Joe Offer wrote:

"Shimrod, where I live, I CAN look up at the night sky and see God. Our clear, black night sky makes me pause and ponder. I see God there."

When I look up in the night sky I see the moon, in its various phases, and lots of points of light. I certainly don't see a gigantic, quasi-human father figure!

I have it on good authority (are you listening, Pete?) that the points of light are either planets in orbit around the Sun, and shining as the result of reflected sunlight, or stars. Our Sun is a star and it consists of a a gigantic accretion of gas and dust which is undergoing nuclear fusion and is held together by its own gravity. The distances between the stars is beyond comprehension - the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is (if I've got my calculations right) around 25 million million miles away. Some stars are so far away that their light has taken many, many thousands of years to reach us. Nevertheless, stars themselves form unbelievably vast accretions - or islands - of stars called galaxies.

Now, conventionally, all of these facts are supposed to evoke awe and wonder and thoughts about God (who probably doesn't exist) etc. But as I get older what they do for me is to provide a rather terrifying perspective on my life and the future prospects for my species. When our planet Earth is viewed from space it is shown to consist of a relatively smooth ball of rock with a thin 'rind' on the surface. This rind is the 'biosphere' and, as far as we know to date, it is the only place in the entire, inconceivably vast Universe in which our species - and other Earth-bound species - can survive. And what our species is currently doing is destroying this biosphere so, probably in a small handful of generations (an infinitesimally minute fraction of a cosmic 'microsecond'), there will be NOWHERE in this vast Universe where we can survive! In my humble opinion, this horrifying prospect - and what to do about it - is far, far, far more important than fretting about whether God exists or not!