FinishMySong Blog

This morning a friend of mine sent me a fascinating email comprised of a series of pictures designed to give us a sense of stellar scale - how big the earth is as compared to other objects in space. I really love this kind of thing and I was recalling how Bradford's Museum of Film, Photography and Television used to have a video on display that attempted to give us an idea of distance in the universe. As it happens, I found both this and an updated version of it on YouTube:


Certainly quite stunning to watch, especially as just a minute and a half into the journey on the latter video the camera passes the farthest reaches of human travel, and as we look at the distances still to pass, this reach is absolutely miniscule. It becomes clear very quickly how little we actually know about our surroundings in this universe and thinking about this has the personal effect of confirming my agnosticism - with so much out there that we are clueless about (just expressing it in these terms leads to an inevitable and massive understatement), how can anyone tell me that they know with any degree of certainty the answers to questions of our origin in the cosmos, etc? My response to any evangelical theist on this issue can only ever be to encourage them to look into the night sky and tell me again that they know and have absolutely no doubt that their ideas about life, the universe and everything are correct.