universe and has so far probed only a fraction of it. Yet to travel to the frontiers of that observed fraction even at 186,300 miles per second (the speed of light) would take at least 6,000 million years.

And the whole incredibly vast universe traveling at fantastic speed moves with the greatest accuracy, like a giant clock. The most accurate clocks used in scientific observation must be adjusted by fractions of a second. But the vast clock that is the universe is never a fraction slow or fast. What kind of Clockmaker has made it?

When you look at the stars on a beautiful night, you are looking back into the past, for you see them not as they are now, but as they were hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. The light you see has taken all that time to reach your eye.

The light we receive from most of them began as a great journey long before we were born. Even the light from the sun-only 93 million miles away –takes eight minutes to reach the earth. But from the star nearest to us, Proxima Centrauri, it takes four years. Since light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, covers 6 million million miles in a year, this means that the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri is about 24 million million miles.

 MORE “MIRACLES”

A big library of books could not describe all the wonders of the universe. There is the little universe of the atom-as small as the big universe is vast. Yet it has a fixed pattern of electrons speeding round a tiny nucleus in fixed orbits and in the most exact proportions to each other-with an energy that man can use to destroy huge cities.

There is the miracle of a tiny seed lying in the dry, dusty field through the long hot summer months. Then, following the regular yearly cycle, clouds fill the sky, the monsoon rains fall and that little seed bursts into the most wonderful life, pushing tiny leaves through the earth. As it grows it absorbs its food with its own roots and leaves, until it flowers and produces grains which can repeat the same “miracle” in the following year.

There is the miracle of the cheeky, fluffy chicken emerging from the egg, just 21 days after the hen began her patient sitting on the nest. There is the little kitten born from the cat, the lovely calf from the cow, the young elephant from its giant of a mother.

Nothing of this happens by chance. All follows a most precise and exact process-regular, exact, delicately balanced, always following the same timetable, the same cycle.

Is it more reasonable to say that all this happened by chance, that all this has no explanation or no cause? Or is it not more rational to say that beyond this wonderfully constructed universe there lies a great Mind and a powerful Builder – immeasurably greater than our human minds and building powers—and for want of a better name we call this Builder GOD?

Perhaps it is the materialist who is asking for an even greater “miracle” when he says that this magnificently designed universe has no Designer and no Builder.