While I’m Being All Sciencey….

This is just a reminder that the Incarnation of the Son of God took place, not because of our awesomeness, but because of His dizzying condescension to our low estate:

Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!
Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted
by the mouth of babes and infants,
thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.
Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is thy name in all the earth!

Moderns who imagine that ancients (being, of course, 3000 years stupider than the culture that has given us Rosie O’Donnell, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Ashton Kutcher, and Richard Dawkins) were too dumb to know the universe is really big. They therefore ignorantly declare that ancients assumed we were important because of our size and declare it “arrogant” for them to think we were made in God’s image. Such people have never given any serious thougt to Psalm 8 (or common sense). For, of course, it has always been obvious to anybody who stood out under a night sky that we are vanishingly puny. The Jews know that it is divine goodness, not human awesomeness, that is the factor at work here. The effect of all the recent atheistic claptrap about man’s insignificance in comparison to the universe is not to exalt man’s dignity and free him from a Bronze Age myth that leaves him cowering in fear before Almighty God. It is to humiliate and oppress ordinary people and to celebrate and play sycophant to the vanishingly few rich and powerful people who crush and oppress the poor. Atheism is the modern form of the court prophet, always eager to grind the face of the oppressed and tell him, “Not only are you the loser in the Darwinian struggle, your death will mean nothing, just as your life means nothing. Look and see how puny and insignificant you are, you germ!” Like all heresies, it takes part of the truth (the delightful fact of our smallness) and uses it as a weapon against the rest of the truth (the fact that what makes our smallness delightful is that a great and awesome God loves us).