I had a great Easter and then when we got home I was watching part of 60 minutes. The segment was talking about the Webb telescope, distant stars, how many billions of it takes for starlight to reach earth and mentioned something I’ve already known about……that we, as humans are made from stardust.
How can someone in the LCMS reconcile this with their faith? The astronomers who are learning so much from the Webb telescope are so certain of all this.
A lot of things are presented as if they were factual when they are at least somewhat speculative or even metaphorical.
If you want to reconcile science with Scripture, what is stardust? Can anyone define it? Does the idea that "we are made of stardust" conflict with "God made man from the dust of the ground"? Unless you want to make some assumptions about the exact meaning of the first few verses of Genesis I'm not sure that it does.
If you assume that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" means that God created the earth in the space of half an hour and then got busy populating it, things start to fall apart if the rest of the universe is truly billions of years old. But Scripture doesn't specifically say that. It doesn't say anything about how much time elapsed between God creating the heavens and the earth, and God creating anything else.
Starting with the assumption that some kind of Big Bang represented the beginning of everything in the universe, and the observation that going faster than light speed appears to be impossible, it logically follows that we can roughly gauge the age of something by its distance. But if the Big Bang theory proves inaccurate, or some historical event we don't know about means that a simple linear extrapolation isn't a valid assumption, everything built upon those assumptions starts to fall apart.
