever taken,” would astonish everyone. It turns out that tiny spot alone contained almost 3,000 galaxies!

Scientists now believe that if you had unlimited vision, you could hold a sewing needle at arm’s length toward the night sky and see 10,000 galaxies in the eye of the needle. Move it an inch to the left and you’d find 10,000 more. Same to the right, or no matter where else you moved it. There are approximately a trillion galaxies out there, each encompassing an average of 100 to 200 billion stars.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How should we adapt to this humbling new reality? Back when people assumed the universe comprised a few thousand stars, a psalmist marveled in prayer, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:3–4).

The answer, of course, is found in the New Testament revelation that God loves the world so deeply (John 3:16) that he sent his Son in the form of a servant (Phil. 2:6-7) to die for humanity. In an act of humility beyond comprehension, the God of a trillion galaxies chose to “con-descend”—to descend to be with—the benighted humans on this one rebellious planet, out of billions in the universe.

Blogger Stephanie Duncan Smith describes the awe she felt watching a total solar eclipse:

[My husband] Zach and I hiked up to a ridge with our supernova glasses. I won’t forget the way the sun just … dimmed, snuffed out, the way the birds swooped in confusion thinking it was nightfall, the magic of witnessing this cosmic event together.

Though not everyone felt that way. I am paraphrasing from memory, but a high-profile CEO tweeted at the time that while everyone else might be staring at the sky through their cereal boxes that day, she would be in the office making millions.

Imagine being bored by the thought of beholding something bigger than yourself, something wild and other and alive. Imagine considering yourself “above” the cosmic orbit in which you make your creaturely home. This executive considered herself too busy to be bothered by the wonder of a world outside herself. She was opting for the security of the measurable, the predictable, all that can be calculated and forecast and scaled. Yet by doing so, she was opting out of the sheer gift of being wowed.

It is human nature to want to be wowed. Environmentalist Paul Hawken once said, “Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course … We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.”

Every night! There is a cosmic event. Every night, an invitation to participate in what psychologists refer to as the experience of “perceived vastness,” or awe. As Hawken highlights here, we tend to tune out the familiar.

When Galileo introduced the telescope as a tool to peer into the galaxies, his contemporaries did not believe him. Scoffing, they refused to even look through the device. Galileo sat alone with his telescope. He was the sole observer of the vastness of the cosmos. A single witness of galaxies beyond anything anyone had seen or imagined. Galileo had the stars to himself.

Undermining Aristotle’s previous explanations of the universe, Galileo published his own findings based on what he’d seen through the telescope. He painted a picture for the entire world through words, a display of the heavens scratched across bound pages. He wrote about mountains and craters on the moon, spots upon the sun, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and multitudes of stars never known to exist.

These were monumental discoveries that would shape future space explorations, but they fell on ears refusing to hear and eyes refusing to see. Galileo’s peers mocked him and his toy. Strictly adhering to Aristotle’s descriptions of the universe, they refused to believe anything contrary to what they had held to for so long.

Astronomers have found the brightest known object in the universe—a glowing core of a galaxy, called a quasar, located 12 billion light-years away. Quasars are the brightest objects in the cosmos, each consisting of a supermassive black hole that’s actively devouring an orbiting disc of gas and dust. But the black hole in this record-setting quasar is gobbling up more than a sun’s-worth of mass every day, making it the fastest growing black hole scientists have ever seen.

The gargantuan object stretches about seven light-years across, and it puts our sun’s luminosity to shame—the quasar shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the star in our solar system.

Christian Wolf, lead author of the new study, said, “This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe. It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now.”

The black hole in the quasar is ravenous, consuming an amount of material equivalent to as much as 413 suns each year, and its black hole weighs about the same as 17 billion suns.

Wolf said, “It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second. He told reports that he doesn’t think anything will ever top this record for the universe’s brightest object.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This newly identified object is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun! How can anything be that bright? Thinking about this star gives us a sense of what the glorious presence of God is like, for Scripture says that God is a being who "lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

Not only are the images from the James Webb Space Telescope brilliant and beautiful, but they are also baffling. Approximately 40 pairs of a new classification of orb have been identified within pictures of the Orion Nebula.

Dubbed JuMBOs—Jupiter Mass Binary Objects—these objects defy our current, conventional understanding of how planets, stars, and gravitational orbits work. Unlike normal planets, the Jupiter-sized pairs don’t orbit a star. Astronomers don’t know why—or how—they function in this way. As The New York Times put it, they are “a complete mystery.”

These images and discoveries coming back from the far reaches of space put us in our place. They bring to the forefront how expansive the universe is, how small we are, how much we don’t know, and how much there is yet to discover. When we consider the heavens—the star clusters, nebulae, black holes, and now JuMBOs—who are we? What is humankind that God is mindful of us and cares for us, as Psalm 8:3–4 says?

In “God’s Promises Are Clearest When We Turn Out the Lights,” Cort Gatliff reflects that “the stars provide perspective. They humble us by highlighting our finitude. Yet they also lift up our heads by reminding us of our infinite worth in the eyes of the Creator.” And while stunning images from space let us glimpse celestial realities we’d never be able to see with the naked eye, simple nighttime starscapes also invite us into awe and wonder.

During Advent, we often read this prophecy from Isaiah: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned” (9:2). In a spiritual and emotional sense, the recent heaviness of war, natural disasters, and other global tragedies helps us understand even more deeply what it means to be people walking in darkness. And this deep darkness only magnifies what it is to gaze upon the Light of the World. Amid it all, God is mindful of us. God does care for us. The Light of the World shines in the darkness.

Philip Yancey wrote in a blog on the seemingly infinite expanse of space and the smallness of our earth by comparison. The sheer scale is enough to make you dizzy, but Yancey stares at the sky and recalls the Book of Job—and Jesus. He writes:

Scientists now believe that if you had unlimited vision, you could hold a sewing needle at arm’s length toward the night sky and see 10,000 galaxies in the eye of the needle. Move it an inch to the left and you’d find 10,000 more. Same to the right, or no matter where else you moved it. There are approximately a trillion galaxies out there, each encompassing an average of 100 to 200 billion stars.

Job got a closeup lesson on how puny we humans are compared to the God of the universe, and it silenced all his doubts and complaints. I’ve never experienced anything like the travails Job endured. But whenever I have my own doubts, I try to remember that perspective — the Hubble telescope view of God.

In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul quotes what many believe to be a hymn from the early church. In a … lyrical paragraph, Paul marvels that Jesus gave up all the glory of heaven to take on the form of a man — and not just a man, but a servant — one who voluntarily subjected himself to an ignominious death on a cross. (Phil 2:6-7)

I pause and wonder at the mystery of Incarnation. In an act of humility beyond comprehension, the God of a trillion galaxies chose to “con-descend” — to descend to be with — the benighted humans on this one rebellious planet, out of billions in the universe. I falter at analogies, but it is akin to a human becoming an ant, perhaps, or an amoeba, or even a bacterium. Yet according to Paul, that act of condescension proved to be a rescue mission that led to the healing of something broken in the universe. […]

We hear the roar of God at the end of the Book of Job, a voice that evokes awe and wonder more than intimacy and love. Yet Philippians 2 gives a different slant on the Hubble telescope view of God. A God beyond the limits of space and time has a boundless capacity of love for his creations, no matter how small or rebellious they might be.

Scientists studying two different parts of God’s awesome creation—the oceans below and the sky above—have made two startling discoveries.

First, (in January 2022), an underwater mapping project off the coast of Tahiti took an unexpected twist. Deep sea explorers discovered a sprawling, two-mile long coral reef resembling a bed of roses. The remarkably well-preserved and pristine reef is the largest ever found at its depth. One scientist called it a “dream.”

Then, two months later (March 2022), astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a record-setting image showing the most distant individual star ever seen. The star lies 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. It is believed to be about 50 times as massive as the sun and millions of times brighter. The scientists expressed awe and surprise at their own discovery. Individual stars far from Earth are often too dim to be seen even with powerful telescopes. But Hubble was able to spot the massive star with help from “gravitational lensing,” in which light-bending gravity from massive celestial objects functions as a magnifying lens. The star was dubbed Earendel, which NASA said means “morning star” in Old English.

David rejoices in the fact that God's steadfast love toward those who fear him can be illustrated by the height of the heavens above the earth (Ps. 103:11). David was not an astronomer. He had no grasp on the unimaginable magnitude of the height to which he refers. But we do today.

A good way to help us fathom the unfathomable is the light-year. A light-year is how far light travels in one calendar year. Light moves at 186,000 miles in one second. Multiply 186,000 times 60 seconds, and you have a light-minute. Mul­tiply that figure by 60 minutes, and you have a light-hour. Multiply that figure by 24, and you have a light-day, and that by 365, and you have a light-year. So, light can travel almost six trillion miles (the number six followed by 12 zeroes) in a 365-day period. That's the equivalent of about 12,000,000 round trips to the moon.

Let's assume we are speeding in a jet airplane at 500 miles per hour on a trip to the moon. If we traveled non-stop, 24 hours a day, it would take us just about 3 weeks to arrive at our destination. If we wanted to visit our sun, 93 million miles from earth, it would take us a bit more than 21 years to get there. And if we wanted to reach Pluto, the dwarf planet farthest away in our solar system, our non-stop trip would last slightly longer than 900 years.

Now, try to get your mind around this: The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of a galaxy some 13 billion light-years from earth. That would put this galaxy 78 sextillion miles from earth (the number 78 followed by 21 zeroes).

If we are traveling at 500 miles per hour nonstop, literally 52 weeks in every year, with not a moment's pause, we would reach this galaxy in 20 quadrillion years (The number 20 followed by 15 zeroes)! And that would get us just to the farthest point that our best telescopes have yet been able to detect. This would be the mere fringe of what lies beyond. It is currently estimated that there are around two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Pause for a moment and let this sink in. Are you beginning to get a feel for what it means to know that God's love for you, is greater than the distance between the heavens and the earth?

Launched in 2016, the $100 million search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, “Breakthrough Listen,” continues to come up empty, as do numerous other high-tech endeavors. Author Bryan Appleyard describes the daunting task. The universe contains “perhaps 2 trillion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets. And yet still we see and hear nothing. There seems to be only what the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal called ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”

The big question is, does it really matter if we make contact? True believers have been observed as needing it to be true. “An alien revelation would explain or heal the undefined unease they felt about the human condition. This unease could be expressed as suspicion of governments, apocalyptic anxieties, religious longing or simply a need for their lives to become less banal, less limited.”

In his distinguished book on the subject, Are We Alone? physicist Paul Davies writes that,

The most important upshot of the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be to restore to human beings something of the dignity of which science has robbed them. Far from exposing Homo sapiens as an inferior creature in the vast cosmos, the certain existence of alien beings would give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, were a part of a larger, majestic process of cosmic self-knowledge.

In a recent issue of CT Magazine, Astronomer David Block tells how he learned that the same God who numbered the stars knew and loved him personally:

I grew up a Jewish boy in a South African gold-mining town known as Krugersdorp. I remember sitting in (synagogue), enthralled as our learned rabbi expounded how God was a personal God—he would speak to Moses, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to many others. Growing up, I often pondered how I fit into all this.

By the time I entered the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, I was deeply concerned that I had no assurance that God was indeed a personal God. I was confident that he was a historical God who had delivered our people from the hands of Pharaoh. But he seemed so far removed from the particulars of my life. Where was the personality and the vibrancy of a God who truly could speak to me?

I became friendly with Professor Lewis Hurst. He had a great interest in astronomy, and we would discuss the complexities of the cosmos for hours at a time. I remember attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society graced by Stephen Hawking. The atmosphere there was intellectually stimulating, but inwardly I could tell that something, or someone, was missing. To be brutally honest, I did not know God.

Back in South Africa, my friendship with Professor Hurst grew, and I started sharing with him my thoughts and feelings about the cosmos. I said, “The universe is so beautiful, both visually and mathematically.” The idea of the universe being designed by a Master Artist continued to resonate with me, but I struggled to find evidence that this artist had any interest in knowing me personally.

I shared further doubts: “Are we,” as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “just a fleeting shadow that appears and then disappears? What is our reason for living? What is the purpose of life? Is it possible to have a personal encounter with the creator of the cosmos?”

Hurst listened intently. He said, “There is an answer to all the questions you are asking. I am well aware that you come from an Orthodox Jewish family, but would you be willing to meet with a dear friend of mine, the Reverend John Spyker?”

My Jewish parents had taught me to seek answers wherever they might be found, so I consented to meet with this Christian minister. Taking the Bible in his hands, Spyker turned to Romans 9:33 where Paul affirms that Y’shua (Jesus) is a stumbling stone to the Jewish people but that those who freely choose to believe in him will never be ashamed.

By divine grace, suddenly everything became perfectly clear. Y’shua was the stumbling stone—my stumbling stone! Jesus had fulfilled all the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures (where the Messiah would be born, how he was to die, and much else besides). While most Jewish people today are still awaiting the Messiah’s coming, I knew I had found him and that all I had to do was respond to his free offer of grace.

Immediately, I asked Spyker to pray for me, which he did. And on that day, at the age of 22, I surrendered my heart and my reason to Christ Jesus. His Spirit spread through every cell of my being.

(Reflecting on my early days), I realize they had been infused by God’s grace. He had been planting spiritual seeds every time I gazed up into the heavens. And I still marvel that a God so majestic and powerful would know my name—and love me as intimately as his own begotten Son.

Evolutionists like to claim that our Sun is merely an average star, just one among billions. There’s no reason to believe our Sun is unusual … or so they say. After all, if our Sun were special, that might support the idea that a benevolent Creator made it for us! Nevertheless, our Sun is special indeed. Stars come in a variety of sizes, colors, and temperatures. As a single “Class G” star, our Sun is very well suited to support life on Earth. Most other stars are not.

For example, the most common stars (about 75 percent of all stars) are red dwarfs. These stars commonly emit flares: eruptions of superheated material, radiation, and charged particles blasted out into space. Large-enough flares can sterilize any planets orbiting these stars. Although our Sun occasionally releases small flares, they’re gentle compared to what we see elsewhere. We’ve seen other stars produce “superflares” up to 10 million times more energetic than those from our Sun.

Even among Sun-like stars, our Sun is unique. In a study of 83,000 solar-type stars, 148 erupted in just 120 days of observing. Extend this rate out, and each solar-type star would have more than a 50% chance of erupting every 100 years. Over thousands of years, a typical Sun-like star should have multiple massive eruptions. Yet there is no evidence that our Sun has ever emitted a superflare. As the study’s summary noted, “The flares on our Sun are thousands of times punier than those on similar stars.” But why?

Secular astronomers are scratching their heads over this. But creationary astronomers aren’t surprised by this. As Isaiah 45:18 says, the Lord created the heavens and Earth “not in vain … He formed it to be inhabited.” Since our Sun was designed by a masterful Creator to support life, we shouldn’t be surprised that it supports life very well. Our Earth, Sun, and Solar System are fearfully and wonderfully made to be our home--and to proclaim the glory of their Creator.

Anna Merlan is an American journalist who specializes in politics and religion. In her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists, she devotes a chapter to the psychology behind UFO conspiracies. Not just in the US, but globally:

… the intensity, depth, and breadth of the conversation about aliens throughout the world says something profound about human hopes. About our desire to not be alone in the universe. (About) our wish for some wise and mysterious force out there in the farthest reaches of space that is ready to show us the way. UFO enthusiasm coexists with a certain degree of New Age spirituality. There’s a sense that extraterrestrials don’t just exist. But that they will someday reveal to us … a better way to live, a higher state of being.

Merlan quotes astronomer and leading ufologist Jacques Vallée, who wrote: “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies. It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy-to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

Dr. Joel Primack is an American astrophysicist who co-developed what's called "the cold dark matter theory" (which seeks to understand the formation and structure of the universe). When asked about the alleged rift between science and religion, Primack said, "In the last few years astronomy has come together so that we're now able to tell a coherent story of how the universe came together. This story does not contradict God, but instead enlarges the idea of God."

David H. Bradstreet, an award-winning scientist and astronomy professor, recounts how his church helped him find his calling in science. Growing up in Massachusetts, Bradstreet developed a love for astronomy by looking through a telescope with a cheap cardboard tube and rickety aluminum tripod. He often took the telescope outside in the middle of the cold winters. Bradstreet explains:

I couldn't see much [out my bedroom window] … so I devised a brilliant solution. I wrapped myself in layers of warm clothing, grabbed a flimsy, derelict metal chair out of the basement, and headed out to our big back yard, along with my telescope and observation notebook. The dark winter skies were incredibly clear, allowing me to study the heavens to my heart's content as I sat bundled, silent and shivering.

On nights when the frigid winds grew particularly bitter, my numb fingers and bulky gloves made it difficult to write down my observations in my notebook. But I did so anyway faithfully recording my sightings of hundreds of planets and stars. … When I could no longer control my frozen body's shakes and shudders, I reluctantly went inside to warm up. Many times I couldn't feel my hands or feet, but nobody in the family ever called me crazy, at least not to my face. My dad even helped me cart my equipment around.

Fortunately, both my family and my bigger church family at First Baptist Church lovingly embraced the somewhat obsessive "junior astronomer" in their midst. It wasn't until years later that I realized how different things might have been for me had I grown up in a church that condemned science and discouraged believers from working in astronomy. I still can't understand why some Christians turn their backs on a discipline that powerfully demonstrates the majesty of our Creator.

Sarah Salviander is research scientist in the field of astrophysics. A lifelong atheist, Sarah became a theist as an undergraduate physics student, when she came to believe that the universe was too elegantly organized to be an accident. She is currently a researcher at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a part-time assistant professor in the Physics Department at Southwestern University.

Her parents were socialists and political activists who were also atheists, though they preferred to be called agnostics. In her testimony Sarah wrote:

It's amazing that for the first 25 years of my life, I met only three people who identified as Christian. My view of Christianity was negative from an early age. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe.

So she began to focus on her physics and math studies. She joined campus clubs, started to make friends, and, for the first time in her life, met Christians.

They weren't like [atheists and agnostics I knew]—they were joyous and content. And, they were smart, too. I was astonished to find that my physics professors, whom I admired, were Christian. Their personal example began to have an influence on me, and I found myself growing less hostile to Christianity.

Sarah then joined a group in the Centre for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS) that was researching evidence for the big bang, and that was a turning point in her conversion. She continued: "I started to sense an underlying order to the universe. Without knowing it, I was awakening to what Psalm 19 tells us so clearly: the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

One of the most astonishing discoveries astrophysicists have made in recent decades is that if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent stronger, our universe would have reversed course long ago. It would have collapsed catastrophically, ending in a big crunch, the opposite of the big bang. Likewise, if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent weaker, our universe would have flown apart so rapidly that planets, stars, galaxies—all the basic constituents of the universe—would never have had a chance to coalesce. We'd all be dust in the wind.

Is it an accident that everything turned out so well? That gravity is not too strong, not too weak, but just right?

Sir Fred Hoyle, the late University of Cambridge astronomer and avowed atheist, didn't think so, not for a second. After doing innumerable computations, Hoyle discovered that the odds of our being accidents of nature are comparable to the likelihood of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling scrap metal into a fully functioning Boeing 747. "'So small as to be negligible," he said, following his calculations, "even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole universe." Hoyle said, "One arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design."

Today astronomers have come down on the side of believing that galaxies and galaxy clusters are pregnant with some sort of exotic material that is invisible to us—they are calling it dark matter. They haven't yet identified what it is exactly—or even established that it truly exists—but it is not for lack of trying. Despite decades of using every imaginable means of detection—from gamma-ray telescopes in outer space to cryogenic subatomic particle monitors buried deep inside a northern Minnesota mine—their occasional, tantalizing reports of success remain as unreliable as Elvis sightings.

And dark matter isn't even the most astonishing thing modem astrophysicists have discovered about gravity. Astrophysicists have discovered another mystifying reality—they call it dark energy. All told, astronomers have concluded that dark energy comprises some 68 percent of the total universe and dark matter, about 27 percent. That means only 5 percent of the entire universe is visible to us! In other words, everything we call scientific knowledge is based on but a pittance of what there is to know about our world. Ninety- five percent of it is hidden from us. Even with all of our advances our science is 95 percent in the dark about the universe it seeks and claims to understand; about what is real or not, what is possible or not—even about a prosaic force that exists literally right under our noses.