I've been listening to a series of lectures entitled, "Astronomy: Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe" and it's got me thinking about the size of things. It's hard to get a real feeling for how amazingly big the universe is. You've heard people talk about the Earth being 93 million miles from the Sun, the closes star, Proxima Centauri, being about 4 light-years away, and the closest galaxy, Andromeda (pictured here, courtesy of NASA Images), being 2.5 million light-years away. Maybe you don't remember the exact distances, but you've likely heard something like this before. The numbers have no real "feeling" to them. How far is a light-year anyway? It's hard to get a sense of the size from the numbers themselves. (1 light-year = about 6,000,000,000,000 miles)The lecturer, Professor James Kaler (info here, or here), did something that helped a lot, and I thought it was worth some thought time.
The first steps along this path are some "local" sizes. The Sun is about 100 times the size of the Earth, and the distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 100 times the Sun's diameter. That means you could line up about 10,000 Earths between here and the Sun. Already this is a pretty big number to imagine!
Going further, imagine that the distance from the Earth to the Sun was one inch. On that basis, the Earth would be about a tenth of a micron, far too small to see, about the size of a large bacteria. Our solar system, out to the little rocks beyond Pluto, would be about six feet across. On this scale, the nearest star would be a little over four miles away. Beyond this, the numbers quickly get too big to absorb again. If the distance to the Sun is one inch, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 miles across--half way to the moon. Our galaxy is one of billions that we can see and is unremarkable. Remember, this is a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars I just called unremarkable!
The universe is unbelievably large, staggeringly large, mind-numbingly large. It's B-I-G. Mankind is proud of the fact that we've gone all the way to the Moon, but that's about the diameter of a strand of a spider's web in our modified scale. Almost too small to see!
One of the things we tend to do as Christians is to underestimate God. We see him as a slightly larger version of ourselves, maybe without the little imperfections we have. But God is the creator of this stupefyingly large universe we've just been looking at! We make a serious error if we see God as just a "big person." We contemplate God, we argue about his existence, about the extent of his power, about his character. What we should be doing is standing in awe, unable to grasp his size, but yet overwhelmed by what we can grasp.
In Isaiah 55:9 God says, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
I should say so!
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There's one theory out there that, since the universe is accelerating, at some point the outer edge of what we can observe will be moving away faster than the speed of light, and future scientists won't be able to physically prove the existence of anything outside the immediate vicinity of Earth. Effectively, they won't even be able to understand anything beyond our local cluster of stars.
There's another theory that says this has already happened, and that what we can observe in the Universe is only a very small section of the ACTUAL Universe, something like the size of a quarter as compared to the size of the Earth.
To actually describe the scale, I prefer to quote the great Douglas Adams: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Most people can't even understand the size of Texas, nor fathom the leagues of the Pacific Ocean, so they are completely lost when speaking of the universe. But it is funny (disturbing) how people will put so much effort into understanding the universe and such little time in trying to understand God. This is not directed at those in this thread, but our population in general.
Both are large beyond comprehension, yet one gave us a person touch, a human, to help us understand him if we would only pay attention.
There is another reason to stand in awe at God's creation. Not only is our universe, and our world, large beyond understanding, it is also perfect. No matter if you are looking for the end of the universe, or looking only at the human body, you will find that our creator put these things in balance, making them absolutely perfect. To me, this is proof that our universe was no accident. But again, I didn't need proof.
Too many times, Christians try to dismiss science thinking it ignores God, and vice versa. Once we all understand that science is God, or better put, God is science, we can begin to revel in what he has provided for us.
God created all and continues to create more. Knowing what is happening at the end of the universe can really do nothing for us. Knowing what is happening in our Christian walk can do everything for us.
I'm amazed every time I see a picture of how large Jupiter is compared to Earth, and then when I think about how small our whole galaxy is compared to the rest of the universe. How wonderful that the God who is big enough to create all of that is "intimately acquainted with all our ways." Amazing.
Do I ever want my telescope back!!!
Have you seen the History channel's series called "The Universe?" It's pretty good. You can get it on itunes...
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