Are We Insignificant Specks?
Photo by David Huang on Unsplash
I don’t know if you’ve ever considered walking to the moon, but there are three things you’ll need if you do: some antigravity boots, a decent spacesuit, and a lot of time. It’s 239,000 miles away. It’s easy to forget that fact whenever the moon is full and bright and looks so close you could just reach out and touch it. And of course, the moon is the closest thing to us, as far as bodies in space. The Sun – which is one million times the size of Earth – is 93 million miles away. Thank God it is that far, or we would be either on fire or frozen.
Neptune, the furthest planet (sorry, Pluto!) is about 2.8 billion miles from the Sun and beyond that are the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, which means our cozy little solar system is billions and billions of miles across.
And there are several stars – as in, at least a hundred billion – in our galaxy (which is called the Milky Way, in honor of a delicious candy bar). To imagine the scale, if our entire solar system were the size of a quarter, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States. Our galaxy is shaped like a spiral with several arms, and our Sun is just one tiny speck on an outer arm.
The Milky Way, which would take 100,000 years to cross even at the speed of light (assuming you don’t have Warp Drive, of course), is only one out of hundreds of billions of galaxies. With tools like the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, scientists at NASA have discovered that there are untold billions of stars and planets in the universe. (All these statistics are from the NASA.gov website, except the stuff about candy bars and warp drive.)
In other words, the universe is huge. Too huge for our little brains to even begin to comprehend; the numbers and distances just aren’t close to anything in our experience. Atheists like to refer to these numbers because they are supposed to show how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things; each of us is only one out of eight billion of our species, out of many species, on one planet out of many planets, in one solar system out of many, in one galaxy out of many, in an enormous universe. How much can you or I possibly matter?
Perhaps you’ve heard this quote from Carl Sagan:
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” (Cosmos, Episode 7, 1980)
And that seems to make sense. The whole planet we live on is but a particle of dust in the grand scheme of things. We are Dr. Seuss’s Whos, and Earth is our speck.
But G. K. Chesterton, writing long before Sagan, wrote:
“Herbert Spencer…popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to overawe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.” (Orthodoxy, 1908)
In our everyday thinking, we don’t judge the value of things based on their size: I’m not a little more valuable than Scarlett Johansson and a little less meaningful than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. We don’t consider a five-carat diamond to be worthless next to a Kia Sorento. So why are we tempted to think, once we get to a certain scale, that size must correspond with value?
We could just as easily consider the enormity of the universe to be evidence for the extravagant creativity of God. We don’t have to be at the center of it, or the biggest part of it, because He is at the center (and everywhere else) and is big enough for all of us.
God is all-powerful, so it’s not as though He had to exhaust Himself to make the universe gigantic; worlds appear when He simply speaks. When you consider that the vast majority of people who ever lived had no idea that the universe is so large (and most people even today don’t understand it), it’s actually romantic to think that God could have created the splendor of a billion galaxies just to produce awe and wonder in the hearts of the handful of people who know this stuff.
And even if the universe doesn’t (actually or metaphorically) revolve around the Earth, who knows what other reasons God might have for making things billions of miles away from the nearest human? Perhaps He simply loves to create – He’s pretty good at it, and it surely brings Him joy. Or perhaps He wanted to delight the angels. We know that He cares about our happiness, so I’m sure He cares about theirs too. What matters is that we are justified to consider the vastness of the universe not as proof that we are unimportant, but as evidence of the creative power of its maker.
King David, writing a little before either Sagan or Chesterton, wrote,
“The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
Psalm 19:1 ESV
This is an important verse for astronomers, anyone who owns a telescope, anyone who likes to look at the night sky, or anyone who has noticed that the Sun shines. The stars were not an accident – not a single one. They declare God’s glory, and the more of the heavens we discover, there more the glory of God is declared to us. Astronomy is godly work (Astrology, not so much).
If the universe is huge beyond comparison, and the God who is powerful enough to make it is on our side, what do we have to fear? Do we really think anyone or anything can thwart the will of such a being? The fact that the universe is huge does not mean that we are insignificant specks. It means that God is bigger than we imagine. He made us in His image because He has a special place for us in creation, and He has given us minds and tools to see a sliver of the glories of what He’s made. Supernovas are the handiwork of God, and so are you.
Rather than lead us toward despair, the awe-inducing size of the universe should inspire us to worship the creator. The one who made all this stuff endowed us with brains to comprehend some of it – each of us to different degrees, according to God’s wisdom.
You or I might not see a nebula or a black hole with our own eyes in this lifetime, but we’ve been blessed with imaginations to picture God’s unseen wonders, and with photographs from telescopes to see the beauty of outer space. It was scientists’ God-given curiosity that drove them (and now us) to understand as much as we do. God is showing us things about Himself.
As great as Sagan’s vision was, he really could not see past the end of his telescope. And as tremendous as Chesterton’s intellect was, he was a tiny match next to the blazing sun of the all-knowing God. When we catch even a glimpse of God’s enormity and power, all of our problems and worries feel miniscule. We feel pretty small, too. But that’s okay because we know the Gospel story: This big, big God loves His little creatures enough to sacrifice Himself on our behalf. We are specks, but we are far from insignificant to Him.