Abraham and the Hubble Space Telescope
One of the most interesting discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope is the vast number of galaxies and stars that exist in our universe. Hubble has the ability to survey much deeper space than was ever possible before. Lately Hubble has been attempting an inventory of galaxies. Just how many are there and just how big is our universe, anyway?
Genesis 22:17
Blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies.
This verse is from Genesis which was written by Moses circa 1450 BC. The events described occurred during the lifetime of Abraham, about 2,000 BC. This verse and other’s explain God’s promise to Abraham that there will be a whole bunch of his offspring (the Jews and Arabs) at some point in the future.
The prophet Jeremiah reiterates this promise circa 600 BC and adds some new information:
Jeremiah 33:22
“As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David My servant and the Levites who minister to Me.”
According to the European Space Agency
“It has been said that counting the stars in the Universe is like trying to count the number of sand grains on a beach on Earth. We might do that by measuring the surface area of the beach, and determining the average depth of the sand layer.
If we count the number of grains in a small representative volume of sand, by multiplication we can estimate the number of grains on the whole beach.
For the Universe, the galaxies are our small representative volumes, and there are something like 10 to the 11th or 12th power stars in our galaxy, and there are perhaps something like 10 to the 11th or 12th power galaxies.
With this simple calculation you get something like 10 to the 22cd to 24th power stars in the Universe. This is only a rough number, as obviously not all galaxies are the same, just like on a beach the depth of sand will not be the same in different places.”
Source: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM75BS1VED_index_0.html
The number of stars visible to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere is around 3,000. Hans Lipperhey filed a patent in the Netherlands in 1608 for the world’s first documented telescope. So until the 1600’s, no one knew there were more than 3,000 stars. A lot more than 3,000.
By the time Jeremiah wrote his verse, the estimated population of Jews had topped 3 million. So how exactly did Jeremiah and Moses know that the number of stars was greater than the 3,000 they could see? Notice that the European Space Agency chose the same analogy as Jeremiah and Moses did, by comparing the number of stars with grains of sand on the beach.
And there’s more. Sand is formed when the shells of oysters and other similar shelled fish is ground up by wave action. So the amount of sand on this planet is increasing, just as new stars are being formed somewhere in the universe, as I write this.
And it gets even better. There has always been speculation about how many grains of sand there are in all the world’s beaches. One estimate is 10 to the 22 power. This estimate is within the ESA range of possible number of stars.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_grains_of_sand_are_there_in_the_world
Just a big coincidence, right? Moses and Jeremiah just got lucky and guessed
- that the number of visible stars was a small fraction of the total star inventory.
- that new stars and sand on the beach was being formed as they wrote.
- that the total inventory of stars was in the same ballpark as the number of grains of sand.
- that there were so many stars and so much sand that an exact count is impossible. Both numbers can only be estimated
Just a big coincidence. Really big coincidence, right? Nothing divine here, just bum luck. If you can suspend your reasoning enough to dismiss this as just a lucky guess, you can probably believe in UFO’s and ghosts and Bigfoot and Nessie.
