It makes no sense that the universe should be so large. Therefore, there is no Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) Creator God, because such a Creator God would never make a nonsensically large universe.
This past summer I heard this opinion expressed on a religious call-in radio show. The show was Dr. David Anders’s “Called to Communion” on EWTN. A caller expressed to Anders that she had a problem with the size of the universe. She didn’t use the exact words above, and I can’t recall the exact date of the show to find a recording of her words and the response of Anders, but the words above capture the gist of her sentiment, and the sentiment of many others who have expressed the same idea.
I can’t recall the exact response of Anders, but I do recall that I didn’t find it satisfactory. I think it was something like what can be found at the 2:50 mark in this recording (click here) of “Called to Communion” from the summer of 2021. Here, Anders is speaking with Dr. Ray Guarendi (who has his own parenting/psychology radio show).
Guarendi wants to ask about the size of the universe. He goes through the numbers of galaxies, stars, planets — the usual stuff of “big”. He notes that before modern astronomy “we didn’t even know that stuff was there”. And so, he asks Anders, “can you just speculate a little bit on why God might have done that” — that is, create such a BIG universe.
Anders gives a decent answer. First, can something be big to God? Second, “this question has been raised by Catholic theologians down through the centuries”. He notes that astronomers recognized the enormity of the universe even before modern astronomy — even when they thought the universe was geocentric. The concern about our smallness in the face of vastness is therefore not unique to the modern world, he says. He cites some stuff from Thomas Aquinas: a vast and diverse universe is necessarily a reflection of its infinite Creator. Guarendi quotes some ideas from Stephen Barr about the size of human beings relative to the largest and smallest things in the universe. Then the discussion gets into the “nature of being” and whatnot.
It is a fine discussion, especially for the science of a century ago. But I didn’t find it satisfactory because it doesn’t really reflect modern science.
A century ago, we arguably still lived in a pre-modern universe. At that time, we were just nailing down the existence of other galaxies. Edwin Hubble was using Henrietta Leavitt’s Cepheid variable stars to show that the “Andromeda nebula” was not an object within our galaxy but rather was a galaxy all its own — and that in general, other spiral nebulae were other galaxies. And we believed that this immense universe of galaxies, with all the characteristics that Guarendi enumerated, was eternal and essentially static, unchanging.
The pre-modern, geocentric universe was also eternal and essentially static, unchanging. No beginning. No end. And it was indefinitely large. The astronomer Ptolemy showed in the second century, when the Church was in its infancy, that the size of the earth was “as a point” compared to the sphere of the stars. A point is infinitesimal, so the geocentric universe was big, big, BIG. Thus the comments by Anders about “Catholic theologians down through the centuries”.
But astronomers today do not believe that the universe is eternal and essentially static, unchanging. We believe that the universe originated with the “Big Bang” about 14 billion years ago (thank you Fr. Georges Lemaitre, who developed the theory from the ideas of Albert Einstein) and over time came to have the form we see today. Moreover, at the “Big Bang” the universe was so hot that not even atoms could exist. When atoms could finally form, what formed was almost entirely hydrogen, with a bit of helium, and pretty much nothing else. The universe came to have the form we see today through expansion and cooling, the action of gravity, the processing within stars of hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, etc.
Well guess what? It takes time to go through all that expansion and cooling and gravity and processing to get the stuff we are made of — the carbon in our fat and muscle and DNA, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that we breathe and that is part of every water molecule within us (and we are mostly water).
In a letter to the journal Nature in 1961, the physicist R. H. Dicke pointed out that the very existence of people who study the size and age of the universe implies that the universe must be of a certain size and age because, “it is well known that carbon is required to make physicists.” That fact means that our (Big Bang) universe — not eternal, not static, but changing, evolving — must be old enough that the chemistry that constitutes human beings can form and be distributed within it. Carbon must form before carbon-based life, including humans who study the age of the universe, can exist. In an eternal, unchanging, universe, by contrast (be it the geocentric universe or the galactic universe of a century ago), the carbon, calcium, oxygen, etc. are always there.
Getting the carbon and such requires time in an evolving universe. The early “Big Bang” universe had to get to the point where the first generation of stars could form (still within a universe that consisted of almost entirely hydrogen and helium). Those stars then had to process hydrogen and helium into carbon and other heavier elements. Those elements would initially be contained within the stars that formed them, so those first generation stars had to then die and spew their contents into the universe. Then a later generation of stars had to form that had around them rocky planets like earth, made from the elements forged within the earlier stars. Then life had to arise on those planets, and human beings had to evolve from primitive life on this planet. The time involved here is billions upon billions of years.
So, by the time the first person could look up in the sky and think about how big the universe was, the universe had to be billions upon billions of years old. And, given the nature of light, that means that the visible universe had to be billions upon billions of light years across.
Therefore, our evolving universe must be huge in order for creatures like us to exist within it. It makes perfect sense that this evolving universe that we see should be so large. We don’t need to speculate on why God might have made such a large universe; given that God obviously chose to create a universe with a beginning that then over time came to be a place in which human beings can exist, largeness follows logically.
People always seem to think that modern science, and especially the concept of evolution, simply creates theological questions. Not true. Sometimes modern science provides interesting new answers to questions that have been discussed by theologians over centuries. Or to questions of the layperson of today who thinks that the the size of the universe is a reason to reject the idea of God.
This post is based in part on material from Chapter 17 of my new book (with Dennis Danielson), being published by Oxford U Press at Christmas (they moved the date up!):
A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-universe-of-earths-9780197803516
