The service which sends us the Daily Philosophical Quotation the other day offered this one by the late Carl Sagan:
Actually, Sagan was not quite right about this. Once Big Bang cosmology came to be understood, at least in its major outlines, many Christians began to realize that the age and vastness of space had marvelous theological implications. For one thing, the extravagance of creation which people like Sagan think argues against conceiving of man as somehow significant and certainly against the view that man is central to creation, actually does the opposite.
According to the Big Bang hypothesis, the universe began in a primordial explosion of space-time and enormously hot energy, which cooled as it expanded, and from which the first generation of stars precipitated. The theory has it that those stars "lived" for billions of years, compressing protons in their cores into heavier and heavier elements and eventually dying and exploding themselves, creating even heavier elements in their death throes, and spewing this chemical debris into space where millions or billions of years later it would be captured by the gravitational tug of younger stars and condense into planets.
If God did indeed choose to form galaxies and solar systems in some fashion such as this then there are remarkable implications. It took, on this model, thirteen billion years, for the universe to produce the conditions necessary for life to exist on this singular "pale blue dot", to borrow from the title of one of Sagan's books, and all that while the universe was expanding. In other words, the process of preparing a world suitable for human habitation took thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution and all that time the cosmos was growing at unimaginable speed.
Thus for us to be here at all, given the means God employed to create us, the universe has to be just about as old as it is and consequently just about as large as it is. Its age and its size are consequent upon the choices that God made in fashioning it. We, then, really are at the center of the universe. Not geographically, of course, as the ancients thought, but ontologically. It exists as it does so that we could exist as we do.
Just as ecosystems, in order to sustain certain species of animals and plants, has to transition through many stages of development and has to encompass a certain minimum size, so, too, does the universe have to be at a certain stage of development and of a certain dimension in order for life to emerge and thrive anywhere in it.
When looked at this way, the vastness and scope of the universe astonish us even more than they would otherwise. We are left speechless at the fact that God did all of this just so that we could inhabit a tiny speck of it, just so that we could be.
