"THE HORRENDOUS SPACE KABLOOIE"

Now that the limits and parameters of the universe have come within the measuring capacity of astronomers and physicists, the design characteristics of the universe are being examined and acknowledged. Anything but the slightest disturbance in the values for the four constants of physics and for more than a dozen parameters of the universe would yield a universe unsuitable to support life. One astrophysicist likened the "coincidental" nature of these constants and parameters to the chance of balancing thousands of pencils upright on their points.

Design characteristics also are becoming apparent for our planet earth. At least nineteen such life-sensitive parameters have been investigated. Considering that the universe contains only about a trillion galaxies, each averaging a hundred billion stars, we can safely conclude that not even one planet would be expected, by natural processes alone, to possess the necessary conditions to sustain life. These lists, each of which grows longer each year, would seem to provide another body of convincing evidence for the hand of the Creator, God in the formation of the universe and of the earth.

A "Just Right" Universe

Imagine piles of dimes stacked on all of North America as high as the moon. More than you could possibly ever count. Then imagine a billion other continents covered over with more dimes. Now, somewhere in those billion piles, hide one red dime. What are the chances of taking a blind-folded person out into these piles and having them pick up the one red dime on the first try. Not likely? Well, the odds of the universe just happening to have the correct number of protons and electrons is the same as the odds for getting the red dime the first time. And if the universe did not have just the right ratio of these particles, galaxies, stars, and planets could never have formed, let alone people and all the rest of nature.

In the last fifteen years, scientists who study the make up of our solar system, and the stars in our galaxy, have come to the conclusion that unless conditions had been perfectly fine-tuned for us, life could never have arisen on planet Earth even by evolution. Every time we learn something about the form of the universe, we find new reasons to glorify God, and to thank Him for His creation.

Just what is the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe? One scientist summed it up succinctly by saying: "The explosion from zero volume at zero time of a corpuscle of energy equivalent to the mass and radiation that now constitute the Universe."

What does that mean? It means that everything we now see or know about was once compacted into an unimaginably small blip that suddenly expanded in a huge explosion that created the very space and time it was expanding into.

Or as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes put it, "The Horrendous Space Kablooie."