Philosophical Bits #3:
Lots of Stars
Astronomy has changed our view of the universe greatly in the last hundred years. In the early 20th century, Henrietta Leavitt discovered the period/luminosity ratio of Cepheid stars, which gave astronomers a “standard candle” by which to measure interstellar distances. Edwin Hubble, working with the newest and best telescope in the world at Mount Wilson in southern California, used Leavitt’s discovery to prove that many so-called “nebulae” were in fact galaxies outside our Milky Way. Only in the 1920s was the debate over galaxies (“island universes”) finally settled. It’s easy to forget that the best astronomers of the 19th century did not know what our school children are taught as a fundamental fact.
Hubble also discovered that the red shift—a feature of light from distant galaxies—increases the further a galaxy is from earth. In the 1930s, astronomers deduced that the universe is expanding, though Hubble himself resisted this conclusion. Interestingly, the first astronomer to propose the expanding universe theory was Georges Lamaitre, a Roman Catholic priest. Most cosmologists opposed the so-called “big bang” theory because they preferred to believe in an eternal physical universe. (Even the label, “big bang,” came from Fred Hoyle, who promoted a steady state theory of the universe; in a 1949 BBC interview, Hoyle derided “this big bang idea.”) Again, big bang cosmology is something we take for granted now, and we forget that the expanding universe theory did not win the day until the 1940s and 1950s.
My high school science textbook, circa 1970, taught us that the universe has been expanding since the initial singularity and offered as an explanation the “oscillating universe” model, in which the universe expands and collapses over and over. But then Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking convinced cosmological theorists that the math didn’t work. The universe, scientists now believe, is a one-time mega-event that started almost 14 billion years ago and will end many billions of years from now in eventual heat death. The time frames and distances involved in astrophysics are so big as to beggar imagination. Still, for many scientists, the idea that the universe had a beginning and will have an end is troubling; it sounds too much like theology.
Current astrophysical theory says there are several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, and each galaxy has about 100 million stars. For comparison’s sake, consider that the earth has more than eight billion people in 2024. Estimates of the total number of people in all generations on earth range as high as 120 billion. If we resurrected every human being who has ever lived and assigned galaxies to them as property, each person would “own” five to ten galaxies, with 100 million stars in each. The stars in the observable universe outnumber all the human beings who ever lived by a factor of 500 million to one. Or more.
For some people, Big Bang cosmology may sound uncomfortably like theology, and it reinforces aspects of theology that may have been neglected. Medieval theologians taught that the God of the Bible—a conception of God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—created the world, including everything that exists (other than God), out of nothing. God is an infinite being, always existing. (Christians add that God exists as three persons, eternally loving one another. Jews and Muslims reject that idea, insisting on the singleness of God.) However great the universe may be, medieval theologians said that God is infinitely greater.
Since they are human beings, believers are tempted to neglect or forget the greatness of God. Quite naturally, we focus on the concerns close to us: our physical bodies, our plans and activities, our families and friends, our clans and countries. We pray about such things, asking God to grant peace and prosperity, health and wholeness. Focusing on things close to us, we neglect the greatness of God. But when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he told them to say, “May your name be honored.” Our prayers should include awareness of God’s greatness.
It helps to meditate on the stars, on the sheer magnitude of the universe. What kind of God is this, who knows the stars by name (according to Isaiah)? Our whole world, teeming with eight billion souls and full of innumerable creatures, is just one tiny planet at the edge of a middle-sized galaxy, one of billions of galaxies. How “big” must God be to see it all? And yet: how intimate God must be, to pay attention, as Jesus said, to every bird of the air? How could God attend to billions upon billions of planets and stars, and also pay attention to all creatures, great and small? God hears all the prayers of people on Earth, and if there are spiritual beings on any of the billions of other planets, God attends to their prayers too. What kind of mind is this, who lovingly attends to billions of souls?
This is the God to whom we pray, the God of all the stars. This is the great God, the God who knows and sees and loves.
