Forty-four years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to fly into space.
It’s been reported that after he returned, he said, “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”
Apparently he looked out the window, saw the curving horizon, the deep black sky above and the earth, blue and white, below. He watched the sun rise and set. And he thought, “Nope, no God here!”
That kind of blind certainty can come only from unquestioning faith, I think. Atheism was the official government-sanctioned religion of the Soviet Union, like Islam in Iran and Afghanistan, or Judaism in Israel. Gagarin, apparently, was a True Believer.
Space exploration has come a long way since Gagarin’s pioneering flight. Men have walked on the moon. Robotic explorers have visited every planet in our solar system except Pluto. We communicate via satellite; our weather reports include photos from orbiting spacecraft, and we take that all for granted. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us astonishing images of the universe around us.
The Bush administration is cutting money for the Hubble telescope from the NASA budget, but they will include funds in the 2006 budget to de-orbit the telescope, sending it to a fiery death in the earth’s atmosphere. Many reasons have been given for that decision — the Hubble Telescope is too expensive, a maintenance mission is too dangerous, new technology will make better alternatives available. I can’t help wondering whether there’s another, unspoken reason.
Biblical literalists can find it difficult to reconcile images of things a billion light years from earth with their certainty that God created the heaven and the earth about 6,000 years ago. Blinded by certainty, they can look and look at the Hubble pictures, but they don’t see God. So, down with the Hubble telescope!
This administration embraces the literalists on many issues. Was Hubble, too, sacrificed to blind faith?
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