On April 8th, observers in North America will have a front-row seat to view one of the most astonishing, recurring astronomical events in human history — a total solar eclipse. There have been plenty of total eclipses recorded over the centuries, but they never get boring to watch. Why is that?
There are several elements to the “coincidence” of our ability to observe a perfect solar eclipse that Jay Richards points out in this thread at The Stream:
Jay Richards - “Perfect Eclipses: Coincidence or Conspiracy?”
Life Needs the Moon
You can visit his post yourself for more detail, but let me summarize the apologetically relevant topics he mentions there. The requirements for life on any planet include hundreds of factors that must be “just right.” Among them are:
Liquid water
Uneven temperature variations that cause weather patterns and a water cycle
Tidal fluctuations that move and replace nutrients between land and sea
A stable planetary orbit in a “habitable zone” that is not too close to the system's star, but also not too far away.
A star like our Sun that is of a certain size and maturity — not too early in its burn cycle and not too late
Though it’s not intuitively obvious, some of these factors — like the tidal variations and weather patterns — cannot exist on a planet that rotates on a plane perfectly perpendicular to its plane of orbit. For a planet to sustain life, it must be tilted about its plane of orbit around its star. That tilt leads to uneven heating. Uneven heating creates the air currents and the weather systems required to move and cycle the water required to sustain life.
In addition to that, the planet cannot wobble excessively as it rotates. A planet that wobbled on its axis too much would be physically destructive to the environment and not conducive to sustained life.
As it turns out, the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees from its plane of orbit. This angle varies slightly but is within a nearly perfect, life-allowing range. And it is held there by a Moon that is inordinately large in relation to the planet. The size of the Moon relative to the Earth, and its distance from the Earth, has an equally important impact on modulating the ocean tides within a narrow, life-allowing range.
So what does all this have to do with an eclipse?
The size of our moon is weirdly coincidental in another way.
The diameter of the Sun is 400 times larger than that of the Moon. It is also 400 times farther away from us than the Moon. Because of that, the relative size of the Moon and Sun in our sky is almost identical. And that means the Moon covers the Sun nearly perfectly during a solar eclipse.
Set Up Job
What we have here is several uncanny “coincidences” that come into play regarding our Moon. The size of the Moon size is required to:
1) Stabilize the Earth’s tilt and wobble
2) Modulate the Earth’s tides
3) Allow for the Earth’s life-sustaining water cycle
At the same time, the fact that the Moon’s size perfectly covers the Sun during an eclipse has allowed us to discover otherwise unknowable facts about the physics of the universe we live in.
It was during a total solar eclipse on May 29, 1919, that Albert Einstein’s General Relativity Theory was tested to see if his predictions about gravity and the space-time “fabric” were correct. Verifying Einstein’s theory eventually led to the realization that the universe was expanding. The fact that the universe was expanding meant that all matter, energy, space, and time came into existence at some point in the finite past.
Contrary to the consensus opinion of almost the entire scientific community at the time, this discovery meant that the universe was not eternal.
It had a beginning.
Whatever caused the universe to begin could not be part of the stuff that makes up the physical universe. That cause had to be very powerful. But it also had to be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. In other words, whatever caused the universe to come into being had to be beyond nature — it had to be supernatural.
And we learned about it during an eclipse.
This 5-minute video is a great summary of the topic. It features Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of, The Privileged Planet:
A PERFECT SOLAR ECLIPSE from The John 10:10 Project on Vimeo.
Coincidental Eclipse?
Maybe this is all just a coincidence. Or, maybe it is part of a divine conspiracy.
As you observe the eclipse, think about the fact that what you’re watching is not only a rare event, it is also a window into the nature of reality itself. It is concrete evidence that our Earthly home is a rare and meticulously designed place. But, it is also evidence that the One who designed it meant for us to discover him.
Maybe, “In the beginning God …” is not just the start of a fairy tale story. Maybe it is the introduction to a book that holds the answers to life’s most important questions.
Enjoy the show …