God and the Universe

In an earlier blog entry , I hinted that I felt that physicists might be the people best equipped to appreciate God's power.  If we believe that God both created the universe and is 'omnipresent' (existing everywhere at once), then it seems to me axiomatic that He is both bigger than, and more powerful than, the universe.  So, how big is the Universe?  That's a very difficult question to answer.  It might be infinite - i.e without an 'edge' - indeed, if there was an edge, what would be beyond it?  A question which is, to all intents and purposes unanswerable and possibly without meaning in the terms of reference we're accustomed to existing, as we do, in space and time.

Let's think about distances.  Suppose you live in Lancaster.  Think of somewhere 200 miles (or 300km) away - say Milton Keynes for example.  How long would it take you to get there by car - three hours on a good day?  It would take a photon (particle) of light 1/1000 of a second to travel the same distance.  Looked at another way, light travels, in a second, one thousand times as far as the distance from Lancaster to Milton Keynes.  That's a very long way - about seven and a half times around the globe!

It takes light about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth - the distance is about 150,000,000km.  Astronomers refer to that distance as one Astronomical Unit.  There are about 63,000 Astronomical Units in one Light Year (the distance travelled by light in one year).  By happy coincidence, there are also about 63,000 inches in a mile, so if we think of the distance from the earth to the sun as being represented by an inch (25mm), then a light year can be represented by a mile (1.6km).

How far away from the sun is the nearest star?  It takes light from the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, about four years and three months to get here.  In other words, the light which can be seen now, at the middle of February 2013, left Proxima Centauri in the middle of November 2008.  Using our scale above, if the distance from the earth to the sun is one inch, then the nearest star is 4 1/4 miles away - or about the distance from St. Thomas' church to Junction 33 of the M6.  It's a vast distance, when you consider the scale.  And that's just the distance to the nearest star!

Think now, about how many stars there might be in our galaxy.  We can't count them, but astronomers estimate (using various measurement techniques) that there are about 100,000,000,000!!  And if you imagine that they form a big cloud, and assume that each one is a similar (or often much greater) distance from its neighbours as the sun is from Proxima Centauri, you rapidly get the idea that the galaxy is way, way bigger than anything we can possibly imagine.  And then, just to blow your mind completely, that is just one galaxy in a universe containing perhaps 500,000,000,000 other galaxies, each made up of, probably, a similar number of stars to our own (very average) galaxy.

That, surely, must have implications for how we think about God!  And just think, the Creator of the Universe is interested in you, as an individual, and was prepared to sacrifice His Son, one third part of the Godhead, to restore the relationship between you and Him.  Almost unbelievable!

Copyright © Phil Hendry, 2022