MOST CREATIONISTS have a very homo-centric view of the universe. They believe that God created the universe specifically to create a home for humankind on Planet Earth. When we examine the universe how reasonable does that belief seem?

Consider the relevant chapters of Genesis. God creates the earth, populates the earth with plantlife, creates the stars, and, creates the sun and moon, populates the earth with animal life, and finally creates Adam and then Eve. To a modern reader there are several problems with this sequence and Biblical apologists have to wrestle with those problems if they want to treat Genesis is a literal accurate account of the creation.

But there is another problem with the concept that God created the universe so as to provide a home for humankind. A problem which has only really become apparent in the last couple of hundred years. The universe is big. In fact the universe is so vast that it is extremely difficult for a human mind to encompass its enormity. Let’s try to understand how big the universe is…

As a starting point readers are probably aware that stars are suns like our own. They are balls of hot gas, fuelled by nuclear fusion under the pressure of their own gravity. Curiously this interesting fact is not at all evident in the Bible. They are also a very long way away. So far away that it is only in the last 300 years of scientific observation that we have learned to measure how far away they are. How many stars are there then?

Astronomers estimate that the universe includes approximately 10^22 stars. For those unfamiliar with scientific notation that number is written down as follows: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. It isn’t easy for the human mind to encompass such a large number so I’m going to try to give you a feel for how big that number is. Imagine, if you will, that each star is shrunk to the size of a grain of sand, a sphere 1mm across. 1,000 such balls fit in each cubic centimetre, and 15625 such balls fit in each cubic inch. If all the 10^22 stars in the universe were 1mm across, and arranged in a cube, that cube would be 21km along each side (about 13 miles). Somewhere in that cube is an individual grain that represents our sun. Imagine trying to find it if it were painted a different color. You could search for lifetimes and not succeed.

In reality the stars aren’t packed together of course. On the scale where each star is a 1mm ball do you have any feel for how close the nearest star (apart from our own sun) is? Well, Proxima Centauri is more than 4 light-years away, and light travels 300,000 km every second. On the scale where the sun is 1mm across, Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbour, would be 40km away (about 25miles), and that is just the very closest star to us. Practically next door as stellar distances go. The Magellanic Clouds, our nearest sub-galactic neighbours, are 40,000 times further away again; on this tiny scale that would still put them more than a million kilometres away… and they are extremely close as galactic distances go, touching distance.

The earth has a diameter one hundredth that of the sun, so on this scale it would be an invisible mote of dust. A practically undetectable dot orbitting the 1mm sun at a distance of around 93mm (around 4 inches). And apparently God created the whole of the universe in order to provide a home for humankind on earth? The suggestion feels more than a little wasteful when the vastness of the universe is contemplated.

In the night sky with the naked eye we can see around 3,000 stars. An infinitesimal fraction of the true majesty of the universe, yet all the ancients knew of. The Bible contains no sense whatsoever of the vastness of the universe (for that matter it contains no sense whatsoever of the vastness of the world outside a small portion of the Middle East), nor the true nature of the stars, nor the fact that 99.999999999999999% of them are undetectable to us unless we use telescopes. When God said “Let there be light” it seems that He created rather more light than was required for our purposes.