By Spencer D Gear
Could this be an application of Psalm 2:4,”He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision” (ESV)?
This report from Fox News of 5 August 2011, “NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Blasts Off on Mission to Jupiter” stated:
Once at Jupiter, Juno will study the huge planet from orbit for one Earth year, helping scientists better understand how and when Jupiter came to be. Such information could shed light on planet formation processes and the evolution of our solar system, researchers said.
“We’re getting the ingredients of Jupiter,” Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwestern Research Institute in San Antonio, told reporters Wednesday (Aug. 3). “We’re going to understand what the structure is like inside — how is it built — and that’ll kind of give us guidance as to what happened in that early time that eventually led to us”….
And it’s unclear exactly how — and where — Jupiter formed. The $1.1 billion Juno mission was designed to investigate these and other mysteries…. Juno will measure the water content of Jupiter’s thick, swirling atmosphere to gain insights about the planet’s birth.
Another report was so brazen as to state that this is a goal of the Juno program: “Key to Origin of the Solar System to be Probed by Jupiter”.
And the Juno mission costs $1.1 billion. I think that this is permission enough to speak of a ‘debt’ crisis that is bigger than just spending money and the USA government being 14 trillion dollars in debt nationally.
When scientists think that a rocket mission to Jupiter will try to “shed light on planet formation processes and the evolution of our solar system” and “to gain insights about the planet’s birth”, what are they saying about God’s creative reality, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)? This seems to be an insufficient statement for these scientists who are wanting to examine the evolutionary processes that led to the formation of Jupiter. Because evolution is the presupposition, they don’t need any theistic explanation.
Why not leave the explanation with the simple way that God put it? “In the beginning, God created….” (Genesis 1:1)? But who or what is God? In defining God, why can’t we start with a definition like this? God is the uncaused Cause of everything else that exists and He has no potential for non-existence. God simply exists, pure and simple (Geisler 2003:32). This kind of definition is a logical conclusion from the cosmological argument for God’s existence.
God is pure actuality and exists independently of everything else, e.g. “In the beginning, God” (Gen. 1:1). As Geisler puts it, God is the Being who existed prior to and independently of everything else and God gives existence to everything else that was created (2003:31) as in His creating every living and moving thing (Gen. 1:21).
The idea of God being “pure existence” comes from passages such as Exodus 3:14, “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’” and Jesus’ affirmation of this in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am” (ESV).
This God of all creation who controls the universe, surely must “laugh” at NASA’s attempts to probe the beginning of Jupiter’s birth with the Juno spacecraft.
Here is the ‘debt’ crisis, as I see it, as stated by NASA in “Juno: Unlocking Jupiter’s mysteries”. It stated: “Juno will improve our understanding of our solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter“.
These scientists of NASA, if the Fox News and NASA reports are correct, want to search for the formation of the planet Jupiter and the origin of the solar system – without God. This is a classic example of the secular humanistic assumptions of evolution driving scientific discovery, without the knowledge of God. The end result will be a human inspired result without the perfect knowledge of God, hence the ‘debt’ of human opinion versus God’s knowledge.
Notes:
Geisler, Norman 2003. Systematic Theology, Vol 2. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House.
Copyright © 2015 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 9 October 2015.
