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William Shatner is most known for his acting role as Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise on the long-running television series, Star Trek, and the movies that followed. He also holds the title as the oldest human being to fly into space. He did so at the age of 90 aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule. In a recent interview, Shatner commented on the impact that experience had upon him:

What I experienced was not so much the flight into space, but my observation. Everybody knows we live on a small rock and that up to 12,500 feet oxygen is there. And after that, as you go higher, you get into a dead zone…. We live on a small rock. I saw the beginning of the curvature of the Earth. If I followed through, I could make a circle of this rock we live on. We are so negligible. We are so nothing. We are this small rock and this negligible solar system which is beside a mediocre star in a galaxy that is barely larger. We’re nothing. We are nothing, and that’s what I saw.

In a way, William Shatner had an experience similar to that of King David as recorded in Psalm 8. But while Shatner was looking from space upon Earth, David was looking from Earth into space. In his poem directed to God he wrote:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit  him?

There is nothing new about observing the vastness of the universe and reflecting upon the apparent insignificance of human beings upon Earth. The implication of David’s question to God is that he was tempted to draw the same conclusion as Shatner: “We are so negligible. We are so nothing.”

However, neither the modern actor nor the ancient king was entirely satisfied with that deduction. Here is the full conclusion of what William Shatner said:

We’re nothing. We are nothing, and that’s what I saw. And what else I saw was the tragedy of the extinction of life.

These two observations are difficult to reconcile. If life on earth is really nothing, then what is so tragic about the extinction of life on earth? Shatner went on to note that he has long been interested in ecology, but one has to wonder why that would be the case. On the presupposition that our planet and its living inhabitants are nothing, the extinction of life on the planet should be absolutely meaningless. If nothing becomes nothing, what is lost? And yet he sees such an event as tragic.

I suggest that is because, in his heart of hearts, William Shatner knows we are really not nothing. He knows what King David proceeded to declare to the Lord after posing his apparently despairing question:

You have made [man] a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

Despite the smallness of man against the backdrop of the vast universe, David recognized that mankind has an exalted status in the cosmos. He was created a “little lower than Elohim,” which can be translated either as God or angels. And he has been “crowned with glory and honor” by God Himself. Such is God’s view of the only creatures He made in His own image (Genesis 1.26).

David further reflected upon how man’s exalted status is demonstrated in the authority and responsibilities entrusted to him by God:

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen –
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.

It is on the basis of this dominion mandate that human beings have explored the world, extracted its resources, and applied accumulated knowledge such that the marvel of space travel has been achieved. Contrary to Shatner’s despairing conclusion, the Bible declares that we are not nothing but are, in fact, the pinnacle of creation exercising vicegerency over it in submission to God. It is because this planet is the good creation of God that extinction of life on earth is a tragedy. The Christian worldview provides a foundation for ecological concern that is not available to one who holds a materialistic/naturalistic worldview. To use the phraseology of apologist Cornelius Van Til, Shatner must borrow Christian capital to reach his conclusion. His own worldview is internally inconsistent.

King David, on the other hand, had a consistent worldview that undergirds the value of human exploration and ecological concern. And while seeing the value of man and his created environment, this worldview also looks beyond man to give credit where credit is due. Rather than ending in despair, David concludes his psalm on a note of praise:

O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!