From 1981 to 2011, the Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions which orbited the earth launching satellites, interplanetary probes, the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as performing scientific experiments and building the International Space Station.

In 1984, astronauts Captain Bruce McCandles and General Bob Stewart stepped out of the Space Shuttle Challenger and performed the first un-tethered extravehicular activities using Manned Maneuvering Units, while orbiting a million feet above the earth.

In an interview with Reasons to Believe, October 1, 2000, an organization founded by internationally renown astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross, General Bob Stewart stated:

“Your first view of the home planet is breathtaking. Maybe that’s how God intended it to be viewed …”

General Stewart continued:

“I had been teaching a Sunday school class here at High View Baptist Church in Woodland Park and the class had decided that they wanted to study Genesis …

The message I hope to get across is that you don’t have to give up your intellect to be a Christian … It gets harder to reach a person for Christ when that person is highly educated and sure of the primacy of science in this world.

Reasons to Believe is the first organization I know of that attempts to tell those people that there is no conflict between religion and science.

They both use their own peculiar language to communicate the same eternal truths: that this universe was brought into existence out of nothingness; that it is especially fine-tuned for the existence of life on this rare, if not unique planet; and that God did it…”

General Stewart, who had been a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam, continued:

“I led off with a primer on relativity so my class could see the historical and logical background of this theory and lose their fear of it.

This was necessary because I intended to talk about the creation event in terms of the big bang, and I wanted my class to understand that this was not just something physicists thought up in a vacuum.

I wanted to approach the existence of human beings on this planet from the standpoint of their unique relationship to the Creator and back that up with some modern numerical biology statistics concerning the probabilities of life existing at all from random processes …”

General Stewart, who had logged 289 hours in space, concluded his interview:

“I hope to continue to challenge the person who is scientifically oriented with the idea that life would be prohibitively unlikely unless it were created by God …

In my life I have made a remarkable transition from a person whose faith was in science to the exclusion of religion, to being a person who holds the Scriptures to be truth with science just catching up after 4000 years.”

Categories: Articole de interes general