In 2005, two British researchers and avowed agnostics, Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, published a book entitled, Who Built the Moon? Butler admits that all experts agree that the moon is a highly improbable object and it has been nothing less than an incubator for life on earth. “Quite simply,” he says, “we humans would not be here if the moon had not been exactly the size it is and in the various positions it has held over the last four and a half billion years.” Having studied almost every conceivable fact about the moon, they confess that the moon doesn’t obey the rules of astrophysics and there is no theory of its origin that explains the known facts. Some of those known facts are not only jaw dropping but also have formulated some interesting theories.
Both Knight and Butler have noticed some very odd mathematical relationships between the size and orbital characteristics of the moon, earth, and sun. For example, the earth revolves 366 times in one orbit of the sun and is 366% larger than the moon. The moon takes 27.32 days to orbit the earth and is 27.32% of the earth’s size. The moon is 400 times closer to the earth than the sun and exactly 400 times smaller than the sun. They also noted that the metric system, universally accepted across the world for scientific measurement, appears to have been created specifically to highlight the peculiarities of the moon. For example, the earth is 109.3 times smaller than the sun, while the circumference of the moon when measured in kilometers in 10,930 km. Also, the moon is turning at exactly 1% of the earth’s spin, which gives a speed at the lunar equator of precisely 400 kilometers per hour.
According to the pair, there can only be one logical explanation: Some agency saw the life bearing potential of the earth/sun system and added the moon as a means to create and nurture life. In other words, this agency deliberately planned and engineered the moon to facilitate the earth’s success. But that same agency did much more – it made certain that the resulting mathematics would be particularly relevant to a species with ten fingers and in the absolute knowledge of the eventual use of the metric system. Their consensus: a future race of human beings traveled back in time and created the moon as a support system for the earth.
From my perspective as a Christian, it takes a lot more faith to believe in that consensus or theory than to believe an all-powerful, all-sovereign, all-knowing God spoke creation into existence and made it in such a way that if anyone would take the time to contemplate its immensity and intricacy, they would come to only one conclusion – “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
David declared in Psalm 8, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place; what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” Later in Psalm 19, he stated, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.”
The mathematical relationships the two researchers discovered in their quest for understanding is amazing to say the least. Even more amazing is the discovery that the One who created the universe would care enough about humanity that he would come to earth in the form of man, die on a cross for the sins of mankind, and offer salvation as a free gift.
Proverbs 1:7 declares, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom.” It would do Knight and Butler a great deal of good to consider God when studying the characteristics of the universe in which we live because any way you add it up, the answer has always been and always will be found in God.
To His Glory,
Pastor Bill