Almost every week you can find in the news some scientific discovery or some item about the exploration of the universe. It may be close-up pictures of the surface of Mars or some other body in the solar system taken from one of our spacecraft or perhaps a spectacular shot of a distant galaxy from the Hubble space telescope. Data from satellite observatories take us back close to the Big Bang, some 14-billion years ago. On earth, experiments with particles at high-energy accelerators try to re-create some of the conditions that existed back then in the first seconds of the universe. Meanwhile, fossil discoveries give us information of life on earth millions of years ago.

            And some of us wonder how what happened in Palestine a few thousand years ago and the cozy religious pictures we may have gotten in Sunday school can have any relevance in the universe that science discloses. In a universe that is so big that it takes light years to reach us from even the nearest stars, traditional Christianity can seem rather narrow.

            What can be disturbing about scientific discoveries is not just the size and age of the universe that they reveal but the strangeness of the concepts that are needed to describe them. Astronomers tell us that there seems to be mysterious “dark energy” that is making the universe expand faster and faster, while some theories suggest that on the smallest scale everything is made up of tiny strings. Those ideas may be fascinating but they certainly don’t give us a picture of a cozy world in which it’s easy to feel at home.

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