I’m off to an appointment and some shooting this morning, but I wanted to stop in really quickly and mention last night’s NOVA episode “Hunting the Edge of Space.” <— That’s a link, you should watch it.
Sometimes NOVA episodes are a little annoying, because they repeat themselves. This episode does a little of that, but it’s all for good reason.
If you’re interested at all in the Big Bang, and you’re so adamant about not reading about it, or thinking that it’s a miracle on the same scale as turning water into wine, this is a good place to start to discover how and why scientists “believe” in such a thing as a big bang (I’m talking to you, Handsome Matt).
It amazes me how little people know about space, and how absolutely gigantic it is. It puts the “pale blue dot” into perspective. But it also puts visual science into perspective. Scientists aren’t all theory. There’s a lot of visual data that you can look at with your own eyes and attempt to make informed decisions.
There’s a part during the episode when the scientists train a telescope onto a small point of darkness in the sky. They peer into it with the Hubble (I think). The scientist talking says, “This is a point in the sky no bigger than the end of a straw.” In that single point, do you know what they discover?
Millions more galaxies.
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth. If you took the time to learn just about optics and how difficult but rewarding capturing photographs of stars really is, you’d collectively shit yourselves. When Hubble shows us photographs, these are shots that I dream of taking.
This NOVA episode is all information that no one had when the bible was being written. The bible is completely ignorant of these things, despite its supposed divine revelation. From a non-theistic perspective, it makes relying on limited knowledge such as pages in a book written when ignorance was so prevalent that it took years to write stories down.
Think about it. The bible provides a blurry picture of the past 2000 to 3000 years. And by blurry, I mean there are miracles and supernatural events. Hubble takes photos of light that is millions of light years old in crisp, brilliance.
I don’t understand how people don’t latch onto the sheer fact that telescopes take pictures a gazillion times older than the bible purports itself to be.
I mean, you’ll trust someone who admittedly dreams about seven-headed dragons in the book of Revelations over someone who shows you actual proof of an expanding universe, and you say, “Yeah, I’ll take the imaginative dragon talk. That makes more sense.”