God, 100Billion Galaxys and our tiny little earth?

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Aaron780

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I think about this a lot, ive studied astronomy quite a bit and in the grand scheme of things we are very very insignificant, we all think in this tiny bubble of ours we call earth that our lives are pretty important but in reality we are a spec of dust floating through the air or a grain of sand in an endless ocean, as soon as our sun dies our solar system will end and will go totally unnoticed, take our own galaxy for example, its 100,000 light years across, which is mind blowing considering there are over 100billion galaxy’s out there that we know of, now scientists believe there are ( in our milky way galaxy alone) possibly over 100,000 civilizations in our own backyard, its just space is so huge and distances so massive that we cant communicate with them, now think of the other 100billion galaxy’s out there and of all the planets and possible civilizations inside these, its hard to get your head around isn’t it? even more so if we start talking about multiverses, many different dimensions than our own reality, things that are beyond human understanding.

What im getting at hear is this, God must be a busy man and Heaven and Hell must be a massive place, because there isn’t just us! I sometimes wonder if there is a Jesus story being played out on other planets as well? this is deep I know buts its scary when you think about all this, there is so much more going on here, I sometimes question my own faith when I think about this stuff, now I believe there IS a God, for all this just to be here with nothing behind it would be even more astonishing, Does anyone else ever think about this? or is it just me? the universe is just so huge and massive I just cant get my head around it, it can send you crazy the more you look into it because there doesn’t seem to be an end…
 
The immensity (size) and depth (time) of the universe is something that has deepened my fascination with God, not the other way around.

Although either way, when you think about it, this question can be turned around on itself depending on how you choose to look at it. The universe is (by our standards) enormous, therefore some people claim it’s silly that God would create it so large and yet make so much of it uninhabitable. Vice versa, let’s pretend that the universe was only the size of planet Earth. If that were the case, you would then have people claim that it’s silly that an omnipotent God would make a universe that is so tiny. So either way, they’re inserting their own expectations into something to draw a conclusion that suits them.

By the way, the Church doesn’t condemn the idea of there being other creatures in the universe, or even other creatures with souls of reasons. It has already said that could be the case.
 
Aaron780 said:
I think about this a lot, ive studied astronomy quite a bit and in the grand scheme of things we are very very insignificant, we all think in this tiny bubble of ours we call earth that our lives are pretty important but in reality we are a spec of dust floating through the air or a grain of sand in an endless ocean,…]
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I am important to my friends, family, and loved ones. Likewise they are important to me. That’s pretty immutable to us with respect to the scale of the universe. I’m sure you are also important to other people and those people are important to you. Does the scale of the universe impact that relationship that you have with each other?
 
TK421 said:
The immensity (size) and depth (time) of the universe is something that has deepened my fascination with God, not the other way around.
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This is exactly what has happened with my faith. It’s incredible to think that God created all that we know and see, but then to realize that He created a Universe more expansive than the human mind is capable of comprehending strengthens my faith even more. And to think that we are now starting to theorize that there are multiple, maybe even infinite, universes. Wow, what an Awesome God!!!
 
I’ll believe in those other beings, etc. when I see them; in the meantime my own life is engrossing enough.

God has a propensity, in any case, to prefer places and folks that are humanly insignificant.

He bypassed mighty Egypt and its Pharaoh to give His covenant to a crowd of escaped slaves.

He chose a minor city in a sliver of forgotten square mileage between the empires of Egypt and Babylon to be the site of His physical presence, the Holy Temple.

When His son needed a human life, He was not sent to be Roman emperor, but a physical worker in an unknown town in a remote corner of a tiny province at the utmost toe tip of the known world!

So, I’d say that the relative insignificance of our world relative to the astronomical cosmos does not matter all that much.

ICXC NIKA
 
I’m sure many people think along those same line…it’s not scary to me…it just shows how great a God we worship that we are part of his infinite creation…and that through his great love he sent us his son so that through him one day we will know and witness his creation …just think that we may spend eternity being able to see galaxies…stars and worlds being formed… life being created…civilizations rising…being able to be there and comprehend the glory of God as he creates all things through his omnipotent design…no wonder we will sing his praises for all eternity.
 
You’re talking values. The size of the universe is greater than x. Why is this value such an important one to you? What about other values, the speed of light is a very “big” number and is a constant very important in science, the value C in E=mC^2 and the Max Planck value is a very small value that is an important constant it is the distance of minimal measurement the very foundation of quantum mechanics, but we would say it is a very small number. So now should the small number be valued more greatly than the large number? No we can value all things large and small. The size of the world compaired to the whole universe is not an importance relationship.
 
I guess the obvious question is, how small would the universe have to be to make us “significant”?

God is a profligate creator and a profligate artist. He has no budget, no deadlines. He could just as easily have created 100 billion billion billion billion galaxies as 100 billion.

As others mention, one can look at the vastness of the universe and feel closer to God. I often think that God has designed a universe which holds nearly infinite revelations for us. Every time we get cocky and think we’ve figured it all out (and thus don’t need God), he lets us peel back another layer of the onion and discover new and unimagined wonders and beauties. Then the process repeats itself, again and again. There seems to be no end to the wonders that God has built into his creation. How amazing that the universe could be so ordered that we can know so much about it, and at the same time be so complex and inexplicable. And how amazing that we, who supposedly evolved to survive on the African veldt, have the capacity to understand into sub-atomic depths and cosmic breadths and back in time to the first billionths of billionths of seconds of existence.
 
The size of the universe should not make us think of ourselves as insignificant. In a real sense , the universe is more insignificant than we are, as Blaise Pascal put it in Pensees.

“Man is a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed…. Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows he dies; and he knows the advantage the universe has over him…. All our dignity, then, resides in thought.”

Indeed, if man should perish, and if life comparable to ours should perish on every planet, what dignity would be left anywhere in these vast galaxies?
 
Well that is largely true. Something I’ve heard several times from atheists is how absurd it sounds to them that a god would be deeply interested in human affairs (as Dawkins put it: a god that cares about where you stick your genitalia). But then why wouldn’t he? What makes untold billions of galaxies somehow more grand than a single human being saying a prayer?

Still, God created the universe to be the way that it is, so we can reflect that He intended to make it unbelievably vast by our perceptions. In looking at the stars there is a lesson to be learned, both in humility and in awe. When we offend God, we are offending the one who commanded those untold billions of galaxies into existence and sustains them.
 
Aaron780 said:
I think about this a lot, ive studied astronomy quite a bit and in the grand scheme of things we are very very insignificant, we all think in this tiny bubble of ours we call earth that our lives are pretty important but in reality we are a spec of dust floating through the air or a grain of sand in an endless ocean, as soon as our sun dies our solar system will end and will go totally unnoticed, take our own galaxy for example, its 100,000 light years across, which is mind blowing considering there are over 100billion galaxy’s out there that we know of, now scientists believe there are ( in our milky way galaxy alone) possibly over 100,000 civilizations in our own backyard, its just space is so huge and distances so massive that we cant communicate with them, now think of the other 100billion galaxy’s out there and of all the planets and possible civilizations inside these, its hard to get your head around isn’t it? even more so if we start talking about multiverses, many different dimensions than our own reality, things that are beyond human understanding.

What im getting at hear is this, God must be a busy man and Heaven and Hell must be a massive place, because there isn’t just us! I sometimes wonder if there is a Jesus story being played out on other planets as well? this is deep I know buts its scary when you think about all this, there is so much more going on here, I sometimes question my own faith when I think about this stuff, now I believe there IS a God, for all this just to be here with nothing behind it would be even more astonishing, Does anyone else ever think about this? or is it just me? the universe is just so huge and massive I just cant get my head around it, it can send you crazy the more you look into it because there doesn’t seem to be an end…
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This is a topic that the Church has carefully avoided by saying that there is no proof that there is life beyond this planet (see catholic.com/quickquestions/whats-the-catholic-position-on-the-existence-of-extra-terrestrial-life), so why indulge in idle speculation? The truth is that they do not wish to confront the obvious - that life outside this planet is almost a certainty.

This leads to a question that is very disturbing for Christians in general and the Church in particular - if Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Man, is he also the Son of ET?

Jesus is divine as well as human, but is he also part person from Kepler-62f?

I personally believe that while the Son (capital S) is universal, Jesus is local to our planet. The other planets may or may not have their own Christ. As for Heaven and Hell that we talk about, they also maybe local to our planet. Though we are insignificant, we are no less important than the beings of any other planet.
 
openmind

**I personally believe that while the Son (capital S) is universal, Jesus is local to our planet. The other planets may or may not have their own Christ. As for Heaven and Hell that we talk about, they also maybe local to our planet. Though we are insignificant, we are no less important than the beings of any other planet. **

Life may be common throughout the universe.Or it may not. There is no evidence either way.

As to human life being common throughout the universe, no scientific evidence for that either.

All this is idle speculation … since the likelihood of even being in eventual contact with other human races, given the vastness of the galaxies, is almost certainly unlikely.
 
There is a verse that I don’t have time to hunt down about Jesus saying he has “other flocks”. The Mormons use it to say that He visited North America.

I don’t see planets with other sapient beings as any threats to the Church or its teaching. The Church doesn’t say anything because the Holy Spirit has no direction to give the Church at this time on that subject. Its not a pertinent matter. There are plenty of currently important issues to deal with for our tiny attentions.
 
Aaron780 said:
I think about this a lot, ive studied astronomy quite a bit and in the grand scheme of things we are very very insignificant, we all think in this tiny bubble of ours we call earth that our lives are pretty important but in reality we are a spec of dust floating through the air or a grain of sand in an endless ocean, as soon as our sun dies our solar system will end and will go totally unnoticed, take our own galaxy for example, its 100,000 light years across, which is mind blowing considering there are over 100billion galaxy’s out there that we know of, now scientists believe there are ( in our milky way galaxy alone) possibly over 100,000 civilizations in our own backyard, its just space is so huge and distances so massive that we cant communicate with them, now think of the other 100billion galaxy’s out there and of all the planets and possible civilizations inside these, its hard to get your head around isn’t it? even more so if we start talking about multiverses, many different dimensions than our own reality, things that are beyond human understanding.

What im getting at hear is this, God must be a busy man and Heaven and Hell must be a massive place, because there isn’t just us! I sometimes wonder if there is a Jesus story being played out on other planets as well? this is deep I know buts its scary when you think about all this, there is so much more going on here, I sometimes question my own faith when I think about this stuff, now I believe there IS a God, for all this just to be here with nothing behind it would be even more astonishing, Does anyone else ever think about this? or is it just me? the universe is just so huge and massive I just cant get my head around it, it can send you crazy the more you look into it because there doesn’t seem to be an end…
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It always reinforces my belief in God’s existence and His Grandure and His Magnificence. Think how great and good God is to give us all that beauty?

Linus2nd
 
Universe so vast, and yet perhaps to God every point is the center…
 
Why God created us the size we are compared to the rest of creation? Because it suited him. Why? We don’t know. It’s as simple as that.

Why we are the size we are has to do with the size of our planet and our place in the ecosystem, speaking strictly from the physical point of view. Most omnivores aren’t big, but medium-sized compared with herbivores, such as elephants, buffalo, or even deer. A buck is pretty big compared to us, after all. Most carnivores are smaller than their prey–it makes it easier for them to hunt, including us.

IOW, each living things fills a niche and the niche determines its size and purpose. It’s a living balance of such amazing refinement it awes me no end. I’m not so blown away by the size of galaxies or stars system I will never go to, but with the tiniest creatures not much bigger than the atoms that comprise their bodies, and yet they live, multiple, feed and do all the things other living things do.

All this speaks of Someone who had a grand plan in mind and who made it happen by no more than saying, “Let it be.” Wow! What more do we need to know other than this same Person loves us more than we can ever know or understand? 🙂
 
Aaron780 said:
I think about this a lot, ive studied astronomy quite a bit and in the grand scheme of things we are very very insignificant … What im getting at hear is this, God must be a busy man and Heaven and Hell must be a massive place, because there isn’t just us!.
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Excuse me for deleting most of the quote. I’ve only left what I see as most relevant.

First of all, the notion that we are insignificant specs in the greater universe around us is the common atheistic argument against theism–grounded on science and astronomy and cosmology.

Since you’ve studied astronomy you then know that it takes light time to travel from the galaxies that astronomers observe through their telescopes, to reach us.

The light that astronomers now see through their telescopes that they call the Andromeda galaxy (the one closest to us) had to travel through space for 70 million years to reach us. Astronomers see the Andromeda galaxy as it was this long ago; so how can we be sure this galaxy still exists? We cannot be sure that it still exists. All we can say is that it might still exist, but we cannot prove that it still exists.

Consider also, that if human beings only appeared on the Earth, according to the fossil record, over the last 4 or so million years, that the universe may have gone through changes as equally vast and seeping.

The universe may be far different than what our limited powers of observation would have us believe. Perhaps that universe that you and I think is our there is no longer out there. Perhaps God and the heaven he has created is what is really out there, but we cannot see this reality because the light from that new creation has not yet reached us.

Perhaps the whole universe has been wiped out of existence and perhaps it has been replaced with something completely different.

Also, if we are insignificant meaningless specks, then why did God send his son in the person of Christ to provide a witness to the Father? What was the purpose for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross?

Of course there are those who would mock this version of history, but I have accepted it, completely, despite not having been there to witness Christ’s crucifixion. I still believe Jesus bore witness to the Father, and I also think the creation that is really out there in the universe observed by astronomers is vastly different than what our common sense would have us blieve.
 
Revelation Chapter 21: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for he first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea …”

I should have added this to my post In response above.
 
God could have created a pocket universe for us, the size of a small continent or a small room. The fact that there is a universe of enormous size indicates that He wants us to learn more about it, to explore it, maybe even to meet other intelligences within it. The sheer size and variety of the universe could be necessary as a teaching tool.

Think about a solar eclipse. The size of the moon and the size of the sun and the relative distances between the sun and the earth have to be just as they are (and our atmosphere has to be clear enough, and we have to have eyes that perceive the right band or radiation in the EM spectrum, and our brains have to be built to process the information, and we have to be able to build on the body of knowledge preserved and taught in the university system that the Church created) to experience a solar eclipse, with the moon perfectly obscuring the sun with just the corona of the sun visible. Because of this, scientists were able to discover the composition of our sun (by examining the corona through a prism to see its spectrum) and to prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, by examining the position of stars that are visible near the sun during an eclipse - showing the gravitational field of the sun can bend the light waves passing near it. There is no other planet or satellite in our system that can experience a solar eclipse as we can, nor do we yet know of any planet in the universe that has such a fortunate set-up. God’s universe teaches us, and the more we learn about His creation, the better our lives are. St. Athanasius told us that.

Regarding the Incarnation and whether it occur on other planets for other peoples (a persistent issue in science fiction, in short stories such as Ray Bradbury’s “The Man” and Gene Wolfe’s “Le Befana,” or the 1950s sci-fi film “Red Planet Mars.”), I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., at the Vatican Observatory explained the issue as well as we can:
God created the whole universe. There’s nothing that makes one place more special than another. Religious people have been able to think in these “cosmic” terms all along, and happily speculated about “other worlds” long before the science fiction crowd had adopted the concept.
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But there is one crucial question that will face Christianity if, or when, extraterrestrial intelligence is discovered. That’s the question about what the Incarnation means to other species. In other words, would aliens need to have their own version of Jesus?
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Do aliens need to be saved? Depends on if they are subject to “original sin” or not. The traditional theology of original sin, tracing it back to the origins of the human race, say absolutely nothing about other entities, either way. Once we find other intelligences, we’ll be in a better position to expand that theology.
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Assuming that original sin, the problem of evil, does face other intelligences, what role does Christian salvation play in their worlds?
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St. Paul’s hymns in Colossians I and Ephesians I make it clear that the resurrection of Christ applies to all creation (“…everything in the heavens and everything on earth.”) It is the definitive salvation event for the cosmos. Another bit of biblical evidence is the opening of John’s Gospel, who tells us that The Word (which is to say, the Incarnation of God) was present from the Beginning; it is part and parcel of the woof and weave of the Universe.
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Just how this “Word” might be “spoken” to the rest of the intelligent universe, I don’t know. But it will be in “words” (that is, events) appropriate to those beings. In any event, good extraterrestrials (ETs), just like good humans, do not need to know about Christ tofor salvation; that’s the tradition of “baptism by desire.”
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The point here is that, even though the life of Jesus occurred at a specific space-time point, on a particular world line (to put it in general relativity terms), it was also an event that John’s Gospel describes as occurring in the beginning - the one point that is simultaneous in all world lines, and so present in all time and all space. Thus, there can only be one Incarnation - through various ET civilizations may or may not be have experienced that Incarnation in the same way that Earth did.
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From “Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist” - Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., New York: McGraw-Hill (2000)
 
As C.S.Lewis points out in discussing this same point, if size determines the relative value of something, as in our small planet vs the universe, then it follows that tall people are more valuable than short people. And we do act this way, in that we abort tiny people, which we wouldn’t do if they were six feet tall and able to communicate with us.
But most people would say that size does not determine value.
 
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