God and Surveyor 3

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Apparently there are a lot of people who think God is in difficulty during the Space Age. They regard him as a benevolent father who allowed his boys to go to college, only to find that they not only did not need him any longer but he couldn't even talk to them. Just about every time a scientific gadget makes a breakthrough, the question is bandied about, "What does this do to the concept of God?"

     The latest is Surveyor 3. This complicated piece of equipment, obeying commands from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, squatted down gently on the surface of the moon and went to work like a beaver behind on his chewing. It took hundreds of pictures, checked the temperature, extended an aluminum arm and dug trenches, and picked up soil and dumped it down on its flat footpads so the scientists could take a good look

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at it in closeup pictures. Ronald Scott, the engineer in charge said, "The operation was accurate to within half an inch, working at a range of a quarter of a million miles."

     All of this is pretty impressive, of course, but it doesn't affect my thinking about God one bit. I'm accustomed to the belief that creative intelligence can produce a machine which can function on a distant planet. After all, man is a complex machine which makes Surveyor 3 look like a little fire engine in the toy department. I'll not begin to worry until Surveyor 3 makes a man of the dust of the moon and breathes into his nostrils the breath of spheres.

     I don't hold with a lot of good religious folk that God does not want us to explore space, or that he will slap us down as if we were "off limits." I think we will plop a man down on the moon, but we will still be a long way from the stars. It will be like a man who decides to walk from New York to San Francisco, and stops in Philadelphia to congratulate himself on his progress. It just could be that he would decide to stay in Philadelphia.

     I'm not so sure that God approves of the means by which we are trying to go to the moon, and I'm almost certain he will not like what we do to it after we arrive. The space race is a little silly when you stop to think about it, and those of us who are caught up in it, taxwise and otherwise are liable to be deadly serious about something which could have some humorous aspects if we were watching it all at once. I've fallen to wondering if God might think of the earth as a small merry-go-round swarming with a whole bunch of kids, and a couple of them who are richer than the others, throwing an occasional expensive balloon into the wild blue yonder, while the rest of them can't even afford a balloon. I don't think he approves of it when we get out of hand and start blustering around and playing with giant fire-crackers which could blow the whole shebang to "kingdom come."

     I'd hate to see the moon covered with beer cans, whiskey bottles and used car lots. We've pretty well made a garbage dump out of one planet and we've gotten ourselves into a mess. A few years ago everyone was in a dither about whether a man could breathe the atmosphere on another planet and survive. The big question now is whether he can breathe the air on this one and live. We may see the day when people will line up to go to the moon like they do now at the Eagle Stamp counter. You always have to crowd up now in order to get away from the crowd!

     Of course God is interested in the Russians too. They may be godless but God is not Russianless. The fact that they are trying so hard to make themselves believe that he doesn't exist, does not alter the fact that he does. Denying a fact does not destroy the fact. It is altogether possible, though, that we get angry with the Russians for different reasons than God does. For instance, we charge that they have defamed God by turning their cathedrals into museums. We've done the same thing but we still pretend to "worship" in them. I'm not so sure God was in a lot of the cathedrals to start with. He might have been out in the stable, and it wouldn't have been the first time.

     This brings me to the place where I can mention the cosmonaut who came back and reported that he had not seen God up there. This struck the funnybone of a lot of Russians and they repeated it with glee. It did not shake me. The God whom I love is not going to be confined to some point in space. The atheistic Communist had apparently fallen into the same trap as a lot of Christians who think that God dwells at a certain dedicated street address, and when you get there you can smoke in the dining-hall, but "no smoking in the sanctuary." So it didn't worry me that a Russian didn't run into God a few miles up. It would have worried me if he had. It would have worried me more if God had sent back word that he hadn't seen the cosmonaut up there!

     I'm a one-hundred-percent, dyed-in-

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the-wool believer "in him who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist." He will be when the moon and stars no longer are. I do not say he will be here, for by that time here may be there. I only say that he lives, and I'm willing to risk my life on it. In fact, I am doing so!