27 Dec

The universe is wonderful

When someone says they believe in a god that created the heavens and the earth, in their minds they consider the earth to be large and the heavens to be a backdrop. Because the world appears so personal, it makes sense to them that they would be the focus of an intentional creation.

It’s only when you step back and objectively consider how very very small the earth is, that you realise that we are not special.

We are discovering lately that pretty-much every star has at least one planet around it, and it’s looking likely that we will discover habitable planets soon, and those are stars that are within tens of light-years of us. The part of the universe that we can see is roughly 28 billion light-years in diameter. And that’s only the observable universe. How many habitable planets is that?

Religions tend to dismiss everything that is outside the Earth. For example, in the old testament, God spent 7 days working on the Earth, and on one of those days, he created the stars for the sole purpose of shining onto the Earth.

There are roughly 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe. And we are told that these were all created one evening by God, just to shine on the Earth. Seriously?

When I tell people that I am an atheist, they tend to pity me, because I am apparently missing out on something. Well, I pity them, because their imaginations are so laughably small – such a wonderful universe, and all they can see is this inconceivably tiny part of it!