The Most Staggering Story Never Told

On September 5, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 into the solar system. On February 14, 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, mission controllers sent a command across 3.7 billion miles of space and asked the probe to turn its camera around and take one last photograph before its instruments were powered down.

The image that came back showed Earth as a pale blue dot — less than a single pixel — suspended in a sunbeam against the black of space. Sagan wrote about it in words that have been repeated ten thousand times since. We are a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere.

He was looking at the right image. He had the interpretation backwards.

But that claim requires honesty about what it is and what it is not. Saying Sagan had the interpretation backwards is not an argument from the photograph itself. It is a counter-interpretation — two people looking at the same image and reading it through different frameworks, neither wrong to do so given everything else they believe. The naturalist looks at the pale blue dot and sees the humbling truth of cosmic smallness: we are, as Sagan wrote, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. That conclusion follows logically from a universe without a personal Creator. The Christian looks at the same image and sees something else entirely — the address of Genesis 2:7. The place where the Son of God became flesh. The location where the creation's long groaning began moving toward its resolution.

Neither reading is imposed by the photograph. Each reading is the photograph seen through a framework. This volume does not pretend the image proves the theistic reading. What it does is ask a different question: if the biblical story is true — if the God of John 1 actually exists, actually made this place, actually breathed into the thing shaped from its dust — what does that photograph actually show? The answer is staggering enough to occupy the rest of this volume. And it is available whether or not you already stand inside the Christian framework, because the question itself is available to anyone who has ever looked up at the sky and wondered whether the vastness is empty or inhabited.

A note on what this volume is and is not. This is a discipleship text, written from within the Christian tradition, for readers who have already staked their lives on the Lordship of Christ. It is not a view from nowhere — and there is no view from nowhere. Every framework presupposes itself. The naturalist framework that treats unfalsifiability as a decisive defeater, that grants normative authority to later conciliar decisions, and that applies Bayesian probability tools to metaphysical claims is not a neutral framework. It is the commitments of a particular intellectual tradition with its own internal logic. The Christian framework is another such tradition. The question is not which framework is presuppositionless — none are. The question is which framework is internally coherent, illuminating, and capable of making sense of the full range of human experience including the fine-tuned universe, the populated heavens, the breath of Genesis 2:7, and the groaning of Romans 8. This volume argues that the Christian framework is. Readers who need the case made from outside any framework will find this volume's genre is wrong for their purpose. Readers who are inside the tradition and need its cosmic scope made visible — read on.