The universe doesn't look made for us.

Question

Thirteen point eight billion years. A hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. And the cosmic drama is supposed to hinge on one ape species on one rock during the last two thousand years? The proportions are absurd. A universe made for humanity would not bury humanity under this much irrelevant matter.

Blaise Pascal · Answer

Man is a reed, but a thinking reed.

The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me too. I have looked through the same telescope as the atheist and felt the same vertigo. Between the two infinities — the immensity of the cosmos and the abyss of the atomic — man is a nothing, a midpoint, lost.

And yet. The universe does not know it is vast. The galaxies do not know they are galaxies. Only this small thinking reed, perched on its rock, knows the size of what would crush it. By space the universe encompasses me; by thought I encompass the universe. The mind that grasps the cosmos is the strangest fact in the cosmos.

That the eternal God should bend to such a creature is astonishing. But once you grant that he made the thinking reed, you have already granted the more difficult thing. The scale of the rest is decoration.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

Smallness is the Christian boast, not the atheist's discovery.

The atheist announces, as if he had discovered it, that man is small in a vast universe. He has discovered nothing. Christianity has been saying this for two thousand years, and Judaism for longer. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? The Psalmist beat the astronomer to the punch by three millennia.

What is new is not the smallness but the conclusion drawn from it. The believer says: given this smallness, the divine attention is the most extraordinary fact imaginable. The atheist says: given this smallness, the divine attention is impossible. But the data are the same. The argument from scale is not an argument; it is a mood.

And it is a mood that depends, oddly, on the very Christian intuition it claims to refute — the intuition that human beings matter, that their being overlooked would be a scandal. A consistent materialist should not be offended by cosmic indifference. He should expect it, and shrug.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

The size of the universe was not news to anyone who looked up.

Ptolemy knew the earth was a point compared to the heavens. Augustine knew it. The medievals, whom we caricature as thinking the cosmos was a snug box, in fact pictured a universe whose vastness terrified them more than ours terrifies us — because they peopled it with intelligences. The discovery of more space did not produce the modern unease. The loss of meaning did.

The argument from size is rhetorical, not logical. A flea is small; this does not prove the flea is unimportant to its dog. A galaxy is large; this does not prove it is important to anything. Importance is not measured in cubic light-years.

If the Incarnation is true, then God entered the smallest possible point of his own creation — a particular Jewish carpenter, in a particular year. The scandal of Christianity has never been that it makes too much of man. It is that it makes too much of one man.

The Mystic · Answer

The drop does not contain the ocean. The ocean contains the drop.

You speak of scale as though God were one large object among other objects, competing for room with galaxies. He is not. He is the ground in which galaxies and atoms equally rest. The hundred billion galaxies do not dwarf God; they are sustained, moment by moment, by the same act of being that sustains the sparrow.

When the contemplative speaks of God's attention to the soul, she does not mean that God has stopped attending to the supernovae in order to attend to her. She means that the divine presence is undivided, total, simultaneous — that the same love that holds the cosmos in being holds her, with the same fullness, in being.

The vastness you find oppressive, the saint finds liberating. There is no corner of the universe she could flee to where she would be more or less held than she is now.

The universe doesn't look made for us.

The objection, in full

Man is a reed, but a thinking reed.

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