Article: 10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT GOD’S CREATIVE POWER by Dr. Sam Storms (original source here)

A week or so ago I was alerted to a video…

How Many Stars from The John 10:10 Project on Vimeo.

…that focused on the amazing creative power of God, both in terms of the massive size of the universe as well as the incredibly small world of molecules and atoms. It may be helpful here at the start to remember that we count from million to billion to trillion to quadrillion to quintillion to sextillion.

So, here are ten things that should leave you in awe of your God.

(1) On a clear night, perhaps best in the desert, the human eye can see upwards of 5,000 stars. That may seem like a lot until you realize that the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy is approximately 400,000,000,000 (400 billion). Some would place the number a bit lower, but certainly not less than 100,000,000,000 (100 billion).

(2) Although that many stars may in itself be overwhelming, we must remember that our galaxy is only one of approximately 2,000,000,000,000 (2 trillion galaxies). Of course, this estimate is based on what is in the observable universe. What we can currently discern, largely through the Hubble Telescope, should not be taken as the limit of what is actually present.

(3) Now, for the sake of our analysis, let’s dial it down to the a much more conservative estimate and draw our conclusion based on only 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) galaxies. That’s a whole lot less than 2 trillion! OK, if we multiply only 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) galaxies times 10,000,000,000 (10 billion stars in each one), and 10 billion stars is an extremely low, conservative estimate, we come to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 1 sextillion stars in the universe!

(4) Now consider all the grains of sand on the earth. There are approximately 135,000 grains in one cubic inch of sand and 235,000,000 in one cubic foot. That’s a lot of sand!

(5) There are approximately 220,000 miles of coast line on earth and 6,000,000 square miles of desert.

(6) There are, therefore, approximately 7 billion billion (that’s not a typographical error; the repetition is intentional) individual grains of sand on the earth, or 7.5 x 10 to the 18th power! Much too big to fit on a single page!

(7) In spite of this staggering number of grains of sand on the earth, there are approximately 10 times as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on the earth.

(8) A single grain of sand is approximately 0.04 of an inch. Yet, in one grain of sand there are 500 billion billion atoms (again, that’s an intentional repetition). That means there are more atoms in one grain of sand than the total number of grains of sand on the earth!

(9) There are in one drop of water 1,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1.7 quintillion) individual H2O molecules.

(10) Just a few drops of water contain more molecules than the total number of stars in the entire universe.

Where did it all come from? What could possibly account for the unfathomably massive size of the universe as well as the incredibly tiny world of sub-atomic particle physics? The answer is given by Paul in Colossians 1:16 – “for by him [that is, by or through the Son of God, Jesus Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him.”

I know this is about ten things that reflect on the creative power and majesty of Jesus Christ, but let’s look at one more. Most of us wake up and go through our day without ever taking note of the sun, except perhaps to complain about it either being obscured by clouds or too hot to stay outside very long. What we rarely if ever consider is the fact that hundreds of billion billion billion billion (that’s 10 with 38 zeros) fusion reactions take place every second in our sun. On top of that, more than 400,000,000 tons of hydrogen are being converted into helium every second in the heart of the sun. And our sun is only one, quite small, star among the billions and billions and trillions and trillions of others throughout the universe, all of which undergo a seemingly endless inferno of chemical and nuclear reactions.

And Jesus does it all! How true are the words of the psalmist: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).

In this excerpt from his message at Ligonier’s 2012 National Conference, Dr. Stephen Meyer tells the story of how Hubble showed Einstein that the universe was not eternal but must have had a beginning.

Transcript

Hubble came into astronomy in the 1920’s at a very propitious time. It was at just the time that astronomers were gaining access to these large dome telescopes that were able to resolve very tiny pinpoints of light in the night sky. Prior to Hubble and the scientists who were looking into the night sky in the 1920’s, there was debate among astronomers as to whether or not the Milky Way galaxy, in which our solar system resides, was the only galaxy, or whether there might be others beyond it. Hubble resolved that issue as he also resolved these points of light, because as he looked through this great dome telescope at the Palomar Observatory, he was able to determine that little points of light that had been viewed through ordinary telescopes before, and just looked like little points, actually revealed galaxies—whole galaxies with hundreds and millions of stars.

The picture behind us is a Spindle Nebula, and he saw Spiral Nebula, many different galaxies in every quadrant of the sky. Such that today, astronomers have something they call the “Hubble Deep Field,” and it’s a picture of the night sky. On the picture behind you’ll see a little square box, a little quadrant. Now the next slide is going to be that quadrant magnified further and you see that even in the tiniest little square in the night sky there are galaxies galore.

And so, the first thing that Hubble determined was that we live in an immense universe. It was grand in scope beyond our wildest imaginations; galaxies in every direction. Now that was just awe-inspiring, but there was also a very theoretically and philosophically significant discovery that he made that was closely associated with this, and that is the discovery that these galaxies are moving away from us. In every direction of the night sky the galaxies are receding. And the evidence for that came from something called “Red Shift.” It’s that the light coming from those distant galaxies was redder in its hue, in its electromagnetic spectrum, in its color, than it would otherwise be if the galaxies were stationary in relationship to us.

How many have heard of the Doppler Effect? Do you know of that? If you have a train moving away from us, the sound of the train whistle will drop in pitch. Well the drop in pitch corresponds to a shift in wavelength. Up in Seattle, we have these…I don’t know if you can talk about beer commercials in a church, but why not…we have these beer commercials for Rainier Beer. And they had these guys dressed up as beer cans that rode around on motor bikes. And at the end of the commercial they would ride off into the sunset saying, “Raaainieeerrrrr Beeeeer,” and you had the Doppler shift happening. I’m probably the only person that watched that and thought Doppler shift rather than let’s go get a brewsky, you know?

The same thing happens with light. Now what do you infer from that? I have a visual aide, and it’s not a beer can, it’s a balloon. Hubble got to thinking about this and he realized that if the galaxies—and I’ve drawn these little spirals on the balloon, so think going in the forward direction of time what’s happening—If all the galaxies are moving away from us, that means the universe must be expanding outward in a kind of spherically symmetric expansion. So as you go forward in time, you get the universe getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Now what happens if you wind the clock backwards like the Saturday morning cartoons where they make the characters go backwards? What if you, the technical term is back extrapolate in time, if you go back 1,000 years? Is the universe bigger or smaller? Ok, and as you go back, and go back, and back, and back, and back, the further you go back in time the universe gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller until eventually you reach the beginning point of the expansion, where everything was congealed together. And Hubble realized that an expanding universe implied a finite universe—a universe that actually has a beginning; a beginning in time.

Now this was a really significant discovery because at the very same time on the other side of the country there was this physicist with bad hair named, Albert Einstein. And Einstein had come to the same conclusion that the universe must have a beginning, but then he said, “No, no, no, no, that cannot be right.” And Einstein came to it on the basis of his theory of general relativity which was a theory of gravitation. And the equations of his theory suggested that the universe must be expanding outward and decelerating in order for all the math to work out. But when he realized that if it was expanding outward it must have had a beginning, he said no that can’t be right. So then he posited an arbitrary force that was meant to counter act the force of expansion in just the right measure so that the universe would be static, and therefore could have existed eternally, without expanding or contracting.

When I was a physics student we use to call this “dry-labbing.” Where you know, the professor gives you an experiment to do and you know what the answer is supposed to be, but you do the thing with the hockey pucks on the air table, and it’s not coming out right. And it’s getting near the end of the period and you want to go to dinner, and so what do you do? Now I’m not saying I ever did this, but I know some people who did. And you take the pen and you adjust the values so that they match the theory. Ok—that’s called dry-labbing. That’s essentially what Einstein, one of the greatest physicists in the history of the world, that’s essentially what he did. He fudged. He fudged, because he had a preconceived idea that the universe must be eternal. And that was such a strong philosophical predilection that he adjusted the science to try to meet with that.

Then Hubble comes along and discovers that the universe actually is expanding; there must have been a beginning. And so he invites Einstein out to California to view the evidence that he’d been viewing through this grand telescope. And there’s some famous newsreel footage where Einstein comes out and he looks through the telescope with Hubble in the background smoking his pipe, and he comes out and meets the media and says, “I now see the necessity of a beginning.”

In any case, Einstein gets it, and later says that his cosmological constant, his little fudge factor, was the greatest mistake of his scientific career. In essence, the heavens talked back. And the testimony of the sky was that there was a beginning to the universe.

On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.

A film by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh
alexgorosh.com
wylieoverstreet.com

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.