Our very large universe

Indeed, what is man that you are mindful of him?

I finished Steven Weinberg’s “The First Three Minutes” yesterday, a book about the first three minutes of the existence of the universe, as understood within the Big Bang paradigm, per the science of 1977 when the book was originally written.

Weinberg was an atheist, and even in the book expresses a preference for steady-state models of the universe because (and this is his language) they avoid the “problem of Genesis”. Moments of creation are uncomfortable for atheists. Whatever you think of the Big Bang paradigm itself, the book is also just a good scientific history, and like any good scientific history you learn that science is messy, filled with dead-ends, and misleading clues, and theories rejected for human reasons and worldview reasons and not actually because of the data, and then you think you’ve finally got it figured out and learn you’re wrong completely. It would be good for all of us (and especially those who worship The Science) to recognize that mess. He even says, to end one chapter.

…I do not think it is possible really to understand the successes of science without understanding how hard it is - how easy it is to be led astray, how difficult it is to know at any time what is the next thing to be done.

But what I wanted to share here… prepping for an astronomy class for Fall, I was looking at that famous Hubble deep field photograph.

Now, I’m not saying anything new here, but you have to look at that photo and be awed for a minute. Those lights aren’t other stars, each one is a whole other galaxy. You can see structural details on many of them, and those structural details are, well, astronomically huge. The Earth is in just one galaxy, orbiting just one star out of the two-hundred-billion or so stars just in our galaxy. And then there are all these other galaxies. If you let that sit on you for a minute, you’re feeling mighty, mighty small. It would appear, from the perspective of the raw physics anyway, that the whole Earth could disappear tomorrow and the universe wouldn’t even notice. We are tiny people in a tiny place¹². Whether from a theistic or atheistic perspective, you have to wrestle with that somehow.

You might chime in, the question isn’t really new. David (the old king, not me) did not have the Hubble telescope, probably had little or no concept of “galaxy” at all, but he still understood, in Psalm 8, that the universe is a lot bigger than us humans.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Well, Weinberg is not King David, but writing from the perspective of an atheist, you can tell he is having some related feelings… or you might say he is receiving the same sense data, but is forced to respond to it differently. He writes:

However all these problems may be resolved [section is about whether the Big Bang only happened once, or happens over and over again as the universe expands then re-contracts], there is not much comfort in any of this. It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. As I write this I happen to be in an airplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the Earth looks very soft and comfortable - fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat [the “heat death of the universe” or “Great Crunch” hypotheses]. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

That’s quite an ending sentence. This is followed by a weak paragraph to the point that all is meaningless, but at least we create meaning by our efforts to understand! That’s probably the best he can do, and he couldn’t just end the chapter with “pointless”, but that would be very cold comfort indeed at that point.

But you sympathize with that paragraph a bit. He recognizes our specialness, but doesn’t have a faith to accept that specialness. It’s true, the Earth is an astonishingly wonderful place to be. Like astonishingly wonderful. Like you can’t actually communicate to another person what a great place it is. We give students teeny tiny explicit statements in science class “what a convenient amount of water, what a great thickness of the atmosphere” and so on, and all these things are true, but they really barely scratch the surface (or outer atmosphere) of what a great place the Earth is, how special human life is. And yes, this great place is microscopically small in the great cosmos. Wrestle with that.

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1. As a second, less dramatic example of that, as I type this there is a sunspot seven times as wide as the Earth on the Earth-facing side of the sun. That’s big enough to be picked out by a cell phone camera at sunset, as I did last night. The slightly darker blob near center is the sunspot band.

2. Indeed, you might remember from a few posts ago that old-Earth creationist Hugh Ross promotes a paradigm in which at least the whole history of the Earth, and perhaps the whole history of the universe, was geared toward helping humans fulfill the Great Commission. And Deborah Haarsma objected that the universe just seems too big and too grand for it really to be all about us, like that. If only for his own pleasure, surely God created all this stuff for some other reasons too.