Star Wars keeps reminding me that creation is good

May the Force be with us all

May the 4th (be with you)

Star Wars Day landed perfectly on a Saturday this year, and so we celebrated by trading Star Wars memes and rewatching Rogue One with good friends.

Forty-four years ago, in the summer of 1980, my family went to see The Empire Strikes Back, the much-anticipated sequel to Star Wars. I saw the first movie in the theater, but was too young at the time to remember it much. Empire, however, rocked my world. In that little Canadian theater I was swept away from my Earth-bound existence and became conscious for the first time of our universe. That was the defining moment of my young life.

Three decades later, I became a professional astrophysicist. I have transcendent moments whenever I go to a remote observatory and look at the night sky. Every time I stand on a star-swept desert mountain, it transports me back to 1980 and reignites the sheer wonder and indescribable joy I felt at the sight of a sky filled with thousands of far-off suns.

But the wonder is now deeper and more complex than it was when I was a kid. I now know what powers each of those suns. I know how they formed, when they formed, and that most have planets orbiting them. I know that though the stars appear to extend infinitely in all directions, I’m only looking at the outskirts of the vast Milky Way Galaxy. But most importantly, I know that all of this was deliberately created.

My brother and I were brought up with virtually nothing in the way of religious instruction or experiences. He and I found God after long journeys on separate paths. It was the intense love my brother felt for his children and his need to believe they would have eternal life that brought him to God. What led me to God was my love of all things space and everything I learned as a student about the creation of the universe. Science continues to be the basis of my unshakable conviction that nothing as beautiful, mathematical, and knowable as our universe could be an accident.

Cosmic insignificance

Not everyone is as comforted about their place in the universe. As a professor, I often ask my students at the beginning and at the end of the semester to share any concerns they have with astronomy in terms of their religious or philosophical worldviews. Students occasionally express concern about the apparent conflict between science and their religious beliefs, but the most common response by far is a feeling of insignificance in the face of their new awareness of the vast scale of the universe.

These students’ answers reflect an intense sense of humility. This humility, combined with the sense of insignificance, seems to lead many of them to feelings of meaninglessness and hopelessness.

I realized some time ago that most people who struggle with belief in God feel the same degree of humility about themselves as Christians, but unlike Christians who bask in God’s love, they often turn the humility inward where it’s translated into feelings of personal worthlessness. This feeling is not unique to the young and uninitiated in science. The late Nobel laureate physicist, Steven Weinberg, lamented in his book, Dreams of a Final Theory, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

I am fortunate to know that our vast universe is not pointless. It’s exactly the scale and age required to give rise to intelligent life. Just about every scientist knows this, but for those who are materialists, the vastness of the universe is also a constant reminder of the cold and deadly indifference of nature. Some non-believers, like the late astronomer Carl Sagan, hope for something after death, but largely accept the materialist view that this existence is all there is. They retreat to gratitude for the moment, which is commendable, but in a way an evasion of their terrible truth.

Other scientifically informed people evade thoughts about the creation and fine tuning of the universe in a different manner, by pushing it beyond the bounds of investigation. They maintain that ours is one of an infinite number of universes—the multiverse—which we can never observe. They argue that we must have simply won the multiverse lottery with its jackpot of all the conditions necessary for life. It seems to me that if people feel insignificant and hopeless in a vast universe, they aren’t going to feel any better being part of an even bigger multiverse.

A darker road is taken by a few, like the late biologist William Provine, who simply accept their insignificance and acknowledge that a godless universe can have no meaning. It’s an honest assessment for a materialist, but one that’s filled with despair.

Deliberately more optimistic atheists will talk of their awe of the universe, but I know from experience that for some it’s only what they say in public to make their case. If they’re capable of taking the next step in reasoning, they can’t help but move to terrifying thoughts. They may feel wonder at the universe, but if they know its history they can’t escape the understanding that nature doesn’t care about them. Their awe, humility, and fear must all be based on the inescapable realization that ultimately the cosmos will bring about their destruction and the eventual annihilation of all life in the universe. Nothing they or anyone else does will have eternal significance. If there is no loving God as Creator of the universe, what the atheist is really looking at in the cosmos is the end of all hope.

What is man that you are mindful of him?

There is no need for such a dim view of existence. If you believe in a loving and purposeful God, you can look at outer space, not as vast and cold and signaling the end of all hope, but as something purposeful and created with humans in mind. You can know that you’re small in physical size, but huge in significance. You can believe that everything you do has eternal significance.

The first time I saw Rogue One, I kind of hated it, because I thought it failed to live up to the optimistic, high-adventure tone of the original trilogy. But watching it again last week, I found the movie to be remarkably hopeful, in a deep Christian sense. It’s no secret that everyone in the movie dies. That bothered me the first time I watched the movie, because I grew up believing that heroes never really die. But this time, I saw the deaths of these characters as heroic—even joyful—sacrifices that saved countless lives and paved the way for the eventual defeat of evil.* The ending made the retrofitted subtitle of Episode IV—A New Hope—absolutely perfect.

There is a (probably unintended) parallel between Rogue One and the story of the gospels. At the core of the movie is love—a father’s sacrificial love for his child, whom he affectionately called “Stardust.” I can imagine our Heavenly Father calling us “Stardust,” because that’s quite literally what we’re made of. Like the father in the movie, it was God’s fatherly love for us that sent Jesus to the Cross to make the ultimate sacrifice that saved us all and paved the way for the defeat of evil.

Let the awe and humility you feel contemplating the universe expand your being through the knowledge that there’s a divine power guided by your Father’s love for you. And let His love make space into something like Star Wars, a hopeful challenge that we can meet with joy because of our God-given spirits and intellect.

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4535—a galaxy far, far away?

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet

Psalm 8:1-6

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*Sorry, but Episodes VII-IX don’t exist in my world.