Stargazing can be one of the most helpful activities in Christian apologetics because it leads people to ask questions. Where did all of this come from? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why this kind of universe and not some other? Apologists combine reason and modern science to show how these questions should lead toward belief in God. Since contemporary physics tells us that the universe is not infinitely old, the Cosmological Argument says the cosmos needs something outside of itself to explain its existence. The Fine-tuning Argument shows how the extremely low probability of a life-supporting universe provides good reasons to think that a personal designer stands behind the whole project. These arguments and others grant evidential strength to the Christian claims that God exists and created the world. However, stargazing can provide another apologetical tool of a very different type.
Go outside on a clear night, and notice what you feel when you look up. A sky full of magnificent stars will meet your gaze, and the immensity of the cosmos will begin to fill your mind. Slowly, you will become aware of a mix of emotions. You may feel awe at the size of the universe and our small physical place within it. You may feel unsettled at the lack of power humans have over the elements of the cosmos. King David reflects these kinds of emotions in Psalm 8:3–4 (NASB) when he says to God, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; what is man that You take thought of him, and the son of man that You care for him?”
Philosophers have tried to capture what happens to humans in such moments, and the word they used to describe these experiences is “sublime.” Sublime things are not necessarily beautiful in the way we normally consider beauty. Our reactions to them are not the same reactions we would have to a great painting or a sculpture. In Part 2, Section 1 of his 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry in the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke says this:
The passion [i.e., emotion] caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.
Burke’s point is that sublime things so strike us in their grandeur that we are emotionally upset by them. We become aware that we cannot even wrap our minds around the thing we see, and we do not necessarily like being in that situation.
As Christians in the modern world, we live in cultures that fancy themselves to be quite rational. Often, though, the origins of people’s beliefs are not reasons but emotions. They feel certain ways and then seek to bolster those emotional reactions with whatever reasons they find sufficiently convincing or convenient. For this reason, the classical arguments of apologetics sometimes fall on deaf ears. The Cosmological Argument is a good argument for God’s existence, but it can remain unconvincing to someone who is trying to defend a feeling. In these situations, Christians may do well to take people stargazing. We can place those with whom we are conversing in a position to experience the immensity of the world so that their emotions are upset. In that moment of instability in their worldview, we can talk with them about the toughest, most basic questions and hope to find our audience more receptive.
