Today’s Church Chat offers a simple point for critics of the Bible to ponder. It centers on the number of stars in the universe, which is a number even an astrophysicist has trouble wrapping his head around. Of course, no one knows how many stars are actually in the universe, but every estimate is a number of staggering size. The most current guess is one septillion stars, a number which looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Our Milky Way galaxy is thought to contain about 400 billion stars. Some huge individual galaxies are said to contain as many as 100 trillion stars. There are 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, say scientists.
To put the numbers into perspective (but not really), The World Book Encyclopedia said this in its 1988 edition: if there are 200 billion billion stars (which was then the best estimate), and if every person on earth (as of 1988’s population) were to count the stars, each person could count more than 50 billion stars without any star being counted twice.
What does any of this have to do with the Bible? One simple point: under the most optimal conditions there are only some 5,000 to 6,000 stars visible to the naked eye without the use of telescopes. Half of them are on the other side of the globe, so on the clearest, darkest night, the most stars a person could see is 2,500 to 3,000. Despite that, and with the invention of the telescope still centuries off into the future, Abraham was told in Genesis that his offspring would multiply “like the stars of the heavens and like the grains of sand that are on the seashore.” Those are essentially infinite numbers, and don’t correspond with the observable universe or the prevailing scientific wisdom of the time.
The Bible is not a scientific book, but it claims divine authorship. As such, one would expect that whenever it happens to touch on something even remotely scientific, if would be accurate, even prescient. Sure enough, its statement about the number of stars was many centuries ahead of its time. In other places it describes “the circle of the earth,” and the earth “hanging upon nothing,” making statements that went against the prevailing wisdom of the day, and which would take scientists centuries to confirm as true.
For those who discount the Bible’s claim of divine authorship, how are these statements explained?
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“Categories: Church of the Infinite Chasm”