Straight to the Heart

It doesn’t matter whatever else you think about the BBC. You’ve got to admit they know how to make great documentaries. I thought that David Attenborough’s nature programmes were unbeatable until I watched Professor Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Universe”.

If you don’t know who Professor Brian Cox is, then imagine that somebody took Patrick Moore’s brain and transplanted it into Vernon Kay’s body. He isn’t just intelligent, having worked at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, but he’s also very cool, having been the keyboard player in the band D:Ream. If you don’t know your music, they’re the band who sang “Things Can Only Get Better”. If you really don’t know your music, you’ll know it as the theme tune which Tony Blair used in his election campaign to become Prime Minister in 1997.

Brian Cox is a worshipper. He may be a humanist, but he’s a better worship leader than most of the people you will find on ”Songs of Praise” on the other channel. He enthuses over the wonders of the universe, captivated by what he sees and infectious in his call for us to praise. “We are all children of the stars,” he enthuses with glistening eyes. “All this was created billions of years ago,” he raves, using a word which would make David Attenborough splutter his coffee. It’s no wonder that Brian Cox worships this way, when the images of space which he presents are completely unrivalled in their pioneering celestial photography. But here’s the really funny thing: The images are state-of-the-art, but the gods he worships are very primitive.

Ur of the Chaldees, perhaps the world’s first great civilisation, was a city which worshipped the moon-god Nanna. Its citizens looked up at the great celestial orb which ruled the night-time and they bowed down in worship to the object which they saw.

Ancient Egypt, the greatest civilisation of the second millennium BC, was a kingdom which worshipped the sun-god Ra. The Egyptians also worshipped the moon but they reserved their greatest praise for the light which ruled the daytime. They were fascinated by the burning, Middle Eastern sun, and built temples and wrote hymns to the flaming star which lies at the heart of our solar system.

The Ancient Greeks, in similar fashion, worshipped the earth-goddess Gaia from whom they believed all terrestrial life flowed. This was simply what people did right across the BC era. They looked at the wonders of the universe and worshipped in wide-eyed wonder. Brian Cox. BC. They’ve got more in common than just their initials.

Yet there was one group of people during the BC era who saw past the wonders of the universe to the wonderful Creator about whom those created bodies testified. The Israelite king David wrote in about 1000BC that “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. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heart. Their voice goes out into all the earth.” (Psalm 19:1-4). The Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans dubbed the Jews and the Christians atheists because they refused to worship the created things which they themselves worshipped as the wonders of the universe. The Christians said those things were not gods at all. They saw past the the wonders of the universe to worship the God who made them all.

When you spend much of your life looking down a microscope, it’s difficult not to become a bit shortsighted, but the best scientists have always managed to maintain their longer vision. Francis Bacon wrote in the sixteenth century that “It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”

I love the images Brian Cox has gathered, and I find them making me want to join him in worship, but we mustn’t let him infect us with his forgetfulness towards Francis Bacon’s bigger picture. We must remember what Albert Einstein said that science was truly all about: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”

So let’s enjoy Professor Brian Cox, and thank God for providing us with such an excited worship leader. But let’s not settle for his worship of sun-gods and moon-gods and earth-goddesses like short-sighted BC men and women. Let’s remember that all of these wonders of the universe are mere details which point to the even more wonderful God who put them to proclaim his glory.

You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to watch your television and find reason after reason to fall down before the Lord in worship.