A few weeks back, our pastor gave a sermon on the Power & Glory of God. In it he used the passage in Psalms 19 saying that the heavens are declaring the Glory of God. He supplemented it by showing a vast array of Hubble Space Telescope images, from nebulae to the Deep Field to the new awesome ultra Hi-Res photo of the Andromeda Galaxy. It is awe-inspiring to say the least, and does conjure up a sense of the Divine.
He then tied it up into John 1, saying that all things were created through Christ. While most went away firmly refreshed in faith and wonder in God, I was nonplussed. After much reflection I found out why...Christianity is much too small a worldview to contain the vastness of the natural world. The sense of immense awe & wonder instantly vanishes when I insert a theology that restricts itself to a tiny fraction of a moment in a tiny fraction of a land in an incalculably tiny portion of the Universe. Or in other words, I simply fail to find Christ in the Cretaceous.
We scoffed at Copernicus when he dared to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but 500 years later we still really haven't gotten away from that philosophy. Yes we realize that technically the Earth revolves around Sol, but theologically we still hold that everything in the quintillions of suns & planets revolves around something that happened in a few hundred square miles. Given what we know about how the natural world works, there is almost certainly other life out there, potentially with their own moral dilemmas. How do you reconcile this paradox? I mean this as an open-ended question to get answers, not to scoff at believers.
He then tied it up into John 1, saying that all things were created through Christ. While most went away firmly refreshed in faith and wonder in God, I was nonplussed. After much reflection I found out why...Christianity is much too small a worldview to contain the vastness of the natural world. The sense of immense awe & wonder instantly vanishes when I insert a theology that restricts itself to a tiny fraction of a moment in a tiny fraction of a land in an incalculably tiny portion of the Universe. Or in other words, I simply fail to find Christ in the Cretaceous.
We scoffed at Copernicus when he dared to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but 500 years later we still really haven't gotten away from that philosophy. Yes we realize that technically the Earth revolves around Sol, but theologically we still hold that everything in the quintillions of suns & planets revolves around something that happened in a few hundred square miles. Given what we know about how the natural world works, there is almost certainly other life out there, potentially with their own moral dilemmas. How do you reconcile this paradox? I mean this as an open-ended question to get answers, not to scoff at believers.
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