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New NASA Telescope Will Boost the God Hypothesis

Photo: James Webb Space Telescope, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Stephen Meyer writes at The Federalist about a boost that the God Hypothesis is set to receive from NASA and its new James Webb Space Telescope. There is a beautiful connection to the time of year. In fact, I see that owing to the weather, the launch has been delayed (fittingly?) to Christmas Day. From, “NASA to Launch Telescope Stronger than Hubble That Can See Back in Time”:

During the winter holidays, Jews celebrate a miraculous, unquenchable light and Christians celebrate the incarnation of God revealed by the light of a star. It’s fitting, therefore, that on December 22 NASA will launch a new satellite capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang — a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of the universe and, in their own ways, reveal God to the world. 

NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope will be carried into space this week from French Guiana on the back of an Ariane 5 rocket. The $10 billion, 21-foot telescope features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope — NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time….

The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes … from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later. Detecting that light will … provide further confirmation of an expanding universe.

Since the new telescope can detect infrared light — invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths — it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang. As space plasma physicist and long-time NASA contractor Rob Sheldon has explained, “The light coming from these ancient, extremely distant galaxies, should be ‘ultra red-shifted’ into the infra-red range that the Webb telescope is designed to detect.”

This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.” If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning — as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest — it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy — no physics — would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

If you haven’t done so yet, go to IntelligentDesign.org to see the five brand new videos from Dr. Meyer for PragerU that were released this week. They cover themes from Return of the God Hypothesis, which is currently Amazon’s #1 bestseller in the category of cosmology. While you’re there, you can get a free copy of a new mini-book by Meyer, Scientific Evidence for a Creator. It’s our Christmas gift to you.