(RNS) — When you look into the night sky, the naked eye can only make out 2,500 to 3,000 stars, five planets and maybe one to three galaxies, and that’s assuming ideal atmospheric conditions and the right location. That has been enough in human history to dazzle us with the immensity and wonder of what we can see.
But 100 years ago, astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, made a stunning discovery: He calculated that a spiral nebula called Andromeda was about 860,000 light-years away — more than eight times farther than the most distant stars in our galaxy. He came to realize that what we thought was a gas or star cluster in the Milky Way was actually another galaxy, and that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies in the universe.
Hubble announced his discovery on Dec. 30, 1924. We celebrate that anniversary this week. Hubble went on to discover about 24 more galaxies.
Amazing astronomical discoveries followed. We learned that our universe is much older than we thought and that it is expanding. In 1929, Hubble first measured the expansion rate of the universe. He realized that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be moving away from us. We learned that the universe appears to have had a beginning, an explosion sometimes referred to as “the big bang.”
Our estimate of the number of stars and galaxies has steadily increased. In 1990, NASA launched the famous Hubble Space Telescope, sending it 353 miles out from the Earth. The photos from the Hubble took our breath away. Using its data, astronomers initially estimated that an average galaxy contains about 100 billion stars and that there were about 200 billion galaxies. Now they are thinking this estimate is way too low! This, too, has evoked wonder.
The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the sun. (Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI)
On Christmas Day 2021, the new James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever built, was launched. Located 930,000 miles from Earth and designed to detect infrared radiation, it sees more deeply into space than the Hubble. It is now looking back in time at the most distant galaxies and stars ever observed — exploring what astronomers call “the cosmic dawn.”
What does all this exploration teach us? Beyond the number of galaxies, it has shown us that the universe is vaster than we can imagine, that it had a beginning, a moment of creation. It is somewhat orderly, in that it consistently obeys the same rules.
The universe exhibits intricate structures. There are constants that are finely tuned to allow for life. We live in what some have called “the Goldilocks zone”: a region around the right kind of star the right distance from the sun, with the right rate of rotation and the right tilt, with the right amount of water and breathable air, all making it possible for human life to exist.
How should all these amazing discoveries be interpreted? How did the universe get this way? And why is there something rather than nothing?
The common answer secular scientists give is that the universe is all the result of unintended happenstance. These creation stories, of a randomly evolving universe with no guiding hand, developing through spontaneous chemical reactions haphazardly self-assembled over time, portray the universe as an unguided, purposeless process of cosmic evolution.
Not all such stories posit the random: In 2021, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, former chair of the Harvard astronomy department, put forth the theory that our universe was created in a lab by aliens.
Others have proposed the multiverse theory — that there are many universes, each with their own version of reality, a notion that is equally speculative. According to George Ellis, one of the world’s leading cosmologists, the multiverse hypothesis is itself a metaphysical explanation that cannot be tested. As he writes in “Cosmology: The Untestable Multiverse,” “The multiverse argument is a well-founded philosophical proposal but, as it cannot be tested, it does not belong fully in the scientific fold.”
Perhaps that is why an increasing number of scientists and astronomers, like Ellis himself, are concluding that a much more sensible explanation is that a cosmos requires a creator. The very word “cosmos” (from the Greek κόσμος and where we get “cosmology”) means a system of order and harmony. To have this order, there must be a designer.
Christian astrophysicist Hugh Ross similarly writes: “The universe is so extraordinarily fine-tuned to support life that it points powerfully to a purposeful Creator. The more we learn about the cosmos, the more it aligns with the biblical description of a designed and sustained creation.”
Hubble himself did not make any claims about whether there was a creator. But his discoveries, and the wonder that they evoke, have prompted others to reconsider “the God hypothesis.”
(Donald Sweeting serves as chancellor of Colorado Christian University and can be reached on X @DSweeting. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)