Think
about some “big” thing that you encountered in your life that deeply moved you
and made you just marvel…”Wow”. Here are some of mine: the Grand Canyon,
Niagara Falls, the Redwood trees in Muir Woods, the giant Sequoia trees in
Yosemite, Luray Caverns in Virginia, and the Twin Towers in New York before
2001.
Big
dogs, big people, big houses, big storms, even big bugs all make us stop and
take a second look. A big anything will give you pause. “The largest …
(whatever)… in the world” makes us pause to see what is it. Just for fun, do a
Google search for “the biggest _________ in the world” and fill in the blank
with anything you can think of.
You
probably keep some record book in your brain somewhere for each one of the
“biggest I ever saw” in every category. Maybe there are a million categories.
You could sit around with your family or friends for hours telling stories
about the biggest whatevers you have seen.
I
saw a TV show not too long ago about a new building going up in the United Arab
Emirates that is going to be the tallest building in the world. It was totally
fascinating. As you can imagine there are some really difficult challenges, not
the least of which was the 125 degree heat and the very high winds.
Let’s
take a quantum leap and imagine all the resources, time and energy, it took to
create every construction project ever made by human beings in all of history:
buildings, houses, roads, bridges, dams, everything. Think of the end products
that have been created. But note, the end product is what you can see with your
eyes. What you can’t see is the intelligence and mind power, the creativity and knowledge, that it
took to build all those things. In fact, all the thinking took place before any
of the building itself was done.
A
great amount of knowledge about the principles of construction was required
even before the image of the end project could be formed. Otherwise the whole thing
would come crashing down. A designer was absolutely necessary for every single
project that has come into existence. A planner was absolutely necessary for
everything to come into existence. Even though we cannot see the planner today,
we know there was one for every single one of those construction projects. None
of them happened accidentally.
Now
let’s talk about BIG again. As awesome as some of the creations of man are, as
big as some of them are, how big are they relative to the size of the earth? Or
compare them to the Solar System or the Milky Way. Compare the Milky Way galaxy
to the universe. NASA claims there are 3,000 already observed galaxies, and an
estimated 125 billion or more.*
Now
we’re talking BIG.
The
universe is estimated to be 10 to 20 billion years old. The Milky Way alone is
100,000 light years across and contains from 200 to 400 billion stars. The
universe is estimated to be over 14 billion light years across but nobody
really knows what’s beyond that.
That’s
BIG. Just trying to imagine the size of the universe seems impossible. Sort of
like trying to imagine God. The universe is real. Nobody doubts that it exists
even though we can’t really get our head around it. But we have more trouble
trying to imagine something BIGGER than the universe. Could there really be a
being that in fact is the creator of the universe? It is very hard to imagine God
in this way, as a being bigger than the universe using 3 dimensional thinking about size. Maybe that’s
one reason many people stop trying.
I
would argue that since anything that we can conceive of from our experience
that is orderly and BIG has an intelligent creator, therefore the universe must have a
creator because of the need for a planner and builder.
Therefore
there must be a God.
Reference:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/021127a.html
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