Why is the Universe so vast?

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To answer the question in your title:

It’s to remind us that God is God, and we are not.
 
copeland45 said:
What if there is another God with a different “image” who created a different life-form in his “image” on another planet? Presumably these other types of beings – whatever they are – would have their own “bible” and believe that their God is the only God.
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If we assume the christian God is the only God in the universe, would other lifeforms he created look like us ?
 
Back to the title question, and assuming creation of the universe by one Creator (the Genesis account), I see two possible reasons:
  1. God created multiple intelligent races on various planets, and he wanted enough space between them so that they wouldn’t contact each other; or,
  2. He wanted us to look up and say, “Wow!”
 
I’ve clarified my premises thanks to all the responses.

I’ve concluded that:
  1. There could be other intelligent life in the Universe, but if there is, in its highest form it would have to be like us since we are created in the image of THE GOD, the single creator of the Universe (the Abrahamic God).
  2. Whether or not God has decided to put humans on other planets is immaterial to the fundamental truths of Genesis.
  3. The Universe is so vast because God willed that we should marvel at his creation.
  4. The Church addresses this by stating that God is the origin and end of the Universe. This implies no other Gods possible.
 
ricmat said:
To answer the question in your title:

It’s to remind us that God is God, and we are not.
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Oh, my. May need to borrow that as a signature.👍
Robertanthony said:
I tend to think that if God had created other beings like us humans (with a soul, in the image of God etc.) that there would have been some kind of mention of it at some point in the OT or the NT. The universe is mentioned, man is mentioned, angels are mentioned. Anyhow, the universe is far too huge, we’ll never be able to know if there is a colony of humans living 5 billion light years from our galaxy. I don’t rule out the possibility absolutely, but I think people who think we came by chance, that we are the results of a million random occurrences, that we are here because the perfect conditions for life just so happen to exist here, not because God engineered those conditions so that life could flourish, these people are more likely to think it highly likely that we aren’t alone in the universe, and that it would be presumptuous or arrogant to think so. If the universe is indeed a testament to God’s glory, Heaven will be awesome!
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Which is why I’d like to think that there’s a wee bit of Heaven here. Just a wee bit. Difficult to see that at times, I know, but…
DaveBj said:
Back to the title question, and assuming creation of the universe by one Creator (the Genesis account), I see two possible reasons:
  1. God created multiple intelligent races on various planets, and he wanted enough space between them so that they wouldn’t contact each other; or,
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😛
DaveBj said:
  1. He wanted us to look up and say, “Wow!”
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Can’t tell you how often I do that and simply say, "Thank you, God. :thankyou:
 
copeland45 said:
The physical universe is practically non-ending and ever-expanding. We can’t even see a fraction of the galaxies that exist for millions and millions of miles.This leads me to ask several questions:
  1. In a universe so large, is it naive to think that Earth is the only planet with life?
  2. Is it required, theologically, to believe that Earth is the only planet with life?
  3. Could the God of our Faith be the same God for another people on another planet with a different faith?
  4. Could there be multiple Gods in the Universe: one for our World (God of Abraham) and others for other worlds?
  5. Has the Bible addressed these issues? If so, what does it say?
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Because y’all is small
God saw everything and said good

God bless
 
copeland45 said:
I’ve clarified my premises thanks to all the responses.

I’ve concluded that:
  1. There could be other intelligent life in the Universe,
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Only if God decided that He would give that life a rational soul. But the probability of life out there is very high, imo. Lots of microbial life, yet higher life forms would need much more sheltered conditions, like on our Earth, and that would be much rarer.
but if there is, in its highest form it would have to be like us since we are created in the image of THE GOD, the single creator of the Universe (the Abrahamic God).
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Be like us in the sense of having a rational soul, but not necessarily “look like us”. As the scholastic philosophers said, man is a ‘rational animal’ – the animal part could be anything that could unite with a rational soul. They could look like dinosaurs, for what it’s worth. Or like little green men after all.
 
Fomalhaut said:
About other lifeforms, God created Adam and Eve in his image, so should we expect him to do the same everywhere else and populate the universe with humans ? Is “image” a very loose concept in this context ?
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I guess I just addressed your point.
 
raikou said:
Why is the universe so vast?
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As you say, it is made for the glory of God. Yet there may also be a physical necessity.
As physicist Stephen Barr writes in his essay on Anthropic Coincidences *) about age and size of the universe:

"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.

“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.”
*) firstthings.com/article/2007/01/anthropic-coincidences-40
 
First of all there is no clue whether there is life anywhere in the universe. If there is life anywhere else it does not go against the Christian faith. The theory of multiple universes is merely a science fiction or speculation - not a theory at all. The universe is indeed vast and so vast is the greatness of our God. Even if there are are multiple universes it is impossible to have more than one God, because if there is two gods, one of them has to be imperfect because it lacks in itself the other( for they are distinct) It will go against the very concept of God.
 
Fomalhaut said:
There is a very interesting thread about the Big Bang theory: Does the Big Bang Suggest a Creator God? Maybe you should discuss the matter there.

About other lifeforms, God created Adam and Eve in his image, so should we expect him to do the same everywhere else and populate the universe with humans ? Is “image” a very loose concept in this context ?
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Brother Leo (on EWTN) said if there was a Big Bang, there would need to be someone available to put it all back together!🙂 Only God could do that.
 
Al_Moritz said:
As you say, it is made for the glory of God. Yet there may also be a physical necessity.
As physicist Stephen Barr writes in his essay on Anthropic Coincidences *) about age and size of the universe:

"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.

“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.”
*) firstthings.com/article/2007/01/anthropic-coincidences-40
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Well, okay, that is coherent. However the universe is not just huge, it is (relatively) filled with stuff. Creating the milky way alone wouldn’t impact the development of life. We don’t need other galaxies, there are already 10^11 stars in ours (100000000000). So why create 100 BILLIONS of galaxies ? We are mind boggingly insignificant. Scaled to the universe, mankind is a microscopic and ephemerous twirl of water in an entire ocean.
 
Fomalhaut said:
Well, okay, that is coherent. However the universe is not just huge, it is (relatively) filled with stuff. Creating the milky way alone wouldn’t impact the development of life. We don’t need other galaxies, there are already 10^11 stars in ours (100000000000). So why create 100 BILLIONS of galaxies ? We are mind boggingly insignificant. Scaled to the universe, mankind is a microscopic and ephemerous twirl of water in an entire ocean.
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Again, this has to do with gravity. There had to be a rather uniform mass distribution in the universe, but also slight fluctuations in that mass distribution (about 1 part in 100,000) *) in order to allow for gravity to do its work and pull matter together into clumps, ultimately resulting in stars, galaxies, planets and people. Without so much ‘stuff’ in the universe all this would not have happened.
*) had it been more than 1 part in 100,000, matter would have coalesced into superclusters with lots of black holes, making life impossible, had it been less, we would have just thin gas clouds spread throughout the universe, but no stars, and thus no life either.
 
Al_Moritz said:
Huh?
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Brother Leo is one of the priests who appears on EWTN and he was interviewed on a recent episode of EWTN BOOKMARK. He commented that if and when the BIG BANG occurred God would have been needed to put all the pieces back together. ( If you have ever witnessed an explosion, it creates lots of debris and to put it all back together would take a miracle)
 
LegoGE1947 said:
Brother Leo is one of the priests who appears on EWTN and he was interviewed on a recent episode of EWTN BOOKMARK. He commented that if and when the BIG BANG occurred God would have been needed to put all the pieces back together. ( If you have ever witnessed an explosion, it creates lots of debris and to put it all back together would take a miracle)
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I just explained the phenomenon in my last post.
 
Al_Moritz said:
Again, this has to do with gravity. There had to be a rather uniform mass distribution in the universe, but also slight fluctuations in that mass distribution (about 1 part in 100,000) *) in order to allow for gravity to do its work and pull matter together into clumps, ultimately resulting in stars, galaxies, planets and people. Without so much ‘stuff’ in the universe all this would not have happened.

*) had it been more than 1 part in 100,000, matter would have coalesced into superclusters with lots of black holes, making life impossible, had it been less, we would have no stars, and thus no life either.
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Do you have a link to a paper for that ? I remember reading about an early universe simulation, matter distribution wasn’t that much strict.
Brother Leo is one of the priests who appears on EWTN and he was interviewed on a recent episode of EWTN BOOKMARK. He commented that if and when the BIG BANG occurred God would have been needed to put all the pieces back together. ( If you have ever witnessed an explosion, it creates lots of debris and to put it all back together would take a miracle)
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You clearly have a misunderstanding of what the Big Bang is. First, it is not, absolutely not, an explosion; And “the pieces” of the world are not getting “back together” after it. In fact entropy has been increasing ever since: less and less order, more and more chaos.
 
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