The Judeo-Christian worldview is rooted in the stories of
the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the beginning of the
Christian Old Testament. Here we learn of a creative God and the story of his
personal relationship with humanity, eventually revealed through his insertion into an obscure tribe roaming territory just east of the
Mediterranean Sea.
The Bible account begins with "In the beginning,"
giving us the name of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. The story mentions
the creation of the universe, but it is a story intended for the child-like
minds of human hearers, so the story places focus on humans. This can be
dangerous and misleading, because humans, being arrogant and self-centered, can
mistake the story as implying that humanity lies at the center of God's
purposes. We apparently occupy a meaningful part of God's story in the present
era of life on this planet, but we should never be so deluded as to confuse the
Bible story of God's concern for humanity with the broader story of God's
creation and timeless purposes in this universe and countless universes beyond
this. Those purposes and stories are simply unknowable.
My point here
is to remind us that the knowable story revealed to us is but an infinitesimal
fraction of the true story of God's power and purposes in time and space. The
real miracle is not that the Earth was created. It is that God attends to such
an unfathomably trivial fraction of his creation.
The Judeo-Christian story misses the reality that the Earth
is invisibly small relative to the scale of the universe. I will make this point here in terms of both
space and time. These arguments are intended to humble us and widen our awe in
the face of a powerful, personal God.
The earth is beyond insignificant on the scale of the
created universe. Its insignificance is far more extreme than what is suggested by the
photograph of our planet as a tiny speck when viewed from beyond Saturn as seen
from the NASA Cassini space probe. The insignificance of the earth is vastly more
astounding.
The mass of the earth seems impressive at 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
kilograms. That is 4 times ten to the 24th power kilograms. This makes the
earth seem important until we risk calculation of the mass of the known
universe. The mass of the known universe (never mind dark matter) is estimated by scientists to be
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
kilograms. That is 10 to the 53rd power kilograms. The earth no longer seems important in any
sense. It is beyond trivially unimportant on the scale of the entire creation. Just how unimportant? Let's calculate the fraction of the mass of the universe that
corresponds to the earth. This ratio is about ten to the 29th power. It would take
ten to the 29th power earths to equal the mass of the universe. Even this makes
the physical insignificance of the earth difficult to comprehend. Another analogy is perhaps helpful. A single
grain of sand has a mass on the order of one milligram. This is one thousandth
of a gram, or one millionth of a kilogram.
The mass of the earth
is to the mass of the known universe as the mass of a grain of sand is to the
mass of the earth.
The entire story of human existence and all that has been
created from our perspective is like the story of a single grain of sand in the
context of the entire planet earth. If we feel that the story of this earth is
meaningful and important, that is all well and good. Let us remember that our
story is equivalent to the story of one grain of sand in a planet made of
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand. If we are important,
how much more important is the whole story – the story that we don't know?
So our entire story is less than insignificant on the scale
of created space. What about created time? This calculation turns out to be no more encouraging. The universe was created about 14 billion years ago. That
is 14,000,000,000 years. The written history of human civilization dates back
about ten thousand years. That is 10,0000 years. That means that the universe,
God's entire story of created time, is more than a million times older than the
human story – 1.4 million to be exact.
How do we come to terms with the insignificance of human history in this
reality? An analogy is helpful. If the
age of the universe were a month, the entirety of the human story – everything
we know about God's interactions with humanity, would have taken place in the
last two seconds of that month.
Before we imagine that we can define God as the being who is
focused on humanity, let us be corrected and stand in awe
that the entire human story is truly nothing on the scale of God's creation of
time and space. We are less that a speck
of paint splashed on the edge of a vast canvas being painted by a master
artist. It is worse than that. Physicists tell us there is reason to believe in
the existence of a multiverse made up of countless universes coexistent with
ours.
How unimaginably powerful and creative is our God. How vast
and beautiful must be the stories of his purposes that do not include us at
all. How thankful we must be that the incredible is true – that such a God loves
us and seeks us and pays personally for us to win our redemption that we might share timelessness with him.
What is mankind that
you are mindful of them?
Psalm 8:4
