Isaac Asimov once asserted that if it hadn’t been for the presence of the moon, human civilization would never have developed as quickly as it did. Early humans, he argued, were fascinated by the moon, and were stimulated to decipher the mystery of its existence. What were the phases of the moon, and why were they there? How far away is the moon? Nothing else in the heavens seemed quite so intriguing, for impressive as the sun was it was perceived as unchanging, the stars never changed except that they progressed with the seasons, and the planets moved but quite slowly. People learned that they could predict the seasons by counting the lunar cycles, and the passage of time could be catalogued in this way. The moon, therefore, seems to have catalyzed the early development of humanity: intellectually, culturally, and creatively. The Christian tradition of Easter is still celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring. Without the inspiration of the moon feeding our fascination through its dynamic presence in the sky, we surely may have developed more slowly.
Now, think of our much more recent ambitions to send people to the moon: it is widely recognized how this challenge motivated significant technological advancements. The entire world was mesmerized by this adventure! One might be tempted to wonder here if somehow the moon could have been placed there intentionally, in order to stimulate our progress, but that would have required some kind of intervention dating back to the formation of the moon, something inconceivable to most. But here we are, civilized in no small way because there happens to be a moon orbiting our eager planet.
There is a documentary video of Apollo 15, and in a portion of this video the astronauts on the moon are riding a lunar rover, toward one destination or another. They are passing a landscape which is dappled with hills, in combination with the characteristic texture of the surface, the lunar dust among craters, with shadows being formed by the sun upon the undulating surface of the hills, when one of the astronauts passionately exclaims that this is the most beautiful thing that he has ever seen! The exuberance in his voice is validation enough regarding the authenticity of his statement, and one is left to wonder how such a thing could be possible. Here is a barren landscape, desolate in the deepest sense of the word, devoid of dynamic energies promising any fruitful future changes, and yet here is the most beautiful thing a mature human being has ever seen. Such is the mystery of beauty. The images of Neptune’s moon Triton collected by one of the Voyager spacecraft during its flyby are themselves replete with an inexplicable beauty. Here is a landscape whose temperature is hundreds of degrees below zero, where water ice has the hardness of steel because of the cold, and where a human would die almost instantly if exposed to these conditions, and yet it can be perceived by our senses as beautiful.
The common aspect of these two examples is that they are both the result of pure and natural forces sculpting random landscapes over eons of time, and illuminated by the sun. Beauty seems to be the inevitable result of natural forces at work over extended periods of time, as if beauty were implicit in the natural laws which govern the universe, including ourselves. The examples of beauty just mentioned require light in order to be perceived by us, yet other kinds of beauty do not. We might recognize a certain piece of music as beautiful, or even a smell…an idea or a hope. We evolved from beauty, to become capable of recognizing beauty, that we might embellish and enshrine the beauty of the present and future through the living of our lives. Here is the poetry of our existence.
There were a couple of girls I knew as a child who were profoundly impactful on my youth. One I knew through the school which I attended, and the other was a close neighbor of mine. We rarely spoke to one another, and yet I drew inspiration from them merely by being in their presence. The promise of life’s potential was contained in these two, and the extent to which my outlook was sweetened by them cannot be overstated. They were the essence of angels sprinkled upon my heart, and hopefully I was something similar to them. They catalyzed my expectations in much the same way as did the Apollo moon missions, for these were contemporaneous with one another in my youth. Because of these influences and others as well, I became convinced of the profundity in life’s potential, and I bask in the afterglow of these even now.
On the morning of December 20, 1996, a couple of angels glided across my field of vision as I lay in bed, and following this I had the most vivid and evocative dreams of what I perceived at the time to be heaven. That the angels were directly connected to these wonderful dreams I never doubted, and yet something happened later that day which confirmed to my heart that these were, in fact, angels. I worked in a print shop, and printing plates were required by the press I operated in order to produce a desired product. Every page which was to be printed required its own plate, which was the consistency of thick paper, where ink would adhere to a portion of the plate but not to the rest, corresponding to what needed to be printed. We had a platemaker machine which photographed the image to be printed, and through a chemical process produced a usable printing plate in just a few minutes. I had used this platemaker probably well over a thousand times in the sixteen months since I started working in that shop, and we had the exposure time of the camera set to twelve seconds. Whenever I was ready to make the plate, I would press a button, and four bright lights would turn on for twelve seconds, the image to be printed would be collected by the camera, and the plate would then be produced.
On the morning following the visitation of the angels, however, the camera did something it had never done before, nor subsequently, and it did this only once. Instead of shining continuously for twelve seconds, once I had pressed the button the lights flashed once and then a second time, and then the camera shut off. I knew intuitively and instantaneously that this was confirmation of the visitation by the angels, and I was astonished, for never had I witnessed God’s hand at work like this before. Others in the shop noticed something had happened as well, probably due to my vocal exclamation, and they were curious. Because of the vividness and clarity of those dreams, I knew those must have been angels which preceded the dreams. But to have this confirmed in such a remarkable and unforgettable way was life altering, and I have never doubted God’s ability to intervene since that camera flashed twice and then shut off.
In the aftermath, I contemplated what must have been needed to intervene in such a way as to cause one of our machines to malfunction, and I concluded that it must have been physical to some extent, something which caused a disruption in the energy flow, perhaps the manipulation of switches. Or, is it possible that the angels were sent that morning because the machine was already poised to malfunction, and God knew that I would be operating it when it did? Was it all just wild coincidence? No, I would stake everything that I am asserting that this was not coincidence, though I cannot be sure how God operates in these matters. Carl Sagan had died the evening before, and he had been my science mentor, and I have always felt that the angels were somehow related to his death. This discredits the idea that the camera was already poised to malfunction, in terms of the timing of the events.
This experience leads me to believe that it is not out of the question that divine intervention might possibly have contributed to the formation of our moon, though it is not at all certain how. If physical intervention was needed to manipulate the flash of that camera’s lights, then maybe a timely nudge caused a mars-sized object to crash into the Earth billions of years ago, leading to the formation of our moon, instead of just barely missing the Earth. But this would require God to have known billions of years in advance that intelligence would evolve on Earth which might benefit by the presence of a moon. I would bet on that possibility, though not so much on divine intercession triggering the formation of our moon. My experience with the camera, however, hints that this could be possible, though how it might happen remains shrouded in the mystery of higher dimensions.
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