The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands!

In my last post I wrote about the concept of Explanatory Power, specifically in the context of life’s meaning, or not. The concept of what most powerfully, compellingly, explains the reality we experience extends to the heavens and the skies. You may be familiar with the words in the title that come from the first verse of Psalm 119. I put an exclamation point at the end because I came across an article of pictures taken of the heavens that are simply mind blowing in their beauty. The title of the piece shows that it took two creators to reveal this specific beauty: “35 ‘Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2019’ Finalists That Took Massive Amounts Of Planning And Precision.”  Here’s one:

Most people exposed to such stunning beauty are left dumbfounded, and deep down inside know there has to be an artist responsible for such artistry. Other people think it’s all just a cosmic accident. We learn why in the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans:

¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

It is actually rather difficult to look at such beauty and deny “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature” because it has to be actively suppressed. The Greek word for suppress means to hold fast, hold back. My favorite analogy is trying to hold a beach ball under water. If you don’t actively keep holding it down, the darn thing just keeps popping up. You see something like this:

And it pops right back up, and you have to push it down even harder. What causes people to reject the obvious truth that the universe is not a cosmic accident is their sin. They want to do, what they want to do, when they want to do it, and they are not about to let any old Creator God tell them they can’t! Ergo, there is no God. Ever since Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), skeptics have claimed that the only reason people believe in God is psychological. We can’t handle a universe, as Dawkins put it, of pitiless indifference, so we invent a God to comfort us. That’s possible, but what is far more probable is that atheists have to invent a god-less universe because they love their sin. They want to be, as Satan tempted Eve, to be their own God, themselves getting to determine what is good and evil.

If these pictures, or just looking at the nighttime sky, don’t drive you to doxology we know why: spiritual blindness. On the other hand, if you see such cosmic beauty and your heart bursts with ineffable amazement at what our Creator God has made, we also know why: You belong to him!