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Sunshine to Go

It's easy to overlook the original source of energy when we flick on a light switch. Electricity is really bottled sunshine! Although our household electricity may come from a coal fired generator, the source of the energy is still the sun. Coal, and other fossil hydrocarbons like natural gas and oil, form from the remains of plants and trees, which once grew by capturing the energy of the sun. This stored energy can then be converted and released for our use in the form of electricity.

Few of us think about what is required to keep our electric lights shining constantly. If the electricity that lights your home comes from a coal fired power station, then a single 100 watt bulb shining for a whole year requires the burning of some 320 kilograms of coal. So leaving one light on day and night for a year is really like burning a substantial pile of coal!

Besides producing electricity, the burning of coal unfortunately creates significant pollutants as well. These include gases like: sulphur and nitrogen oxide, which cause acid rain and smog; and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas suspected of causing global warming.

So next time you switch on a light, think of all that has gone into bottling that sunshine. Remember too, that although you can't see the pollutants, they’re still out there!

Light is one of those things that is so fundamental that it’s a little hard to pin down. Scientists still discuss some of the properties of light which lead them to think of it in significantly different ways. For everyday purposes, we’re less concerned with the nature of light and more interested in whether or not we have enough.

Photographers pay a great deal of attention to light. The best painters us it in stunning ways to edit the content of their work – drawing our attention to the things they want us to notice. But most of us usually don’t think of light in terms other than something we need in order to see. As we grow older we notice that we need more light to see the details we once observed casually, but our interest in light doesn’t go much beyond that.

Light is almost mystical in its power as it supplies the energy for life on the planet. There is a host of ways, which have nothing to do with vision, in which we depend on light every day. Light from the sun is ultimately behind the food we eat. It’s the source of power for the vehicles we use for transportation. It keeps us warm in winter. It powers the water cycle which provides us with fresh water. Moment to moment, we use light, in both its direct energy and stored material forms, everyday.

When we think about energy on planet Earth, we trace it all back to the sun in one way or another. We see the sun as the source. But, of course, the sun is only able to produce the energy that gives life to this planet because it is busy releasing that energy stored in vast quantities of gases that comprise it.

The search for the origin of all matter and all energy might seem to be a chicken and egg hunt. But obviously it had to start somewhere with something. That “somewhere” was not a place and that “something” was not matter. The energy at work in the universe is not the random raw power we might expect from an accidental explosion. It is focussed and purposeful. That is why we believe that an Intelligent Designer and Creator, spirit in nature, stands behind the material universe.

Among the many things the Bible tells us about God is that God is light. That is a spiritual statement. We’ve already seen that the light of the sun is the source of energy for our planet. It should not surprise us that the God who is light is the one who created and maintains the cosmos. Only an intelligent being of unlimited power could set the universe hurtling through space with such order and precision.

David Humphreys and Ron Hughes