The Heavens Declare

Depending on where you are in the world, you may have heard something about a total solar eclipse happening today. If you're close to where I am - in the direct center of the "path of totality" - then you have heard a lot about a total solar eclipse happening today. You might even already have a T-shirt proclaiming such a thing. 

This event is bringing together persons from all walks of life, who will be standing outside and staring up at the heavens...whatever they believe about them. 

Which brings us to an interesting conversation about, at the very least, "science." There are so many persons who believe only in "science" who are super-excited about this event because they know it will be once in a lifetime for them (unless they choose, as many do, to travel around and chase these things because honestly, they aren't as rare as they seem unless you spend your whole life in one spot). 

They will marvel at how cool it is and dig deep into the science of it, and then they lean on the math to tell you that this isn't going to happen again, at least not here, until the year...whatever year it is. And the very fact that they can say that betrays the very foundations of their faith in science. 

See, "science" as a general belief system says that all the matter in the universe always existed and things got started off somehow (the most widely-accepted theory is some sort of "big bang") and all this mass of matter, out of chaos, has organized itself over billions of years to become the things that we live in today. Even we, as human beings, have evolved to come here. Because the entire universe is constantly expanding, rapidly (relatively) changing, always growing. Things are always morphing into other things. 

And yet, somehow, we come to have something so solidly, mathematically predictable as when the next solar eclipse is going to happen in a certain location. 

So they'll tell you that things have settled into a certain rhythm, even as they continue to evolve and expand and press outward, but...can both of those things be true? 

As I've said before with other aspects of the faith of "science," they really can't. We can observe, maybe, how the universe has expanded for the last hundred years or maybe two, as we've developed the equipment, but that doesn't mean that it's always been expanding. It could be perhaps expanding and contracting, just at such a length of time that we haven't observed a contraction yet (and some scientists are waiting on contraction as a sign of inevitable collapse, but again...would that necessarily be the case if we see some contraction?). In other words, maybe the universe isn't constantly expanding; maybe it's wobbling. We don't have enough data to know. 

Which leaves us with two things that are possible. Either 1) we don't have enough information to accurately say that in 412 years or whatever, another eclipse will pass through here because we may not know for sure what exactly will happen in a time span longer than we've been scientifically observing space...or 2) the world has a rhythm about it that really is predictable and knowable. And if the latter is the case, we have to ask how it got here. 

Because it wouldn't be from chaos. If the world is chaos organizing itself and it has come to rest sufficiently to be predictable, then it has to have come to rest in something, for some reason. Think of a marble rolling around and then finally finding a groove. The groove gives it stability, but where did the groove come from? We are back to the question of a Creator. "Science" always leads us back to the question of a Creator. 

So either, we're still ignorant or we're back to the question of a Creator. And this conundrum is illustrated no better than a moment like today, when we will all be standing outside staring up at the sky as the moon passes between the earth and the sun and casts a rare mid-day moment of darkness and stillness and night and...

...and as the heavens declare His glory. Indisputably.