Wow! Wow! WOW! Wow!
I am sure many people around the world have had a similar experience to me as they look at the amazing photos that NASA and its partners have been releasing in the last few days.
I have only a secondary-school pupil’s grasp of physics, but one does not need to be an astrophysicist to know that these photos show a level of information about the cosmos that is greater than humans have ever had before.
For the whole of human history, we have stared up into the night sky and wondered – but our wonder just grows as we look at these images.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) once opined that one reason humans stood up-right was so that we could turn our heads upwards to look at the wonders of the night sky!
Looking upwards reminded us of the complexity of the creation.
But to just appreciate the technical brilliance of the scientists that developed, built, and then deployed – successfully – the James Webb telescope is stretching my head to its limits.
When just before Christmas, and then with its launch on Christmas Day last year, we heard from the NASA and ESA teams that this was the greatest scientific instrument ever built, there were probably many – myself included – who thought that this was just the usual researchers’ hype to promote their project.
Now, when we see its first images, I for one stand in awe of the skills of those who conceived such a project and then got it into space – a marvel of human ingenuity.
Beyond our thinking
The images show light that has been travelling for BILLIONS of years – thousands of millions of years – and so over an extent that is, literally, beyond comprehension.
It looks back into an earlier ‘moment’ in the evolution of the universe than we can imagine – yet we see a simple fact: these photographs.
I can imagine a year, a decade, a lifetime.
The historian tries to train his or her imagination to appreciate that distance back to the time of Jesus, or the builders of the pyramids, or the first cultural marks made by Neanderthals.
Going back hundreds of thousands of years in tracing evolution to the time of Australopithecus and the early hominins is actually just an abstraction – we cannot really grasp such time spans.
To make comparisons such as we make in class – and I have done it myself – such as if they are thought of in terms of 24-hours, then those hominins lived in Africa yesterday morning, the pyramids were built around ‘ten minutes to midnight’ … and so on … only serve to show we cannot get our minds around such spans of time.
But if coping with the time spans of biological evolution on this planet is so hard – at the edge of imagination – how do we even begin to grasp the time spans in these new photographs?
Southern Ring Nebula (click image to enlarge)
The universe is ever more complex. Ever more wonderful.
But – for me as one who worships God – it serves as a further reminder that though I use the word “ g – o – d ” every day in prayer, and we hear it used often enough, it refers to a reality beyond reality, beyond all imagining.
It is but a sound, a stutter that there is that which is greater than all that I can imagine. We do not know what God is. To imagine we can ‘define’ – set limits in our mind upon – God is itself the greatest blasphemy.
For Augustine looking ever deeper into the cosmos and its complexity, there came back but the reflection in his mind: ‘I, the universe, am not God, but he made me!’
I am awed by these photographs of the cosmos, but that is still less than religious awe: the creator is still greater and ever greater. Beyond images, beyond words, beyond imagining.
Human continuity
Looking at these pictures I am also struck by the continuity in human nature and what interests us and inspires us.
The first human builders looked upwards and were amazed by the night sky and aligned their structures with it.
The ancient scholars in Babylonia looked up and sought to use mathematics – whose inherent beauty seems to resemble both the beauty of the cosmos and our own logicality – to understand and appreciate it.
That same maths – that we still divide a circle into 360 degrees is a legacy of the Babylonians – helped scientists today to build not a pyramid in Egypt or Newgrange in Ireland but the James Webb telescope.
Yet we still wonder at what we see in the cosmos around us!
The instinct to wonder, to question, to seek beyond our imagining is at the heart of our humanity – when we look upwards.
But we also look downwards!
On the same day that James Webb was launched (25 Dec 2021) there were also grim rumblings of manoeuvres and exercises by Russian troops on the borders of Ukraine.
Little room there for wonder, awe or human aspiration.
Here was the dark side of humanity seeking domination, promoting destruction, and advancing falsity in the form of nationalist mythology. The realism of theists is that we neither decry wonder not deny wickedness. Here is where we are called in faith to make a difference.
Stephan’s Quintet (click image to enlarge)
Belief in creation
Similarly, human understanding is not just limited – imagining 13.5 billion years is beyond me; knowing ‘what is’ God is impossible – it can be perverse.
For some – that these pictures challenge neat, well-boxed ideas about ‘Made by God’ are taken to mean that God, faith and religion are all just bunkum.
For others – that there is a difference between these images and their simplistic reading of the Book of Genesis sets up a challenge of ‘science versus faith.’
To believe in creation is not to accept any story as a factual account, but to embrace all the wonder and complexity around us – and then appreciate that there is still the Mystery and that the Mystery is loving.
I heard a physicist say recently that she was ‘still a Catholic’ and a believer in God ‘even though I know I should believe in the Book of Genesis.’ She is not alone. For many – both those who claim belief and those who reject belief – it seems to be an either/or. This is a failure of our preaching and our teaching – and of understanding.
One believes in God, one listens to books.
One tries to love the Creator, one tries to appreciate our myths.
The truth is one – and it is our conviction that whenever we grasp even the smallest little bit of truth that it is a little bit of the work of the Creator and eventually will fit with all the other little bits. But we will only come to ‘the truth’ at the end of time. For now, both in our scientific work and in our human journey we move forward in darkness. Truth is our desire, our destination – not our possession.
As I look at these wonderful photographs I am driven back to those lines in Genesis:
Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. And let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And He made the stars as well. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (1:14-9).
What a witness to continuity: the wonder of those theologians and astronomers is still the wonder of theologians and astronomers today. They had but their naked eyes, we have the lenses of James Webb.
The concern of the Priestly-author (who created this part of the Genesis account) was to remind his fellow Jews in Babylon that the sun, moon, and stars were not divine, not gods – as those around them imagined – but the handiwork of God. The wonder of the Big Bang, the swirling galaxies beyond our counting, and the billions of ‘years’ (what does a ‘year’ mean before there was our planet, our sun or our galaxy!) is not ‘all there is.’ To believe in the Creator is to assert that the whole we see stands in dependence on that which is beyond.
All in these pics depends for its existence upon that which is beyond it, but that Source of Being does not depend upon it.
We believe in God – Creator beyond all that is seen and unseen – and we read Genesis as a memento of our desire to seek truth and to worship. We look at these photographs as still more evidence of our human quest for truth – even in our darkness and our wickedness. And we try – through theological reflection – to reduce our confusion.
Carina Nebula (click image to enlarge)
The response of wonder, thanks, and praise
As a human being my response to these images is one of wonder. It is ever more amazing.
It is also one of thanks.
I could not even hold a screwdriver for the brilliant scientists and technicians who built the James Webb, but I am thankful to them. I am also a bit sad: what if all the technical skill used to make and fire munitions in warfare had been turned to work similar to launching the James Webb into space?
So the James Webb produces wonder at the scientists’ results, thanks to the scientists for their research dedication, and praise to encourage them.
As a theist, I am driven to even deeper wonder at the cosmos – and challenged never to slip into the blasphemy that ‘I have it figured out.’
The universe revealed in these photographs challenges how we think and speak of the creation – and its Creator. But I am also a little sad: human confusion – that ‘creator’ is imagined mechanically or that ‘revelation’ is reduced to a book – is a stumbling block on our human journey. But most of all, I am driven to thankfulness for the beauty of God’s handiwork:
When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?
For you have made us, mortals, but a little lower than the angels, and have crowned us with glory and honour (Ps 8:3-5).
So the James Webb produces wonder at the divine handiwork, thanks to the Creator for ‘his’ sustaining love, and praise – knowing that the desire to praise ‘him’ is itself his gift.
- Thomas O’Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
