AMERICAN BABEL

On Christmas Eve, 1968, three Americans were out of town. Way out of town. 238,900 miles out of town. They were the first human beings to orbit the moon and they were doing it numerous times on that Apollo 8 mission. The people in charge of the mission, those back on earth, noting how historic it would be, told the trio before they left the surly bonds of earth, "Do something appropriate to mark the occasion."

So, on their last orbit around the moon, astronauts Lovell, Borman, and Anders did something appropriate--they read Genesis 1:1-10 to their earthbound audience, all one billion of them, the largest television audience ever, at the time, and therefore, the largest audience ever to hear a human voice.

As you might suspect, some people got all huffy about the reading and, under the leadership of Madalyn Murray O'Haire, collected a "whopping" total of 28,000 signatures on a lawsuit petition demanding that astronauts or any other government official, be forbidden from citing Scripture while on duty. (Had this lawsuit been filed and won in the 19th century, Lincoln would have had to censor the dozens and dozens of references to or quotations from the Bible he made in his speeches.)

The lawsuit went nowhere other than the courtroom trashcan.  Today, few, if any, remember her or her outrage.

That was 1968.

In 1999, the British Broadcasting Company ("The BBC") developed a series of documentaries on "The Planets" and they included a program titled, "The Moon," about the race between the Soviet Union and America to land a man on the moon and get him safely back home. The program was an interesting one; it included the son of the Soviet Premier at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, the fellow who was infamous for banging his shoe on the table during a U. N. meeting and also for saying to America and the capitalistic West, "We will bury you."  (Or something like that.)

The BBC fellow narrating "The Moon," told us, "Discovering the origin of the moon became the official stated scientific goal of the American lunar program." This "official stated goal" was years before Christmas Eve, 1968.

But if that was our only purpose for going to the moon, we should have stayed home. We knew its origin sometime around 1440 BC when Moses wrote Genesis. In addition, the three astronauts read the origin of the moon to one billion people on Christmas Eve, 1968, while in orbit.

I had always wanted to be an astronomer and have the cushy job of sitting in a massive observatory like Palomar, eating pralines and discovering new planets. Such was not to be, because my math skills started decaying when I was in the 7th grade. That's when "ciphering," as Jethro Bodine used to say, got hard.

One day, in elementary school, the teacher called my daughter to her desk and asked, "Did your father help you with your homework?" My daughter proudly answered, "Yes, he did." The teacher replied, "Tell him to stop; he doesn't know what he's doing; your paper is all wrong."

So, I gave up my dream of pralines and planets--7th grade arithmetic was the stake in the heart that killed it. But I've always been interested in astronomy, and just last week I discovered that series on TV on the subject, the aforementioned one by the BBC.

In the program on the moon, the BBC gave a platform to a professor sitting all comfy in his easy chair, and, in an affable manner, he told us about the theories back then in his day, 1999, about the origin of the moon:

1. The earth and the moon had grown together, side by side, for a long, long time. Or,
2. The moon formed somewhere else in the solar system and later came into the earth's orbit and was captured by the earth. Or
3. Maybe (his word, not mine) the earth was spinning so fast that it spun the moon off and it flew off like a drop of water from a spinning ball. Or, and this is the professor's theory . . .
4. Long, long ago there were all these huge worlds competing for space in the universe. The earth was one of those competitors. In the competition, a body the size of Mars collided with the earth and, as a result, there was a lot of debris which collected and grew into the moon.

The professor went on to say, "Perhaps, maybe, all the moons of all the planets came from other collisions as well, as did the rings of Saturn." We might call this competition the "Primal Olympics." In this Olympics, the earth won; we beat the big boys like Jupiter and Neptune--we got all of the air, water, vegetation, heat, and we got Lubbock, TX! Go earth!

However the professor didn't tell us the origin of all these large bodies in the universe which were competing for space in space. Nor did the professor tell us that no one was around at the time to observe this theorized "competition," and therefore, his personal theory (#4) is to be taken by faith, as are #s 1-3. (By the way, his theory is the predominate one today.)

When all this is said and done, as you can see by the theories, God is never in the discussion, nor was God in the discussion for the entire program. Genesis 1:1, 16-18 never came into the program.

Can't we discuss it? The Bible tells us interesting other interesting facts about astronomy: 1) the earth is round--Isaiah 40:22 and 2) God suspended the earth on nothing; it's floating--Job 26:7.

But let's go back. Does the "official stated reason for our going to the moon trouble you? I know it's a point of pride for us, but do you find that reason uncomfortable? Whatever else we might say, it certainly was an achievement.

And so was the Tower of Babel, that ziggurat born on the drawing board of Nimrod's rebellion and  and steeped in the heady wine of "Let us make a name for ourselves." (The motto of humanity.) The Tower was their spit thrown in the face of God because the Tower made its own architectural statement, "We will not spread out as You commanded us to do; we will unify and collectivize!" Babel was the first organized, systematic rebellion against God.

Do you think that the officially stated reason scientifically for our going to the moon was an explicit, officially phrased rejection of Genesis 1: 1, 16-18?

However, we shouldn't expect the unbeliever to live and think as the Christian thinks.