This article is by Mark Legg:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Ps 19:1)

Human gazes have wandered into the stars with wonder for thousands of years. The otherness of the night sky inspired ancient cultures to represent them as spiritual beings, powers walking in the heavens gazing back at Earth. Many looked to them for guidance and worshiped them for their power to affect fate.

Aside from some who toss out “Virgo” or “Leo” in idle gossip, most in the West follow astronomy rather than astrology. Cosmologists and astronomers study, among other things, the beginning and edges of the universe. If you’re curious, it’s about 93 billion light-years from Earth to the boundary of the observable universe (94 during rush hour). Referring to the distances between galaxies, much less the edges of space itself, becomes an activity of mere abstraction. A YouTube educational video addiction has taught me how incomprehensible the size of space is — the size of the universe being the quintessential topic on science channels everywhere.

Our minds didn’t come with the hardware to comprehend such vastness. Even theories stretch thin in the face of space’s grandiosity. The deeper we peer into the black heavens hung with fiery giants and galaxy-eating black holes, the grander and more mysterious they become.

Launched into space three years ago, James Webb telescope changed astronomy forever. When they translated the data into canvases of rich color, we collectively gasped in awe. More than the aesthetic appeal, NASA’s data from Webb began to unsettle scientists (warning: I am not an astronomer, so get your pinches of salt ready). In February of last year, a paper in Nature found galaxies more mature and nearer to the Big Bang than the consensus models predicted. These dots of light are called “Universe Breakers” because their age seemed to contradict modern theories of cosmology. One of the paper’s authors summarized well: “It’s bananas.” Even before the discovery of the Universe Breakers, some theories of cosmology claimed that the universe may be infinitely large (and so, not really “sized” at all).

In sum, the universe is big — ludicrously so. We resort to raising lightyears to the powers of powers of powers to measure its size. Yet measuring the universe’s size seems to elude the grasp of science and human comprehensibility.

Here’s a question to ponder: Why? One of my agnostic friends recently asked me, assuming there is no extraterrestrial life, why would God make the universe so large?

We seem to live in an age of posthumanism, a zeitgeist of cynicism. Nevertheless, humanism and transhumanism live on. Many place their faith in science — and understandably so. Science as a method of progress and study has raised unthinkable prosperity. In valuing science and, by extension, humanism/transhumanism, the West easily forgets its limitations. Cosmology (and fundamental physics) seem to run up against the limits of the scientific method — the more all-encompassing and bottomed-out, the more challenging to verify.

The expansiveness of the universe serves to humble the sciences, and by extension adds uncertainty to the West’s tendency to value abstraction, certainty, and progress. It seems poetic that bustling metropolises create light pollution to dim the night sky’s beauty, as though the powers of modernity are fighting back against the wonder of nature.

In a less abstract but equally potent way, the heavens remind us of the universe’s beauty and mystery. That experience can be accessed without a Ph.D. or telescope. Perhaps, then, God spread the heavens out over incomprehensible grandness to overwhelm us with awe and remind us of our finiteness. Far from inhibiting the awe, astronomy only serves to deepen it and unveil how incomprehensibly grand the universe is.

If humans appear increasingly smaller, then the reverse is true of God. Creation seems intrinsically extravagant — the diversity of species, the flavors of good food, the depth of the sea, the variety of climates, etc. God is not particularly concerned with efficiency, and this seems deeply, theologically true.

It’s interesting that English synonymizes extravagance with “wastefulness,” “squandering,” “recklessness,” “profligacy,” and more negatively charged words. Let’s not only think in terms common to 21st-century Western culture, in numbers, bottom lines, and abstractions. Let’s instead sit in awe of God’s all-perfect aesthetic taste, for he not only provides, but blesses in unexpected ways. Finding grandness in nature gives us insight into God’s character (even as we find the world broken and in need of God’s healing).

Perhaps, then, God unrolled the scroll of the heavens in creation to spread out near-infinitely wide to communicate to us his character as extravagant and extra-abundant. In fact, it seems like a much smaller universe would still communicate his grandness to us sufficiently, but that’s the point–and here we find, again, extravagance upon extravagance.

While limited resources and brokenness abound today, the grandness of the heavens reminds us of God’s power to bring about a New Creation of abundance. The heavens remind us that in our lack, need, poverty, or run-of-the-mill struggles, we can yearn with hope for the “kingdom of heaven.”

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