Opaque Lucidity

The Worlds Thy Hand Hath Made, Continued

I find that my choice in audiobooks reflects my mood at any given moment, so you can imagine what I've been thinking about with my last two selections: '2001' by Arthur C. Clarke and 'Pale Blue Dot' by Carl Sagan, who also read the work. One is fiction, the other a treatise on mankind's future in space. They speak to the same central theme: the universe is enormous and we really don't know anything about it.

I take something else from these works as well, that being the idea that the universe was not made for us. We are certainly a part of it, but we are a nearly invisible speck of dust in the corner of a giant machine whose size and purpose remain unknown to us.

Early Christians borrowed heavily from the Greeks and Egyptians in thinking the Earth is the center of the universe. After all, the stars and the Sun seem to move around us. The planets do not make neat paths, but that could be explained away with a complicated system of loops. An Earth-centric universe became so accepted by the Middle Ages that to deny it was seen as hypocrisy. As humans, we are above the animals and made in the image of God. As God's children, why would we not be at the center of His creation?

Now we know that our little planet is in an average Solar System in the arm of a common galaxy whose siblings number in the billions. We are not at the center of things; in fact, we can not realistically determine where the center is. With a universe expanding into an infinite space of something we know nothing of, there can be no center. Everywhere is the center, and nowhere is the center. Plus, the universe was here long before human beings showed up. In fact, the universe was over 10 billion years old before the Earth was formed. Planets and stars had been born, lived their lives, and died in that span. And we weren't here to see it.

So are we still God's children? Certainly. But we are not alone. I believe we will someday find children of God in all sorts of places. Their relationship with Him may be different in the same way a child's relationship with the divine is different from an adult's. They may know Him in ways we do not. Or they may look to us for enlightenment. Either way, I believe we will find the universe teeming with intelligent life, all of it in His image.

Imagining human beings as being the only intelligent creatures in the universe holds a certain arrogance. This is not our universe, but God's. It is for His glorification, not for ours. To think his Greatness is somehow centered on humanity with all our frailties is hard for me to imagine. We are His children, but we are using His playground.