God—‘Lost’ in Space!

AiG recently released a unique music CD that will be distributed to music stores throughout the nation (and available through AiG). Using a number of award-winning artists, this creation “praise and worship” CD is an effort to make a much wider audience aware of AiG’s teaching ministry.

As a lead-up to the first song entitled “The Story of Light,” sung by Mark Harris of the Dove award-winning group 4Him, the CD begins with a beautiful orchestral piece called “Creation Overture” that then fades as we hear the voice of Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.

As his tiny spacecraft orbited the moon on 24 December 1968, hundreds of millions of Earth listeners huddled close to their TVs and radios where they heard him say over crackling radio waves from 71 miles above the moon’s surface:

“For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’”

I must admit, every time I listen to Astronaut Anders, I get “goose bumps.” Also, the CD’s orchestral piece that wraps around the reciting of Genesis 1 evokes a sense of wonder and praise for our Creator God unlike anything I’ve heard before.

The Apollo 8 website states:

“Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1968. That evening, the astronauts, Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8.

They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.”

As I contemplated this while listening to our new music CD, something very sad occurred to me.

I was a teenager in Australia when this Apollo 8 space flight occurred. I remember hearing the words of Anders being played on Australian radio stations as he read from Genesis.

At the time, I don’t recall the secular media making negative statements about the fact that astronauts were reading Genesis—maybe they didn’t in the USA either back in 1968. In Australia, prayer and Bible readings were still fairly prominent in the public school system.

But in the year 2004, I doubt such an event associated with NASA would ever occur again. You see, things have greatly changed in the culture. The secular media would scoff if such a reading from Genesis occurred from space. Probably organizations like the ACLU and others would threaten court cases over “separation of church and state” issues.

Now NASA is involved in space exploration with even greater fervor. Sadly, though, the major purpose of its effort is to try to prove that life evolved—that it is not the result of the Creator God of the Bible—that the first verse of the Bible is not true!

NASA’s own website has numerous statements like the following that sum up its current mission:

“The story of how you and the ground beneath your feet evolved out of space dust is beginning to unfold with a new batch of findings from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.”

And in recent times, we have read and heard all the hype about NASA’s search for life on Mars by scientists who believe life may have evolved there.

God has been “lost” in space. Therefore, a major part of AiG’s “space mission” is to help the world rediscover this “lost” vital truth—God’s creation of the heavens and the earth.

A part of this mission will be accomplished through AiG’s planetarium being constructed in our Creation Museum complex. A highly qualified Ph.D. scientist has joined our AiG team to write creation-based star programs for this planetarium theater so people will again “find” God in space.

Oh, how people need to hear the words “In the beginning God created … ,” instead of “in the beginning the cosmos.”