The upcoming theatrical film The Story of Everything (out on April 30) is well timed, with the fits that prominent atheists are being driven to by religious thoughts invoked by Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover. The documentary examines two competing stories about the universe, one of those a cosmos with ultimate meaning, the other without.
A Meaningful Cosmos
For the Wall Street Journal, our contributor Bethel McGrew describes the contest as unfair. She has a point. The tradition of seeing the stars, planets, and the rest of space as pointing to a creator has a long and distinguished scientific history. Dr. McGrew observes, “In the early 17th century, astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote about his revolutionary discoveries of the laws of planetary motion in rhapsodically reverent language that would give Richard Dawkins an aneurysm” — God forbid! More:
Kepler said that he’d planned to become a theologian, “but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for ‘the heavens declare the glory of God.’ ” He believed astronomers were “priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature,” so “it befits us to be thoughtful . . . above all else, of the glory of God.”
Carl Sagan christened Earth the “pale blue dot” of the cosmos, inspired by an iconic image from Voyager 1. He believed this snapshot of our fragile planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” should challenge “the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe.” It should make man feel infinitely insignificant, with no hope of rescue from above as we look up to consider the heavens. Sagan’s question is as ancient as the Psalms: “What is man that you are mindful of him?” But the psalmist’s answer is the same as Victor Glover’s: Man isn’t a lonely cosmic accident, but beloved.
There’s a reason this message continues to ring more loudly than atheist manifestos and angry screeds. The contest between nihilism and a narrative that places the thinking, discovering, space-exploring man in conversation with the creator of the universe simply isn’t a fair fight. It never was.
The scientific evidence behind a meaningful cosmic narrative is simply much stronger than the alternative, as The Story of Everything makes clear. Read the rest at, “There’s No Separation of Church and Space.” Or if you prefer without a paywall, here. See also, “‘Cosmic Orphans’ No More: Stephen Meyer on the Meaning of the Artemis II Mission.”