Skye Puppy has a series of photos that are breathtaking in what they illustrate about the size of the planet upon which we live relative to the cosmos. Look at the photos and then remember that there are billions of stars like those shown in the bottom photo just in our galaxy alone and there are billions of galaxies in the universe (To enlarge go to the link).
Some twentieth century thinkers have cited the immensity of both space and time as an argument for the insignificance of the earth and therefore of man. They gazed at the vastness of the heavens and scoffed at the medieval idea that man is at the center of the cosmos, that somehow it's all here just for us. That idea, though, no longer elicits derision. It's become clear to even the most adamantine skeptic that there's something eerily special about the construction of our universe. It is as if, cosmologist Freeman Dyson once said, the universe knew we were coming.
As for its great size and age, cosmologists note today that, given the fact that the elements necessary for life are forged in the centers of stars by nuclear fusion and distributed throughout space when those stars die in catastrophic explosions, the elements of which life is comprised would not have been available until at least one generation of stars had been born and died. This is a process judged to take billions of years. All through that enormous stretch of time the universe would have been expanding. Thus, by the time it was chemically ready to support living things it had to be very old and consequently very large.
In other words, the cosmos has to be as old as it is and as big as it is in order for us to be here. It's vastness is not a sign of some divine (or natural) profligacy, but, assuming that God chose to use stellar evolution as His means of producing carbon, oxygen and the rest, it is a divine necessity. We may not reside at the geometric center of the universe, indeed there probably isn't such a thing, but we very well may reside at its ontological center. It very well may be that we are the reason that the incomprehensibly huge universe exists at all.
