Comfort Through Creation: Astronomy and Beauty

This post is the first in a series of posts that correspond to an upcoming seminar (March 13, 2025) entitled “Comfort Through Creation.” The first section of content from that seminar will focus on the God-ordained role played by natural beauty in God’s creation. This section on natural beauty will, in turn, be divided into three parts: astronomy, biography, and literature. Today’s post will elaborate on the most overtly “natural” of those three – astronomy.

First of all, I want to say what I hope this seminar (and these posts) accomplish. For the Christian, my heart’s desire is that the beauty we see in the natural world – oceans, stars in the night sky, clouds, trees, grass, etc. – would awaken in us a profound wonder and love for the God who made these things with great care and intentionality, and who speaks to us through them. For the unbelieving skeptic, I hope that pondering that gazing at and pondering beauty in the world around you would not only spark (or rekindle) fascination, but would also probe you to ask honest questions. For every person, the truth of the matter is that truth alone (i.e., cool, rational facts of information) is not enough to captivate anyone. Human beings are more than just walking encyclopedias gathering objective data. We are relational. We intuitively sense there are such things as objective good and evil. We care about character. We care about beauty.

Secondly (before we learn from astronomy), imagine what life would be like if beauty in the world did not exist at all in any form. We’d have no music. We’d have no art. We’d have no great literature. No Grand Canyon. There would be no sculptures, no architecture. No math (yes, math possesses its own form of beauty). In short, life would be dull. Nothing would capture our imaginations or transport us outside of ourselves. Just think about that for a moment. If we contemplate a life without any of those things, I think we’ll be moved to amazement at the fact that those things do exist. They didn’t have to be there, yet they are. I also think it will begin to sink in just a little bit why it is that pure logic, rationality, and reason alone will not make God look as wonderful as he is. Reason – if it is to be fully reasonable – cannot be abstracted or divorced from beauty.

Now for what astronomy can reveal to us about beauty. Our own amazing planet weighs six trillion tons (that’s a six followed by a lot of zeros). Despite the immense variety on the Earth’s surface (from Mount Everest to underwater craters), the earth’s crust “is so thin relative to the rest of the planet that it is the equivalent of a postage stamp stuck on a soccer ball.” But Jupiter, the largest planet in our little solar system, is a whopping 1,300 times larger than Earth in terms of volume (i.e., the space it occupies) and is 317 times bigger in terms of mass (i.e., how much it weighs). Perhaps you’ve seen the picture – taken by Voyager I in 1990 – or know of the book called Pale Blue Dot, written by the great Carl Sagan. Regarding the famous picture that the book’s title alludes to, Sagan says the following, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives….Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” If you haven’t yet done so, you should look up the picture he’s referring to.

But that’s nothing. Jupiter is “only one-thousandth the size of the sun. If the earth were the size of a pea, Jupiter would be a grapefruit, and the sun would be a giant beach ball, capable of holding 1.3 million earths inside it….” But that, in turn, is also of little consequence when Antares is considered. Antares is a red, humongous (words fail here) star in the constellation Scorpius. It is 700 times the diameter of the sun. And there are more stars that dwarf Antares. And this is just in our little galactical neighborhood, the Milky Way Galaxy.

This is beauty and largeness that boggles our minds. Truly, “When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—the moon and the stars you set in place—what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” (Ps. 8:3-4) Ironically – and comically – the author of Genesis gives a nod to the reality that this is a walk in the park for God, when he says in Genesis 1:16, “He also made the stars.”