Hubble, Humility, and Man

Spirituality Column #246
July 26, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers

Hubble, Humility, and Man
By Bob Walters

Dramatic deep-space images from the Hubble satellite telescope have inspired worldwide awe the past couple of decades.

On TV, in magazines, and clogging our inbound email, we’ve seen the luminous light of exploding quasars and collapsing galaxies, thanks to Hubble’s above-earthly vantage point and mindboggling technology. The pictures are phenomenal: scientists marvel, artists are humbled, and poets are left speechless. Atheists proclaim man’s insignificance. Believers see God’s magnificence.

Some people just sit back and say, “Wow!”

A recent network evening newscast noting the end of NASA’s space shuttle program aired a sidebar on the oft-repaired Hubble’s history, trials and triumphs. The reporter’s parting words grabbed my attention. Voicing over surreal intergalactic photography, he intoned (approximately), “Hubble’s images have made mankind think differently about how he views himself.”

I just sat back and said, “Wow.” For here was a brilliantly crafted, politically correct, non-committal statement carefully and perfectly framing a truth with no conclusion, casting light with no heat, making a brick with no straw, and balancing a platitude squarely on a secular fence.

The reporter left the sharp arrow in the quiver, the logical follow-up question: “Different … how?” That ponderance was left dangling with the audience. One could muse, simply, “Look what man found!” For sure, many said, “Behold, the face of God!”

Because the interview leading into that final statement was a scientist marveling at our “13-billion-year-old universe” – which I interpreted as an enthusiastic and institutional bon mot for Evolution and a purpose-pitch at the chin of Creationism – it seemed the reporter intended us viewers to gain further appreciation for our personal smallness against the big, meaningless, postmodern emptiness of everything else. In other words, “Those Hubble images sure put mankind in his rightful, small place.”

I think not. In the Hubble images I see unequivocal, gigantic proof of a great God, and the shimmering, show-stopping, unimpeachable truth that God not only exists but that He builds utterly amazing stuff. I see overwhelming evidence of a God Whose glory I cannot adequately express.

“What is mankind that you are mindful of him?” David asks God in Psalm 8:4.

The Hubble images are no adequate picture of God, because God is bigger than that. But in those images we see something the creation of which God considered worthwhile for His glory. And to think, He created us, too.

All I can say, humbly, is “Wow!”

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the Bible gives us a more instructive view of God than any telescope. Psalm 8. Yeah.