On Friday morning, the space shuttle Endeavor safely returned to earth, landing at the Kennedy Space Center after a 15 day trip that took it 248 times around the earth, and a distance of 6.5 million miles.
While in space, the Endeavor spent time docked with the International Space Station, performing some maintenance, and replacing one astronaut who had been in space for 5 months, Koichi Wakata with another, Timothy Kopra.
These astronauts are national heroes, and their courage and competence in their work is truly amazing to behold. I believe the space program to be a worthy effort, and recognize that it has led to many advances in technology that we today take for granted. We have truly reaped many benefits from the resulting efforts of President John F. Kennedy’s resolutions expressed in September of 1962 during a speech at Rice University.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
While I understand the need for such research and exploration, there is one overriding “motivation” that I must confess I have a hard time accepting. So often, both in space exploration, astronomy and physics, it is said scientists are seeking to determine the origin of life on earth. My question, why is this so important?
I, of course, believe that the Bible clearly reveals the origin of life on earth. Life, including man, was created by God after He fashioned the universe and earth to accept it (cf. Genesis 1). Atheistic and agnostic scientists have rejected this explanation, and have since sought to replace it with a more “scientific” scenario.
With the moon expeditions, the building and launch of the Hubble Telescope, unmanned expeditions to Mars and beyond, the building of the massive CERN Hadron Collider under the borders of France and Switzerland, and many other projects, the constant rationale used to justify the cost of the efforts is a search for the origin of life or the universe.
The explanation supplied in the Bible has significance. If God created man, then man has a responsibility to serve Him. “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). But, if there is no God, why is it so important to know where the universe or life came from? Such knowledge, in and of itself, would constitute no technological achievement. There would be no tangible benefit at all.
I submit that the primary motivation for the spending of so much money is simply to shut the mouths of the faithful. If the origin of life can be “proven” by science, then religion is invalid, and the war being waged by atheistic evolutionists upon people of faith is won!
I am confident that such misplaced efforts will remain unfruitful. Athiests are looking in the wrong place. They look in space, when the answer is right in front of them in black and white: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
