What Do We Make of God's Inhospitable Creation?
Photo by Vitalis Hirschmann on Unsplash
A Universe Made for Us
I love to look for ways the creation points to the creator. God made everything for His glory, and each thing has its own way of glorifying Him (even cockroaches, I suppose), if we have eyes to see it.
One way to see God's providential hand in creation is to consider the Fine-tuning Argument: When you add up all the properties of the universe that must be exactly what they are for humans to exist, you see that it is astronomically unlikely that everything came together this way by chance, and it seems inescapable that someone made this universe with us in mind from the very beginning. Some of these properties include:
• The strengths of the physical forces, such as gravity;
• the chemical composition of the universe, and the Earth itself;
• the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun and the other planets;
• physical properties of the Earth, such as its size, tilt, rotation, core, and moon;
• the existence of chocolate (I suppose we could live without it, but I wouldn’t want to);
• and many other properties that must be what they are, within incredibly small tolerances, for us to exist.
Fine-tuning is a fascinating way to think of how God prepared a place for mankind here on Earth, much as He’s now preparing a place for believers in His eternal kingdom (the New Earth). He is in control, and He controls things for our good.
Where We Can’t Go
Even with all of those design elements, the universe can feel less than tailor-made when we remember that there are a lot of places in God’s creation we can’t go and never will. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is utterly inhospitable to human life, and we would die in spectacular ways if we ever found ourselves anywhere but where we are.
Consider the idea of putting humans on the surface of Mars, the only non-Earth planet we have any chance of visiting in person. Despite Elon Musk’s optimism, there are many obstacles to overcome when considering a trip to Mars, and some doubt we’ll see people walking on the Red Planet within the next century. We have to consider: deadly space radiation, the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body, the fact that we can’t bring enough food to sustain life, and our current inability to transport sufficient fuel to land and take off again (all this in addition to the utter lack of Martian Starbucks). These aren’t small problems, and while I think it would be amazing to have a “Neil Armstrong moment” in my lifetime, I know the odds aren’t great.
Consider even our own planet. It takes incredible amounts of time, money, and effort to reach the deeper parts of the ocean, and even then only one or a few people can go at a time (in a heavily fortified submarine). There are many places like that on Earth where we just cannot go - into volcanos, very high into our atmosphere, to the poles (most of the year), very deep into the Earth’s crust (and certainly not into the mantle). This is our home planet, and even here there are many places we cannot survive. The biosphere is an incredibly thin layer where humans can actually exist.
Earth is only one planet out of billions of planets orbiting billions of stars in billions of galaxies. If extraterrestrials don’t exist, 99.99999% of the cosmos is uninhabited, and, as far as we can tell, always will be. It seems a little wasteful, or it would be if God were capable of waste (waste implies limited resources, and God is not limited).
The Creation that Teaches and Inspires
Of course, all of this empty cosmos might be inhabited by invisible angels, or microscopic civilizations, or little green men. Or perhaps we’ll be able to explore this space when Jesus comes back to redeem and restore creation and make all things new.
But even if none of those possibilities are true, I still believe the cosmos reveals and glorifies the creator to us humans here on Earth. The vast majority of God’s creation is utterly inhospitable to the human body, but none of it is inhospitable to the human imagination. Even if I never visit Mars or the planets of the Andromeda Galaxy or Tatooine or whatever’s out there, I can be awed and inspired by them, and learn things about my creator through studying them.
The vastness of the universe teaches us that God is all-powerful. The regularity of the universe teach us that He is an orderly and sensible being. And the beauty of it all teaches us that He is an artist, which is a profound thing to say about the personal power behind the universe.
The tools developed by science - from telescopes, probes, rockets, and other technology that allow us to explore the cosmos; to submarines and robots that allow us to explore the depths of the oceans; to tools and technologies that take us into volcanoes and below the crust of the planet - have given us the ability to explore with our minds and emotions the places that would destroy our actual heads and hearts. God has blessed us with the gift of imagination, and we can use it to explore real places that are more fantastic than anything in the movies (except nature documentaries).
What it Means to Explore
With these incredible tools and inventions, we can explore places that are, in a material way, totally inhospitable to us. Our imaginations can go wherever we send them; we need only knowledge and vision, and the curiosity to explore. It’s great to send humans rocketing off through the cosmos, and if we do, I’ll be glued to the news as much as anybody. But if our tools can take us there in other ways, perhaps we can consider ourselves explorers even if we never leave the ground.
I don’t ever plan on visiting the Mariana Trench (in the ocean) or the Sea of Tranquility (on the moon). But I feel like I’ve been to those places because of brave men and women who have either gone there themselves or created the technology to take humanity where humanity cannot go.
Not a molecule of God’s creation is wasted. It all gives Him glory, and the little tiny sliver of it that we can see and understand at this point in history is just a glimpse of the wonder we’ll experience in the Kingdom of the Creator for all of eternity. We will never tire of seeing what God can do, and He will never tire of wowing us with His creative power (because He never tires). So let’s explore the universe God made - with our bodies where we can, and with our imaginations everywhere else.