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Moon Goddess reigns as Jade Rabbit scampers

By Andrew Lam: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, December 4, 2013

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Chang'e, the Goddess of Moon in Chinese myth [File photo]

Each year during the Mid-Autumn Moon festival, a pastry shop near our house in Saigon during the Vietnam War would display the figure of a dancing goddess in a flowing dress who, I was told, resided on the moon.

Then one year the goddess was gone, replaced by three strange creatures adorned with Christmas lights. “Mother,” I asked, “are those angels?”

“No,” she answered. “They’re American astronauts and they’ve landed on the moon.” That was in 1969. Ever since then other nations have followed suit, and most recently China has launched a rover known as the Jade Rabbit to collect data on the moon.

If I as a child had believed the goddess really did live on that silvery globe that hung outside my window at night, that mindset has long ago shifted toward something else.

Science dethrones all the old, known gods. The Hubble telescope and the Kepler Telescope have found at least 150 billion galaxies, many of them still being formed.

There aren’t enough gods and titans in human history to name the planets in our own vast Milky Way, let alone the rest of the awesome universe. Instead, scientists use letters and numbers — MS13 for a galaxy, GC143 for a star.

When Nietszche asked, “Have you not heard that God is dead?” it was a rhetorical question. Galileo, Newton, Einstein and the like revealed a universe more startling than any ancient myth could describe. The sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus.

And yet it is my contention that science, even as it slays the old gods, does not destroy human spirituality.

Quite the contrary, they reinforce each other.

Some years ago, at UC Berkeley, my physics professor offered his attentive students proof that God exists. He called it the Big Bang theory. Most scientists now believe that the universe began with an instant of creation some 20 billion years ago. The fragments of that formative explosion are still flying outward from the focus of that unfathomable blast.

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