Last week, I took my family to visit the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum near our nation’s capital.
We walked through the huge hangars which are packed with real historical pieces of mankind’s great 20th century invention: air travel and space exploration.
They have it all there at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center- From the crude piecemeal constructions of early flight to the incredible sleek design of the SR-71 Blackbird, that military marvel which could fly 16 miles high and outrun a bullet.
Maybe the most impressive of all is the massive space shuttle Discovery now confined to a lowly building of concrete and steel, after her exciting career which consisted of 39 space missions over the span of 27 years. By retirement, she had accumulated just under 150 million miles on her odometer.
We finished up our visit at the Airbus IMAX theater, which itself is a testament to human ingenuity. The screen is 86 feet wide and towers 6 stories high, immersing the viewer in heart-thumping sights and sounds.
DEEP SKY, one of their latest feature films, takes you behind the scenes in the design, building and deploying of NASA’s James Webb space telescope (aka JWST).
The James Webb space telescope is a gargantuan accomplishment of human engineering and technology. It orbits the sun one million miles away from earth and captures unprecedented views of deep space through its ground-breaking INFARED technology.
From its conception, the telescope took over 30 years to reach completion, including a major redesign in 2005 and 5 years of testing, before the final assembly began in 2019.
A rocket launched the 10 billion dollar beauty into space on December 15, 2021 from a space port in French Guiana, South America.
Even after launch, there was so much that could have gone wrong. One engineer explained that there were over 300 individual “single-points of failure” involved in the process of getting JWST into working order. In laymen’s terms, that means if anything went wrong at any of those 344 junctures, the amazing telescope would have become useless space junk.
“The most complex sequence of deployments ever attempted in a single space mission.”
It was a fascinating presentation, for sure. Some of the JWST team members teared up on camera as they described the emotional moment of launch and then the long-awaited photographs that were beamed back to earth months later.
However, in my perspective, the most jarring part of the film were the words left unsaid. That blaring omission that you couldn’t miss. There was an elephant in the room.
God.
Over 20,000 of the brightest minds from 14 countries convened to invent, create, test, and deploy this marvelous irreducibly-complex machine, of which the tiniest malfunction would have totally ruined its purpose and task.
Yet, they want me to believe that mindless, unguided processes produced the vastly more complicated biological life on our planet.
Under the guise of “scientific exploration” the film’s true spiritual nature quickly became apparent.
“Where did we come from?” How did the universe begin?” “Are we alone?” These questions reverberated from the massive speakers into the sparsely-filled seats of the theater.
The NASA personnel and the producers of DEEP SKY would likely disagree with my assessment that these are questions which arise from a spiritual place in the human heart.
“He has set eternity in their hearts” says the wise king in Ecclesiastes. “Except that no one can find out the work that God has does from the beginning to end.”
The film continued on, showing the stunning photographs taken by JWST, that allow us to “look back into time”, to the early stages of the universe. They described “star nurseries, explosions, and colliding galaxies.
Exploding stars, they tell us, expel carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and the like into space. These chemicals are known as the “building blocks of life”, and therefore these supernova explosions “seed” the next generation of stars and planets, from which life will eventually form.
Mr. Gray-Haired Bespeckled Professor man onscreen then answers the first spiritual question- where did we come from?
The universe, he tells us, is in a never-ending cycle of birthing and dying stars. “We are all made of stardust. We are simply recycled stardust.”
He pauses, perhaps grappling with the full philosophical implication of his statement. Then he shrugs and smiles.
“…And that’s ok.”
Selah.
There it was. The conclusion of the whole matter. We are recycled stardust.
What it really is, however, is just recycled paganism. Who would have known that at NASA in 2025 you could hear a warmed-over version of reincarnation from the ancient eastern religions?
If you and I are just accidental products of star explosions, then the only logical conclusion to draw is one of complete and utter nihilism.
A devout materialist must adhere to the belief that there is no such thing as a “mind”- only a brain, derived of random stardust, firing its receptors for no apparent reason, and to no apparent end.
Thus, all the non-material realities that every human being intrinsically knows to be important and most sought after…those things called we call love, happiness, hope, dreams, longings. These also, must have no meaning.
Of course, deep down in, very few people actually believe this. The little whisper of eternity placed within our hearts knows it to be false.
But if you preach the gospel of nihilism long enough, some young souls, grasping for meaning and purpose in their life, will start to believe it. And then act on it.
We live in a culture which is suffering a real crisis of meaning. Most astute non-believers will even tell you that.
Young men living in the basement, terminally online, sucked into a vortex of fringe message boards, dark memes, and violent video games don’t always act upon their personal meaning crisis.
But some do. And when they do, innocent people usually die.
Nihilism scrawls weird, cryptic, self-contradicting messages on shell casings and then goes out in attempt to create some meaning of its own. Stardust speeding up the recycling process a bit. That is all.
Nihilism scrawls weird, cryptic, self-contradicting messages on shell casings and then goes out in attempt to create some meaning of its own.
The film ended. Part of me wanted to spit in disgust at the screen. Another part wanted to turn around and preach Jesus to my fellow audience members.
Those who know me won’t be surprised to learn I did neither.
Instead, at a nearby restaurant, as we waited for our food to arrive, I put my arms around my 9 year old son and 7 year old daughter who were sitting on either side of me.
“Children, I want you to know something. You are not recycled stardust,” I said.
“You are sons and daughters of God.”
Young Again 