none of the other elements out of which planets and life are made. This point in time must have marked the beginning of the Universe." (4) It was created. This is the only remaining alternative and the only reasonable view of the origin of the universe. Since our finite, dependent (and contingent) universe (of matter/energy) did not cause itself, it was obviously caused by an infinite, independent, eternal Mind. God, speaking through Moses (Genesis 15:5) and Jeremiah (33:32), mentioned that "the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured ...." Little did we know how true those statements were. Johann Bayer (1603) devised a system to indicate the brightness, or magnitude, of the stars, using the Greek and Roman alphabets to denote their brightness. [Remember Paul's statement to the Corinthians (I Corinthians 15:41): "...for one star differeth from another star in glory."] Men before and after Bayer tried to count the stars. Hipparchus the astronomer, in 128 B.C. counted the stars and said there were 1,026. In 150 A.D., the famous astronomer Ptolemy counted the stars and arrived at the number of 1,056. Years later, in 1575 A.D., the renowned Danish astronomer, Tyco Brah, counted the stars and said there were 777. In 1600 A.D. the German astronomer Johannes Kepler counted the stars and gave the number 1,005. At last counting (and we are nowhere near finished yet) the number of stars stood at `25 sextillion'. That's a 25 with twenty-one zeroes after it! There are an estimated one billion galaxies,. and most of them contain billions of stars (the Milky Way galaxy in which we live, for example, contains over `100 billion stars'). It is so large that travelling at the speed of light (186,317.6 miles per second) it would take you 100,000 years to go across just the diameter of the galaxy. Light travels in one year approximately 5.87 x 1O.MDSU/12' miles. In 100,000 years, that would be 5.87 x 1O.MDSU/17' miles, or 5...
