Sunday, September 4, 2016

The vastness of the universe

The discovery of the "closest" exoplanet orbiting around Proxima Centauri has generated a whole lot of interest in space, the galaxy and the universe.

IMHO, the vastness of the universe and even the Milky Way Galaxy shows how silly all our Earth based religions are which put us, human beings, and in Judaism, the Jews at the center of the universe.

From Wikipedia:

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that has a diameter usually considered to be about 100,000–120,000 light-years[27] but may be 150,000–180,000 light-years. The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars. There are likely at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way.

According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. That makes the number of stars in the universe unimaginably large.

Given the above, we can ask the following.

Why would God create an unimaginably large universe with over 100 billion stars and planets just in our galaxy if the purpose of creation was man and his acceptance of Torah? Who needs all those stars, planets and galaxies, especially since most of them could not even be seen until modern times? Why bother with all of these billions of stars when they have no impact or influence on Earth? It seems clear from the vastness of the universe the sheer number of stars and planets that there is nothing unique about either the sun or the earth and therefore no reason to believe that a creator would create just us on a random planet in the middle of an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Why would God specifically pick this planet around this star to put his creations on?

Shouldn't the size and scale of the universe put to rest any notion that somehow mankind on the planet earth are God's chosen?

It is clear that this is the reason why the Catholic Church (and many Rabonim) fought so hard against Galileo in the 1600s as the move away from geocentrism was seen as heretical. Once the Earth is not the center of the universe then it raises questions as to our place in the universe and Gods interest in us. Today, the knowledege that the Earth is essentially being one planet among billions just in the Milky Way Galaxy is much more dangerous.


10 comments:

  1. Well written. In ancient times people thought the Earth was flat covered by the rakia - firmament. The latter supported on pillars in contact with the Earth. The Earth was not understood to be in motion. G-d resided above the firmament controlling water thru flood gates in the rakia. The Earth seemed like it was the center of everything. Thus it was possible for the Sun to stand still with no problems. Many sections of the Torah are now known to be almost certainly false. It is about time Orthodox Jews just admit the obvious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with practically all of your comments and observations on this blog, but the vastness of the universe never seemed (to me, at least) an impediment to belief in Man being the object of creation, if one wishes to go down that road. I believe it was Dinesh D'Souza -admittedly not a scientist by profession- who writes about this topic in his book What's so Great about Christianity, and discusses how an immense universe is actually a prerequisite to creating an Earth as we know it, with a complex ecosystem that ultimately produces sentient creatures. Admittedly, the myopic attempts of the Church to suppress a heliocentric solar system, etc., are nonsensical.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. WADR I disagree. Once you bring in an omnipotent god why couldn't he create a complex ecosystem using a much smaller universe. After all he is omnipotent.

      Delete
    2. It makes no sense to 'create' the vast Universe just to have man evolve on Earth. It is a big waste and not needed. In other words, it is a piece of evidence that does not support the G-d Hypothesis. And if it does not support that hypothesis it will act to support the non-God Hypothesis.

      Delete
  3. Your question only really works against a very narrow view of G-d. If you want to attack young-earth special creationism, then fine (although there are far clearer ways to debunk that view, set out in depth elsewhere). However once you accept the old-earth naturalistic view of the development of Earth and man then clearly a universe is required (to get galaxies, to get our solar system with enough chemical diversity and physical conditions to support both the generation of life and its evolution to sentient beings). All other stars, planets etc. are a necessary side-product of this process.

    The real G-d question is not "would this be the way G-d would do it?", but rather "Is G-d a necessary, or logically favoured condition for such a world".

    BTW, "Why would God specifically pick this planet around this star to put his creations on?" is a pretty ridiculous until you have a better candidate (at which point if the existence, or otherwise, of life on it is a far more interesting factor in the debate).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A few points.
      1. It is not at all clear that even in a naturalistic view that the universe needs to be as big as it is. Do there really need to be hundreds of billions of galaxies to get to the diversity and physcial conditions? Couldn't a much smaller universe still generate the conditions necessary for life?
      2. The acceptance of an old Earth natuarlistic view is based on the evidence that we see and our understanding of the universe. However, we can ask a very simple fundamental question why? If the focus of creation is man then why couldn't God come up with a much simpler model of the universe that didn't require trillions of stars in billions of galaxies? Why would God create such a complex model for so simple a result, man?
      3. Your last point about extra-terrestrial life is an important one. The existence of extraterestrial life would be a clear contradiction to the centrality of man in the universe and would probably be a death blow to religion.

      Delete
  4. I used to not be bothered by the vastness of the universe, before I had some grasp of how truly immense it is. Forget the universe - even the solar system is unimaginably large. The Voyager spacecraft, which has been traveling at a speed of a million miles a day for almost 40 years, just recently left the solar system.
    There is a great website - http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html - where you can get a feel for the size of space. It plots the solar system as if the moon was the size of 1 pixel on your screen. The amount of time it takes to scroll to Pluto is incredible. And you can also set it to auto scroll at the speed of light - and you see just how slow that is, traveling over these vast distances.

    That's just our solar system! A tiny nothing speck in the Milky Way, which is itself a tiny nothing speck in the universe.

    Does that mean there is no God? No. But the idea that we are the pinnacle of creation just seems so intuitively wrong when you have a sense of the physical size of the universe.

    When it leads to belief in God, we are encouraged to follow our intuition. (If you find a watch in the desert, doesn't it imply a Watchmaker?) But using the same intuition - does a baker make a poppy seed muffin for the sake of one poppy seed? Does a builder create a skyscraper for the sake a spiderweb in the corner of a closet? If this enormous amount of mass and volume was put here somehow by some intelligence - does it make sense that it's all for us?

    Maybe stars are the real inhabitants of the universe and they are the goal of creation. Maybe one individual bacteria living in a drop of water in a puddle in a cave somewhere is the goal of creation. Just on the basis of pure intuition, how can we be so arrogant as to think that this whole universe is for us?

    ReplyDelete
  5. As to 1 & 2, your question is a good one, but is equally pertinent to a non-G-d universe. The anthropic principle dictates that we should expect to find ourself in a universe that is capable of generating and supporting sentient life, but it also implies that we should most likely find ourself in the universe most likely to do so (that will be some sort of trade off between a simple universe capable of but unlikely to support life and a complex one more likely to support life but less likely to exist itself. The quest for e.t. will possibly help us discover which we are in). So whatever solution you find for a G-dless universe can likely be applied to a G-dly one too.

    As for the specifics, you say it is uncertain as to whether such a vast universe is needed for life, and I would agree that it is unclear. However it is far from clear that a less complex or massive universe could do it. Clearly in the context of our physics we need the higher order elements to allow life, which in turn requires supernovae and quite likely multiple galaxies. Clearly we have a very large number of galaxies so possibly a smaller universe would do, but maybe not.

    As to 3. The death of religion has been predicted way to many times. Standing in 1930 or so I would have predicted that young-earth religion at the least would be dead within a matter of years, maybe a handful of decades, but would have been very wrong. I agree that e.t. would be a further blow to such a worldview but would not predict it's demise even so. As to old-earth, I am not convinced that it would be such a blow at all. I would warrant that many such believers already expect to find e.t. at some point. On that note, the glaring absence of e.t. is actually surprising under no-G-d hypothesis (e.g. Fermi paradox etc.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am quite familiar with the Fermi paradox. I find a number of the common answers reasonable enough. You

      Delete
    2. There are some explanations that I find wholly unconvincing, the ones that seem reasonably plausible to me all seem to come down to one filter or another.
      I don't doubt that there is an answer, and we have nowhere near enough data to really choose between them. But my gut feeling is that if it's a Great Filter then it's behind, rather than in front of us. More likely a series of filters but again most of these are likely behind us. It just seems that we are too close (almost certainly within a few centuries) to GI to posit that there is a significant filter between us and it. From there a Von Neumann probe or similar seems to me to be inevitable.

      I think it likely that few if any have ever reached our point and therefore we should not expect to find any extant. I don't think it too unlikely that we are the great filter.

      Of course that's just my personal view:)

      Delete