Does a Tiny Earth in a Vast Universe Mean Humanity is Insignificant?

The truth: Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized. ~ Dr. Michael Newton Keas

Last time, I posted about a book dealing with science, history and Christianity that had graciously been made available for free both through Academia.com and Amazon.com by Dr. Michael Newton Keas entitled Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. As part of that blogpost, I quoted part of the book’s introduction where Dr. Keas raised the supposed problem for God’s existence arising from the existence of an insignificantly small Earth in an almost incomprehensibly vast universe. He identified the myth: “Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that revealed humans to be insignificant.”

In the book, Dr. Keas points to a number of sources to show that while man may not have fully grasped that immense largeness of the universe, from at least the closing years of the Medieval period the idea that the universe was extremely large was unquestioned. Dr. Keas writes:

For example, the popular medieval work South English Legendary stated that if a man could travel upward at a rate of about forty miles a day, he still would not have reached the stellatum (“the highest heven that ye alday seeth”) in eight thousand years. The fact that this medieval stellar distance is much smaller than modern estimates gives the “premodern small cosmos” myth the superficial appearance of truth. But, as [C.S.] Lewis deftly argued: “For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this.”

So, perhaps they didn’t think in trillions and trillions of light-years, but they certainly recognized the vastness in terms of their own more limited scale of measurement. Eight thousand years was thought, at that time, to be greater than the number of years that the universe had been in existence, which made it a very large number indeed.

So, should these early thinkers have concluded that such a large universe pointed to man’s own insignificance? Quite to the contrary, even with an understanding of man’s incredible insignificance in light of the universe’s size, the immense size of the universe served as further cause to praise God for His wonderous works.

For example, one portion of Dr. Keas’ book sites the work of Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch Physicist and Astronomer who worked in the mid-to-late 1600s who was clearly a very serious scientist. A quick look at his Wikipedia page praises his scientific work:

Christiaan Huygens FRS, also spelled Huyghens, was a Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and a major figure in the scientific revolution. In physics, Huygens made groundbreaking contributions in optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he is chiefly known for his studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan. As an inventor, he improved the design of the telescope with the invention of the Huygenian eyepiece. His most famous invention, however, was the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656, which was a breakthrough in timekeeping and became the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. Because he was the first to use mathematical formulae to describe the laws of physics, Huygens has been called the first theoretical physicist and the founder of mathematical physics.

And the accolades for Huygens’ work continues on Wikipedia – more so than I want to spend time copying here. In his work, Huygens knew that the universe was even larger than the Medieval scholars had imagined. But the size of the universe did not somehow make God less likely. As Dr. Keas notes:

In his posthumous Cosmotheoros (1698), he wrote that earth, when seen in Copernican astronomical context, is but a “small Speck of Dirt.” He believed—based on a weak analogical argument—that the vast cosmos was filled with countless inhabited planets. Huygens wrote:

What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our Wonder and Admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious Distance and Multitude of the Stars?

He suggested that this cosmic perspective has a few moral and theological implications:

We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls Great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such earths inhabited and adorned as Well as our own. And we shall worship and reverence that God the Maker of all these things; we shall admire and adore his Providence and wonderful Wisdom which is displayed and manifested all over the Universe.

Humility before the creator, not godless dethronement of humanity, is the appropriate response to a huge cosmos filled with varied forms of life (including intelligent ET), Huygens argued. (Footnotes omitted.)

In fact, as Dr. Keas also notes, man’s insignificance compared to the universe is actually alluded to in the Bible and the scholars of the day (who were certainly not as ignorant of the Bible as today’s scholars) took note of God’s foretaste of what would later be discovered.

[One] of the most quoted biblical passages in eighteenth-century astronomy literature is Psalm 8:3–5:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.

King David sang of how insignificant we feel as we gaze upon God’s vast cosmos. Why should God care about puny humans? Yet God granted us slightly less than angelic celestial status. This song provokes great gratitude for God’s honor bestowed on humanity.

So, it is clear that the size of the universe alone, which has been known to the educated since the Medieval Age, did not and should not lead people to believe that God doesn’t exist. But should it lead us to believe that the Earth is not somehow specially created for humanity?

Coincidentally, J. Warner Wallace, author of Cold Case Christianity, recently published on this very point in his Quick Shots section of his blog, ColdCaseChristianity.com. The short article entitled Quick Shot: “Earth is just a pale blue dot in a huge hostile universe” [] makes an excellent point that the universe’s incredible size should not, in and of itself, lead to the conclusion that the Earth is somehow a cosmic accident. Wallace gives two answers to that position:

Response #1: “I agree that the universe is hostile to life. But how does that make the case against God? Doesn’t the existence of a planet like Earth, that overcomes the statistically impossible odds of existing in such an unfavorable universe – especially given the level of fine-tuning that is required for a planet to support life – demonstrate the need for Divine intervention? The odds of a planet like Earth, supporting the life that it supports, is more than just statistically improbable. It’s miraculous. Why wouldn’t the existence of a planet like ours demonstrate the existence of a Divine Creator?” OR “OK, imagine finding yourself in a vast desert stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. As you walk in this huge wasteland, you discover a stone. Examining it closely, you find that something has been written on it. The words appear to be freshly scribed in dried blood: “Help! I have been kidnapped, and I am being held hostage a mile from here in a small red shack. Please contact authorities!” Should we ignore the stone and toss it back to the ground along with all the millions of other stones in this huge desert? Why should we consider this stone to be anything special? After all, this is just another stone among millions. They’ve been here a long time. Can you see why it doesn’t really matter how big the desert is, how many stones there are, how long the stones have been out here, or how old the desert is? This stone is special. It bears the hallmark of design and intelligence. It begs us to investigate further and to find the author. In a similar way, it doesn’t really matter how big the universe is, how many planets there are, how long the planets have been out here, or how old the universe is. Our little pale blue dot is special. It bears the hallmark of design and intelligence. Can you see why it begs us to investigate further and to find the author of life?”

The argument that an incomprehensibly large universe contrasted against a tiny speck of a planet makes God’s existence less likely does not bear the weight put on it. The fact that a planet in the vast cosmos exists which is incredibly well-suited to support human life is not cause to doubt God’s existence, but cause to give Him more praise.