Mormon Musings

  "...men are not mere ciphers in a vast but dumb space; they are everlasting and accountable individuals.  Modern witnesses affirm that meaningfulness of life, human identity and human belonging.  The vastness of God's creations are the verification  of meaning, not its annihilation .  There is eternal purpose, and it is to be found in the Father's Only Begotten, Jesus Christ."  p. 8 "...the Lord's plan of salvation is not a set of floor plans for a new house that we as clients can modify or reject.  The Architect is not our employee, but our Host, even the Lord of Hosts; He is not only our Landlord, He is also our Lord!" p. 9 Elder Neal A. Maxwell, "Even AS I Am", pp 8-9

The late Carl Sagan, who communicated effectively about science and the universe, perceptively observed that in some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said—grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed’? Instead, they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge. [2] Latter-day Saints certainly should not lack reverence and awe—especially when we contemplate the universe in the context of divinely revealed truths. Yes, the cosmos “as revealed by modern science” is “elegant,” as Sagan wrote. Bu...

Astronomers tell us that our solar system is located in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, a flat disc-shaped cluster of stars approximately 100,000 light years across at its widest point.  A light year is the distance light travels in one year.  Moving at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, a beam of light traverses 5.7 trillion miles in 365 days.  The size of our galaxy, then, in miles, is a staggering 5.7 trillion multiplied by 100,000.  Our galaxy is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars, half of which likely possess solar systems similar to our own.  The next closest galaxy is Andromeda, a star system much like our own Milky Way, approximately 2.2 million light years away from us.  Furthermore, our best telescopes can probe outward into space to a distance of over 10 billion light years and view over 50 billion galaxies, each of which possesses billions of stars.  And these galaxies are the only ones we can detect with the presen...