Reflection by T.C. Lo on the 50th year anniversary for the first man to walk on the moon
I have never forgotten the very day fifty years ago. Astronaut Neil Armstrong spoke the phrase “The Eagle Has Landed” to announce the successful landing of the Apollo 11 his famous lunar module named “Eagle” in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon on July 20, 1969. As the first man to walk on the moon, he uttered his famous line: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Less than 20 years later, Armstrong, a devoted Christian, came to Poughkeepsie, NY, to speak at an evangelical meeting where I brought my children (Esther and Tim) there to listen to his view on Christianity.
However monumental this historic event might have been, let us look back in time to see what had happened before it. Ravi Zacharias described it beautifully with theological insight (Ref. 1):
“On August 7, 1961, twenty-six year-old Major Gherman Titov became the second soviet cosmonaut to orbit the moon and return safely, climaxing a monumental feat for mankind. Sometime later, speaking at the world fair and savoring his moment of glory, he recounted this experience, vouchsafed to a privileged few. Under a triumphalist pretext, he let it be known that, on his excursion into space, he hadn’t seen God. Upon hearing of this exuberant argument from silence, someone quipped, “Had he stepped out of his space-suit he would have!” Evidently reluctant to restrict the immediate gains of the moment to the disciplines directly involved in that endeavor, Titov attempted to draw theological blood. Thus, one great step for science became for him, an immensely greater leap in philosophy.
On Christmas Eve, 1968, three American astronauts were first human beings to go around the “dark” side of the moon, away from the earth. Having fired their rockets, they were homebound on Apollo 8, and beheld our planet in a way that human eyes had never witnessed before. They saw Earth rise above the horizon of the moon, draped in a beauteous mixture of white and blue, bordered by glistering light of the sun against the black void of space. And in the throes of this awe-inspiring experience they open the pages of the book of Genesis and read for the world to hear ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth…’
Two similar experiences of awe and exhilaration; two diametrically opposed conclusions about the nature of the world. Such a chasm is quite understandable, for these two incidents carried into space the most fundamentally debated question on earth: Does God exist? Has God created man, or has man created God? Is God indispensably to any cosmological explanation, or is he only a psychological necessity of men? Theism or atheism?
In 1952, Encyclopedia Britannica published a fifty-five-volume series entitled The Great Books of the Western World. Mortimer Adler, the noted philosopher and legal scholar, was co-editor of this series, which marshaled the eminent thinkers of the western world and their writings on the most important ideas that have been studied and investigated over the centuries. This includes ideas in law, science, philosophy, history, theology, and love that have shaped the minds and destinies of people. These essays are assembled for comparison and contrast. Very striking to the observant reader is that the longest essay is on God. When Mr. Adler was asked by a reviewer why this theme merited such protracted coverage, his answer was uncompromising. “Because,” said he, “more consequences for life and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from any other basic question.”
Ref. 1 “The Real Face of Atheism” by Ravi Zacharias; pp 19-21.
