The Ultimate Discovery

The Ultimate Discovery

1989 4 April 12-13 The Ultimate Discovery (467) The joy experienced on making a scientific discovery is no doubt very great. But the greatest feelings of exaltation and sheer bliss are to be experienced only on discovering the Almighty. Anyone who claims to have found God, but evinces no such feelings, is clearly mistaken in what it is he has discovered. Without these signs of intense joy, there has been no real discovery of God.

Because of the sun’s relative proximity to the earth, it seems much larger to us than any of the other heavenly bodies. True, it is 1,200,000 times the size of our globe, but by cosmic standards the sun is a relatively small star. Again we feel that the sun is the brightest object in the firmament, and must, therefore, be emitting the greatest amounts of energy, but this is not so, for astronomers tell us that most stars, as well as being bigger than the sun, are more radiant. Vast orbs of heat and light, they are scattered in enormous numbers throughout the universe and, although they have been shining for billions and billions of years, their reserves of thermal energy show no signs of being exhausted.

How do stars continue to produce such colossal amounts of energy? Astrophysicist Hans Bethe spent years on the study of this question before he discovered that the secret lies in the carbon cycle – a piece of research which won him the Nobel Prize for physics in 1967. His wife, Rose, says that she was with him in the New Mexico desert when the moment of enlightenment came to him. When she exclaimed over the brightness of the stars, he said to her, “Do you realize, just now you are standing next to the only human being who knows why they shine at all?” Naturally this was a moment of great joy for him. But his joy would have been much greater if he had been able to penetrate to the ultimate truth: the reason for this carbon cycle coming into being and operating as it did in the stars. As it was, he had solved only a tiny portion of the problem. A physicist, in fact, can never get to the heart of the matter. It is the man of religion who will tell you, with certainty, that the prime mover in all questions of the functioning of the universe is God, its Creator and Sustainer.

The joy experienced on making a scientific discovery is no doubt very great. But the greatest feelings of exaltation and sheer bliss are to be experienced only on discovering the Almighty. Anyone who claims to have found God, but evinces no such feelings, is clearly mistaken in what it is he has discovered. Without these signs of intense joy, there has been no real discovery of God.