Your God Is Too Small
By: Tom Hanak
People often refer to the Christian God as the creator of the universe. Most of the time, I do a mental face-palm whenever I hear this and get on with my day. But every once in a while, I laugh. I laugh quite hard actually, if my mood is good enough at that particular moment in time. The idea of Yahweh being the creator of something as vast and as complex as our universe is so ridiculous, so obviously stupid, so blatantly wrong that it ' s laughable. And don’ t call me Shirley.
Why, though? Why is the idea laughable? Billions of people believe it, so why not? It seems only rational if you ' re one of those people. After all, all those people can ' t be wrong, can they?
A Lesson in Astronomy
To understand why it ' s laughable, it ' s good to have an understanding of what the universe is. Most of what makes up the observable, material universe is matter— or atoms. Each atom has a certain number of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and the number of each determines what kind of element an atom is and how it behaves. The vast majority of the universe consists of the smallest atoms, hydrogen and helium. These elements also make up the vast majority of a star ' s composition for the majority of it ' s life, fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Our sun is a low mass star, which means that in about 6-7 billion years, it will grow into a red giant before collapsing into a white dwarf.
Stars tend to be found in large groups, such as star clusters or galaxies. Our sun is located towards the edge of one of the spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way itself is approximately 100,000 light-years across, and contains about 200 billion stars. The current estimates suggest there are about 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That means that there could be as many as 10 24 stars in the universe, or 1 with 25 zeros behind it. The universe itself is thought to be as large as 150 million light-years across, according to current estimates. That’ s approximately 9 x 10 20 miles, or 9 with 20 zeros behind it. Even riding on the fastest man-made object, it
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