B
buffalo
Guest
Sincef God is love and He radiates His love it would certainly make sense the radius of love grows bigger.Atheists argue that humans are too insignificant in the context of the entire universe, a purported insignificance related to their size as compared to the vastness of the universe. So how can believers be so parochial to think that there might be a God who cares about us, and given the insignificance of humans, how can we even start to believe that our existence is on purpose? Does it not all point to a pointless, godless universe?
There are several issues here:
In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear about that (paragraph 293):
- Not just atheists, also believers have wondered about the significance of man in the grand scheme of things. Already the psalmist in the Bible exclaimed “When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Does that seem parochial to you? I don’t think so.
- How can believers claim the universe was made just for us? Well, I don’t and there are probably few religions that do. I have never heard the Catholic religion claim that the entire universe was exclusively made for humans (perhaps some fundamentalist Christians do).
“Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.” St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and communicate it”, for God has no other reason to create than his love and goodness.”
What would show the glory of God better, a vast universe or a small one? Rather than to claim that God created the universe for humans, it would thus probably be more accurate to say that God created the universe with humans in mind.
"It turns out that the very age and vastness of the universe may have an ‘anthropic’ significance. Life emerged in our universe in a way that required great stretches of time. As we have seen, most of the elements needed for life were made deep in stars. Those stars had to explode to disperse those elements and make them available before life could even begin to evolve. That whole process alone required billions of years. The evolution of human life from those elements required billions of years more. Thus, the briefness of human life spans and even of human history compared with the age of the universe may simply be a matter of physical necessity, given the developmental way that God seems to prefer to work. It takes longer for a tree to grow to maturity than the fruit of the tree lasts. It took much longer for the universe to grow to maturity than we last.
- Does it make any difference for the value of human life how large humans are? The pursuit and attainment of happiness, knowledge and an intellectually fulfilled life, moral virtues, love, interpersonal relations, beauty in art and nature, adventure in life, creativity, fulfillment of our positive capacities, needs, desires, interests and purposes – is all this dependent on our physical size? Would all this be diminished if we were 100 times smaller than we are? I don’t think so. Yes, we might not be able to play guitar or piano, but this holds just as much if we were 100 times larger than we actually are. Would our lives be any more significant or valuable if each us were the size of Jupiter? Hardly. It is just that we would not have any air to breathe or anything to eat, and we would collapse into undifferentiated mush under our own gravity (in the core of Jupiter, hydrogen is crushed by gravity into a high-pressure metal-like state). We are apparently just the right size for what we are by nature.
- If humans cannot get so much larger, how about a smaller universe to “raise our significance”? It turns out that this does not work according to physics. As physicist Stephen Barr writes in his essay on Anthropic Coincidences about age and size of the universe:
“Physics can also suggest why the universe has to be so large. The laws of gravity discovered by Einstein relate the size of the universe directly to its age. The fact that the universe is many billions of light-years across is related to the fact that it has lasted several billions of years. Perhaps we would be less daunted by a cozy little universe the size, say, of a continent. But such a universe would have lasted only a few milliseconds. Even a universe the size of the solar system would have lasted only a few hours. A universe constructed in such a way as to evolve life may well have had to extend widely in space as well as in time. It may well be that the frightening expanses that are so often said to be a sign of human insignificance may actually, like so many other features of our strange universe, point to man, as they also proclaim the glory of God.” (End quote)
Thus, neither can humans be much larger than they are, nor can the universe be much smaller than it is, given the developmental manner in which it was created. Rational analysis shows that the argument for the insignificance of humans based on size, in relation to the sheer vastness of the universe, is merely an emotional argument.
The famous astrophysicist Martin Rees makes a more rational argument in an interview, when asked if he does not feel an infinitely tiny speck of no significance:
“I don’t because the earth, though small in the cosmos may still be a most important part of it. It may be the only place where there’s life like us. And so what makes things fascinating is how complicated they are and not how big they are. And for all we know the earth, tiny though it is, could be the centre of the cosmos in terms of complexity.”