ASTRONOMY

My parents usually drove us to school each morning, swinging by to drop us off at Battle Creek Academy before they headed to the appliance store that they ran.  Generally they weren’t able to pick us up from school in the afternoon, and beginning in about the fourth grade I took a city bus home from school each day.  The Academy had school buses, and I’m not sure why I took public transportation.  Perhaps it was less expensive or perhaps it got me home faster.  In any event, I would pick up the city bus a couple of blocks from the school and ride it downtown.  I would then need to transfer to a different bus that would take me past my house.  Occasionally I would get lucky and the connection between the first and second buses would be fast.  But most times I would have a wait that could be as long as 15 minutes or more.  Because the city library was only a block or so from the downtown bus stop, I began regularly to check books out of the library between bus transfers.

The library used the Dewey decimal system for classifying books, and soon I found myself most afternoons in the stacks numbered in the 500s, science and math, eventually gravitating toward astronomy. 
A lot of what I read early on related to planetary astronomy, essentially what is going on in our solar system.  This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the beginning of the space race and the idea of traveling to the moon and to other planets was pretty sexy.  Eventually, though, I began reading more broadly about stellar astronomy, including books on the formation, composition, and ultimate fate of stars.  Others that I read dealt more broadly with the origin, history, and future of the universe.  By this time the general size of the universe, including the fact that it is expanding, had been well established.  However, this was at a time when the controversy over whether the universe had begun in a “big bang” or existed in a “steady state” had not yet been resolved.

Over the course of my high school years I read most of what our local library had to offer on the subject of astronomy, probably 50 or more books.  Some of them were over my head (figuratively, that is).  Others were more popularly written for the interested layman.  Many of the books covered a lot of the same ground, explaining not just what we know about the universe but what methods we use to gain that knowledge.  And though the books may have differed in some particulars (in part because a few were pretty dated), virtually all of them spoke to the great age and size of the universe and how we learned those facts.

All of them, that is, except one book.  I no longer recall the name of the book or its author.  But it was clearly different from all of the others in that it did not speak to the universe’s great age or its size.  Instead, it spoke more in terms of the universe’s grandeur and beauty.  In addition, it spoke specifically of something special about the great nebula in the constellation of Orion and that it seemed to form a pathway to somewhere else in the universe.  This was not the first time I had read about the nebula in Orion in astronomy texts; other books had referred to it as simply a prominent example of a gaseous nebula that appeared to be the site for recent and ongoing star formation.

More to my point, this was not the first time that I had been told that this nebula was special.  In fact, the Seventh-day Adventist prophetess, Ellen White, had specifically stated that during one of her “visions” she had learned that the Orion nebula was on the route that Christ would take on his way to earth at the time of his Second Coming.  Now I was very curious.  I had never heard of this book’s author, but at that point I did check the publisher:  Southern Publishing, run by the Adventist church.

I do not recall now whether I came across this book before or after my fateful visit to the museum that I spoke of in this blog’s initial post.  If before, then my recognition of the disparity between this book and all of the others was an important element in my personal philosophical journey.  If after, then it certainly served to strengthen my new perspective.  The fact that the Adventist book was so different from all of the others and, frankly, less sophisticated was critical.

I am now 50-some years removed from my intellectual affiliation with the Adventist church.  I don’t know if the church still emphasizes Christ’s imminent Second Coming.  My guess is that it is downplayed in favor of more general notions of what it is to live a Christian life.  That may be a good thing.  My guess too is that no one talks nowadays of the specifics of Christ’s itinerary for his Second Coming.  But I am curious.

© 2013 John M. Phillips