The cosmos is evidently finite in age and extent, but enormous: cosmologists often estimate the universe's age to be 13.7 billion years old and one source approximates there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, but truth be told, no human knows (Psalm 8:3-4).
Our Milky Way galaxy contains roughly 100-400 billion stars. See https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2015/07/22/how-many-stars-in-the-milky-way/
The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec or 9.5 trillion km/yr and the Milky Way is 600 quadrillion miles in diameter which would take 100,000 years to cross traveling at the speed of light. Our nearest neighbor is the Andromeda galaxy. How far away is it from the Milky Way? Try 2.5 million light years. And we won't even mention M87. However, take the time to look it up and you'll be amazed.
Why is this cosmos so enormous? Why such vast distances between objects?
The Creation book published by Jehovah's Witnesses famously discussed clusters and superclusters. One source describes clusters this way:
"Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe, spanning distances up to ten million light years, and containing the equivalent mass of a million, billion suns. Our research examines the physics of these remarkable systems using the best available multi-wavelength data, and uses the observed properties of clusters to probe the nature of dark matter, the weakly interacting yet dominant matter component of the universe, and dark energy, the driving force behind cosmic acceleration."
See https://kipac.stanford.edu/research/topics/galaxy-clusters
The Virgo galactic cluster is part of the Local Supercluster that contains 100 clusters of galaxies and stretches over 100 million light years. See https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/tour_ggs.html
Additionally, there are four basic forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetism, weak force and strong force. As for life, we need proteins and amino acids: the latter constitute building blocks of the former and together, they are responsible for life as we know it.
I once looked into a diet that would have involved eating much less protein than I do now. The diet had many things to recommend it, but I learned that if one cuts back on protein, the lack has to be supplied from somewhere else. The point is that protein and amino acids are needed for life: they are indispensable.
When we take into account life's diversity and the many things we see in nature (including the air and seas), we can see evidence for a grand Creator, who made all things (Romans 1:20; Hebrews 3:4).
Sporadic theological and historical musings by Edgar Foster (Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies and one of Jehovah's Witnesses).
If one eats enough calories from a variety of whole plant foods one automatically get enough protein.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/EngPopsci/Protein.htm
I like the low protein diet if one is dealing with weak kidney function but I was surprised that it requires so much supplementation if protein is cut to almost zero. But I agree that one can get protein from more than meat. As to the low protein diet, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29854979/
ReplyDeleteOf course, the protein comment was to make a broader point.
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