Window to Creation

We live in an age where our lives are radically impacted by light we cannot see and sounds we cannot hear. You turn on your microwave, and it cooks your food using light that has a wave length longer than your eyes can see. You get an x-ray, and the picture of the inside of your body is made with light that has a wave length shorter than your eyes can see. Kidney stones and unborn babies are photographed using sound waves with wave lengths that humans cannot detect with their senses. All of us have seen discussions recently about cell phones and their possible influences on the human body. Unlike the frequency of light that our eyes can see and tell us about, most of these other kinds of light and sound can penetrate solid objects of all kinds. That is why we can hear radio inside a building, use x-rays to see a bone, or use sound waves to observe an unborn baby.

 The thing that many people do not understand about all of these forms of sound and especially of light is that they can and are being used to see things in the creation that our eyes cannot see. These lights our eyes cannot see are truly windows to creation. The problem with our eyes is that they cannot see through solid matter. Observers in the Northern Hemisphere cannot see stars over the South Pole because the earth is in the way. In the same way, we have problems seeing things in space because there is so much material in the way. If you look at the sketch on page 4, you will see the earth's position in our galaxy. The galaxy consists of 100 billion stars plus large amounts of dust, gases, hunks of rock, and probably numerous planets, moons, comets, and other objects similar to ours. Since we are located high in the edge of the galaxy, about a third of the way out from the center, when we look south, for example, we are looking into a huge amount of matter. Similar problems exist looking east and west. If we were able to use only visible light, the only direction we could see anything would be to the north, and our view of the cosmos would be very limited.

Diagram of Milkyway galaxy

Using radio waves that penetrate solid material just as they do the walls of your house, we are able to look all directions in the cosmos. X-rays also provide us with a view of the cosmos we could not see with our eyes that cannot see through gas and dust clouds obscuring the cosmos. A vast percentage of our modern observations of the creation is made with these new tools using a window our eyes cannot see through.

The ultimate question, of course, is the question of what we have seen through this new window we have. The answer is that whole new understandings of the cosmos have come about, all of which support the existence of God and His creative wisdom and power in the creative process. We have learned that the cosmos is accelerating, not slowing down in its expansion. This fact clearly shows that the cosmos had a distinct beginning and is not an eternal pulsating or oscillating universe. We have come to understand that the cosmos is far larger than we thought. In less than 100 years, we have learned that instead of one galaxy in which we live being the extent of the creation, there are literally billions of galaxies in space. We have also seen that our Milky Way and our Solar System are far more special than we had ever imagined. We now see the major planets as shields that protect the earth from debris being drawn to the sun's gravity well. Our x-ray studies have shown us that black holes are far more common than we thought, further emphasizing the design features of our own part of space. We have seen that planets around other stars are far more massive and have huge orbital eccentricities in their elliptical patterns emphasizing how rare and carefully designed our earth is with its very circular orbit.

 More than anything else, all of these discoveries have shown us that the more we know of the creation, the closer we get to the Creator. Those who believe in God welcome new windows to creation. If the God who created the cosmos in the beginning had told us what He did in the Bible, all we are doing is learning more about the power and greatness of God.

--John N. Clayton

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