Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-22-23

If you live in a city, you can see the moon and a few stars in the night sky. In suburbs on clear nights you can find Venus and Mars and maybe the famous constellations. In the Great Plains or on ocean cruises, look up at the night sky and you will never lose your wonderment at the blanket of planets and stars, twinkling like sparkles on a pretty date’s dress and shoes. If you are fortunate to have beheld the Milky Way, you know it more resembles a magical, glowing ribbon than a band of individual stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope is treating us to pictures of billions of stars; galaxies previously unknown; “events” in space calculated to have happened billions of light-years ago (or away, take your pick of terminology) – that actually might have “burned out” by now, despite their images traveling 187,000 miles per second and only coming close to our view now.

Whether you believe the universe is 6000 years old or sixty-skillion years old, your hair may start hurting now over such thoughts.

Speaking of stars. And hair. I got a chuckle this week from a review of a book called Observer by a “scientist,” Robert Lanza, co-written with a science-fiction writer. Not really a review; rather, a collection of quotations and self-congratulations on Lanza’s own website.

Breathless endorsements suggest that the authors have kissed the Face of Truth in their construction of themes – like the serious-sounding quantum-physics hoodoo – basically, that our thoughts can influence the physical universe. An MSNBC “Science Editor” claims that “special relativity and quantum mechanics have provided solid grounding for the idea that the act of observation has an effect on external phenomena.” (Why doesn’t he “visualize” better ratings? …but I digress.)

A few years ago Dr Jim Garlow and I co-authored The Secret Revealed in which book we took the New Age best-seller The Secret to task. Besides peeling back its absurd claims and century-old rostrums, we applied logic on one hand, and a little detective work on the other. For instance, the author’s blatant misquoting of supposed experts in “thinking and realization” like Winston Churchill. She quoted Martin Luther King, and we reached out to his niece Alveda who denied that Dr King ever meant, or said, the things attributed to him in that book.

Yet The Secret “spoke” to a million itching ears, promoted on Oprah and elsewhere. And today its author is working on a sequel, and, surprise, endorses Observer as a book of substantial import. She is cited as a “#1 New York Times bestselling author,” not a fabulist, but she says that Lanza “has taken the gigantic step of incorporating his ideas into a science fiction novel…. Often-complex concepts are illuminated through a riveting and moving story.” She claims that Lanza’s previous work has “backed up everything I knew to be true on a spiritual level…. It is the leading-edge scientists such as Dr. Robert Lanza who will help take humanity out of the dark ages and into a new world.”

The authors say about themselves that “if life and consciousness are really central to everything else, then countless puzzling anomalies in science enjoy immediate clarification…. The simplest [?] explanation is that the laws and conditions of the universe allow for the observer because the observer generates them.”

Obviously this book and its proponents and its promotion do precisely what the contemporary world does – blurring lines between science and fiction; intelligence and “Artificial Intelligence”; and truth and lies. The phrase I used above, “itching ears,” is from the Bible, about people who crave unreality. A country-music song title captured the impulse well: “Lie To Me.”

The extensive review and promotion, just as with The Secret and myriad other manifestations of today’s culture, addresses the most serious matters and questions about reality – existence; the physical universe; our roles in life – but never utters one word about God.

How we got here… why we are here… who created the billions of stars… who created, well, us? Forget science fiction or this book specifically: those questions, and their answer, are seldom addressed seriously any more in media, in schoolrooms, in education… sadly, less and less in churches. Hint: The answer is God.

Authors and movie-makers and Oprah can speculate – and even believe – all their nonsense all they want, but I am still thrilled by quotations from another Book:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars that You have ordained, what are mortals, that You should be mindful of them; mere human beings, that You should seek them out?

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father seeing. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than sparrows!

I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my spokesmen to the world.

No two snowflakes are alike. We cannot survey the uncountable stars. We contemplate the numbers of grains of sand on the earth’s shores. And yet the Creator of all this, of the universe seen and unseen, has created us too… and knows everything about us.

More than that: He cares more about you and me than about everything else in His creation. That’s what He tells us. Is someone like Him going to lie? He cannot.

No fiction in His Book.

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Click: His Eye Is On the Sparrow