The Astronomy Lesson – Sunday, August 21, 1983
We look to the night skies and see the summer stars. These heavenly lights have looked upon us from their whirling orbs since the dawn of civilization, seemingly unchanged as they meet their appointed revolutions of days and years, seemingly unaltered while the empires of man rise and fall.
The ancients saw them, gave them names and human forms, worshipped them, feared them, and slowly began to understand them.
In the inscrutable wisdom of God, knowledge is not free for the asking. All truth, religious and scientific, represents some person’s agonizing toil; and some truths represent the painful labors of entire civilizations.
Astronomy is no exception. The truths we take for granted today concerning the universe are the result of centuries of detailed observation and experience. The entire history of astronomy is replete with heroic figures who fought their way through dense jungles of superstition, ignorance, and error in their attempt to uncover truth: the Greek astronomers who postulated the shape of the earth and the distance to the moon, the Egyptian mathematicians who began the geometric computations for cosmic relationships, and later the Italian and German astronomers who added their observations to this slowly developing body of truth. Entire lives were sacrificed to the acquisition of minute facts, all contributing to man’s awareness of himself and his vast surroundings.
So, we come today to our expanding knowledge that we live on a revolving dot surrounded by endless time and space. This planet, this earthly globe which purposefully whirls through the universe with precision clockwork with other spheres, other stars, other galaxies, is part of an unfathomable expanse. We stand on the edge of this cosmic sea, engulfed by measureless oceans of space, and cast, like children on the beach, our metallic pebbles a few feet from the shore—to the moon and Mars, to the closest planets beyond.
With all that we have learned, we have just set sail on our apprentice voyage into the entire universe of truth and knowledge.
And thus, through astronomy we also discover human truths. As we turn our giant telescopes toward the stars, we find reflected there an image of ourselves—with piercing clarity, revealed against the handiwork of God: our impotence and frailty and our dependence upon the Creator of the heavens and the earth.
Not in agnostic doubt nor atheistic scorn do we observe the stars, but with marvel and reverence, considering, pondering, praising, saying with Him who brought them into being:
it is good.
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August 21, 1983
Broadcast Number 2,718