Silverton Evangelical Church

We haven't only just discovered the scale of the universe. Many people think that we've only recently understood the sheer size of space, and our terrifying aloneness in an absolutely massive galaxy. And so they think it must have been much easier to believe in God when everybody thought of the world as a small, cosy three-decker affair with God living just a short distance away on the top floor.

But that's not true. C.S. Lewis showed in God In The Dock that the size of the universe was well known many, many centuries ago:

The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago.

Why wouldn't God have created something this big? Does the size of the universe rule out God?

Dr Nick Hughes (who isn't himself a Christian) argues that we feel insignificant in this intimidating universe because we can't control it. But in fact, if we truly are the only intelligent life forms in the entirety of space, we're very significant!

The Bible says that God's incredible creation shows us a glimpse of his glory and immensity; perhaps the size of everything around us helps the human race to appreciate just how limited we are, and how much more there is to life than we experience in our world. And how amazing it is that God has created beings "in his image" uniquely on this small planet.

Without God behind it, life in the universe has no lasting meaning.  Do we still need God? We may know a lot more about the size and age of the universe, but we're a long way from ever being able to take charge of it.

We can't even control our own planet properly, given the human history of wars, crime and environmental ruin! And if there's no God, we have to face up to the ultimate meaninglessness of human life, as the great philosopher Bertrand Russell did.

He pointed out that since he didn't believe in God, he was committed to believing "...that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins".

John Lennox is the renowned Oxford maths professor who wrote the book God's Undertaker to show that modern science hasn't yet succeeded in consigning God to the graveyard. In this video - "Has science buried God?" - he explains his thinking in a lecture given to an American university.