Black Holes

Someone recently posed a question about blackholes and just after writing them on it AiG released this article, go figure. It, and many other astronomical phenomena, are truly amazing and sometimes terrifying. Black holes certianly fall into both categories, but what do we know and what should a Christian think of these monstors?

What we know is that up in the vast expance are many distortions and dark spots which we call black holes. We are lead to believe that these "black holes" are a consequence of the death of stars and their eventual compaction under their own enormous weight. Eventually, as the star "dies", it is unable to maintain a resistance to it's own gravity and so the mass of the star begins to colaps inward to the center where it is compacted and becomes very dense, creating what is called a singularity which acts as a kind of gravity well. (See Image) This is about the extent of what we can pretent to know for sure however, because each black hole has what is called an event horizon. This is a radius that, once inside, nothing can ever come back out; not even light, hense we cannot see inside of the "black hole".
A Christian Perspective:

Black holes are not directly mentioned in scripture and so we can't use a direct scriptural insight in that way, at least to my knowledge. We can however apply the biblical history to interpret the idea or reality of such black holes. Does the idea of a black hole fit Gods perfect creation? No, but it does fit a "fallen" creation in the same way disease, death, and pain fit a fallen creation and that does fit a Christian worldview. We are talking about a dead star, which is then caught in the grip of its own gravity. So, we know that they fit the idea of the fall which is accounted in the word of God. A fallen creation would produce a myriad of degrading processes from genetic mutations to dying stars which generate these proposed black holes.

Truly, a black hole is a frightening concept and yet is not hard to believe within a Christian worldview where God has removed His sustaining power and things are in a constant state of decay, fitting a biblical view perfectly.