Scale of the universe makes belief in God look very small

I'm not religious.

But if I were ever to embrace a religion, I'd want it to be a modern one. A scientific one. Meaning, a religion that seeks to explain whatever might lie beyond the physical universe without denying the reality of what does indisputably exist.

The dogmas of every major world religion, though, date from prescientific times. Back then, most people believed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. The Sun and stars orbited around our planet.

We humans were special.

Both in terms of our relation to the rest of the universe, and of our relation with God. God had created the universe with us Homo sapiens singled out to be "the top of creation." Oh, how good it felt to know that everything revolved around us.

Now science has revealed a very different picture of the universe. I was reminded of this when the AppAdvice app on my iPhone told me about the free Khan app. 

"Khan" refers to Salman Khan, founder of the amazing Khan Academy, a free online learning community. It features thousands of videos on a wide variety of subjects. My first Khan iPhone pick was in the Cosmology and Astronomy category, an eleven minute video called Intergalactic Scale.

 

Wow.

I watched it in my morning meditation area. Then I turned off my iPhone, shut my eyes, and contemplated my place in the cosmos during my usual breath/mantra focused meditating. The video had moved me deeply. Something about reality is, well, so damn real. 

There's no way to describe how indescribably small our planet -- indeed, even our entire galaxy -- is compared to the observable universe. Watch the video and you'll see this. 

Back in 2005 I wrote a "Scale of the Universe" post. Re-reading it a little while ago, my mind was re-boggled in the same way as the Kahn video boggled me.

I’m finding that embracing insignificance can be exhilarating. I rushed back to Google for more web pages and found Steven Dutch’s Scale of the Solar System and Universe. This is a more straightforward treatment of the subject, but it has some nice sand-related facts. I learned that if the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across.

Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—maybe not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

Good God. I have no idea, none at all.

Yet religions think they do. Theologies based on false ideas about our place in the universe proclaim that humanity occupies a privileged place in the cosmic scheme of things. 

God sacrificed his only Son for us, says Christianity. God dictated in Arabic a book that contains ultimate truth, says Islam. God gave ten commandments to Moses, says Judaism. God/Brahman is essentially the same as the human soul/Atman, says Hinduism. 

Yeah, right. Tell me how this makes sense after you watch Khan's "Intergalactic Scale" video.

If we humans are so central to God, why is the universe so astoundingly, massively, gigantically indifferent to us? Earth is barely above nothing compared to the everything known to science, much less the Unseen More which lies beyond the observable universe.

I might, just possibly, be inclined to accept a theistic religion which was able to perusasively explain how it is that humanity can have a special relationship with God when God's creation leaves us in such an impressively unspecial place in the universe.

Most likely conclusion from this undeniable fact: we are not special. And there's nothing wrong with that. We're still part of everything. Just a insignificant part, exactly as Carl Sagan told us.

Comments

[tucson]

No matter how vast the universe, it is miniscule compared to whatever is beyond it, or transcends it, or what it is expanding to or in. Actually, in this context, size is irrelevant. Big is always surpassed by bigger ad infinitum. The biggest is continually surpassed by bigger still to the point where the biggest is really small and, conversely, the smallest is surpassed by something even smaller to the point where it is really big and the whole thing gets turned inside out and suddenly the smallest becomes the same as the biggest and the biggest is the same as the smallest...all in a flash. No space, no time, no this nor that nor any thing at all but just this.

Certainly an anthropomorphic God concept is inadequate here but that does not preclude the existence of something un-name-able we may ultimately call God just for the sake of convenience.

[Greg]

Why does size matter?

Is a large granite mountain as interesting as a colony of ants?

There are other factors to value than size.

[HarryBeast]

Here is something I ran across that is pretty retro --- but revealing in that, most certainly.

http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/atomic/society/examining/

Something happened when human science split the atom. This assault on nature was inevitably an assault on our old notions of "God". Nature was always the proof of God. It was God's earth. With Science, the triumph of being able to manipulate the very innards of nature, made us, more obviously important and influential on earth than Almighty God. "He" didn't and does not step up to stop all the tampering . The door is and was wide open to relentless discovery....and lamentably abusive applications for $$$ and power. We are very clever, naked chimps. Just not clever and insightful enough to stop our own, most probable, coming demise as a direct result of our chimp-ness combined with a bigger brain pan. So before we applaud "science" or "god" too enthusiastically we might want to look in the mirror and weep at the hairy beast with his finger on the button.

[Jacob]

God could have sent his other children to different beaches. I'm a Christian but I wouldn't claim that creation ended on earth, or in the Milky Way.

It's true that we're astonishingly small but the comparison to a subatomic particle is apt. We're massive from that perspective.

Our sentience is evidence of our meaningfulness. Indeed, our brains, so paltry in scale, still have billions of neurons instantiating trillions of connections.

The idea that we're so small that God wouldn't care about us cedes a central claim of theism, omnipotence (and omniscience). That we are capable of making intelligible decisions is probably sufficient to warrant divine attention, which is effortless for God.

[Guest]

The sheer size of Jupiter and the Sun are enough to humble any man, let alone the size of the Milky way galaxy, the super clusters, and the Universe itself.

I really do hope that some day we'll be able to unravel the mysteries of this great creation, but in my heart I know we never will.

If anything, the sheer size and the nature of the Universe, something that to this day we don't truly understand is a testament to something much bigger and grander than us. Some people like to call this God and I'm inclined to believe them.

Something this mind boggling and unfathomable truly shows us how insignificant we are in the grander scheme of things, yet somehow we've been placed in the perfect spot in the universe that gave birth to life. The author calls it an "un-special" place, yet all scientific investigation has never revealed anything as "special" as the part of space we occupy.

The universe IMHO is God's way of showing us just how much more there is that we don't get. All we can do is theorize and even to this day something like gravity that we deal with everyday, still remains nothing more than a theory. Laws of Physics - completely moot in the face of a Black Hole.

If this doesn't teach humble us enough to realize that there is so much more to life that what we can perceive, I don't know what will.