There's More

Maybe you read it, too.  Hurtling through space, NASA's Kepler Telescope has sent back images of an ancient solar system; a sun with circling planets similar in many ways to our own.

It's not all that far away, either--only about 117 light years.  Why, that's practically around the corner!  Yet it's not its close proximity to us that is the remarkable thing about this neighboring solar system, but how old it is.  Scientists at the University of Birmingham (England...that's even closer--just across the pond!) are saying somewhere around 11 billion years old.  I thought I was getting old!  In comparison, the Earth is a relative teenager: by the time our Earth was formed, the planets in this newly discovered but far from new solar system were already older than the earth is now (about 4.5 billion years old...give or take).

Whether old or new, near or far, it all reminds me that my own little world is kind of small.  I tend to think and live within my own self-drawn boundaries, a relatively miniscule sphere of influence and activity, as if this is all there is.  That's kind of sad, really.  Because, in reality, there is so much more--much of which--MOST of which has yet to be discovered.

Science is a wonder.  It continues to insist that there is more, and continues to prove it, too.  Religion, on the other hand, more often closes rank on a rule-based world in which all that exists is already well-defined.  No wonder the two often clash, and that's too bad.  Because GOOD religion is not incompatible with science--in fact it seeks to do the very same things that science does: to live in the mystery while searching for greater understanding.  The challenge, for those religiously oriented, is to steer far and wide from any notion that we have it all figured out.  Because as soon as we say "we know it all" a new discovery will remind us that we don't...not even close.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.