Coming out
of the leisure centre last week, I looked up and there in the middle of the
dark, western sky were two very bright stars that I had not seen before. Wondering what they were, I went home, checked
a couple and star charts and found out that they were the planets “Jupiter” (smaller
and on the left) and “Venus” (larger looking and to the right). Interestingly, “Mars” was also visible as a
red dot in the southeastern sky. Until
the end of March, these three planets will be visible for a least a few hours
after sunset (When showing this to my kids, I challenged them to find one more
planet. When they could not, I told them
to look down and see the earth…. They did not think that was funny either).
I have
always been interested in stars, planets and comets. I do not know a lot about them, but the
little bit that I do know fascinates me. For example, did you know that, due to its
elliptical orbit, Venus can be as much as 261 million km from earth? Jupiter has 66 confirmed moons and several of
them can be seen from earth using common telescopes. Of course, we know much more about Mars
thanks to the “rovers” that have explored its surface in recent years. The incredible thing to me is that those are
just the “near-by” things. Thanks to the
“Hubble Telescope”, scientists are discovering new stars, galaxies and deep
space objects every day (see http://hubblesite.org/
for some amazing photos).
All this
makes me think, “There had to be a creator”.
Does anyone really believe that all that stuff out there just
“happened”? To believe that all the planets,
moons, stars, comets and galaxies that swirl around in our universe came into
being by some really lucky accident takes as much faith (or more) than to
believe in a creator who designed it all to work the way it does.
Whether
looking at large scale things like galaxies, or small scale things like newborn
babies, the message is exactly the same: “In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
(For more information about how science and faith ought to be friends and not foes, check out www.doesgodexist.org . Run by a long time science teacher and former atheist, it has a lot of good information on a wide range of topics)
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