What is our place in the universe?

This is a question that has been debated over the centuries and its ultimate answer defines us a species. I believe that it's the most important question ever.

It was not that long ago that most people thought that we were the center of the universe and that the universe was limited to a celestial sphere on which the planets and stars moved. Most people believed that the sun orbited the Earth. It wasn't until a brilliant Polish astronomer by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus used visual observation and mathematics to show that the Earth orbited the Sun. His book 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres' was published in 1543. Of course his ideas met with stubborn opposition by the Church because it supposedly conflicted with the Bible.

Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian astronomer, who used a telescope to observe the phases of Venus and the four main moons of Jupiter, confirmed Copernicus' ideas. His discoveries were published in 1632 in the now famous book 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'. He ended up being declared a heretic by the Italian Inquisition. It's amazing that it took so long for the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe to become widely accepted. It wasn't until 1992 that Pope Paul II expressed regret in how Galileo was treated.

Of course, modern science has broken away from any connection to religion. However, this really didn't happen until the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin's now famous book 'On the Origin of the Species' came out in 1859 and caused a huge controversy that still persists to this day. I believe that this event represented the beginning of the New Age of science where only verifiable experiments and repeatable observations guide scientific discovery.

And, the subsequent discoveries have flowed out like rivers swollen with heavy rain, especially with the dawn of the twentieth century. It wasn't that long ago that people thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the center of the universe and that we were in the center of the galaxy. Then, along came a feisty astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble and he changed everything. His careful observations showed that the universe is much larger than the Milky Way galaxy and that the universe is full of galaxies. He also discovered the red-shift, the Doppler shift in the spectra of distant galaxies that prove that the universe is expanding and that the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it's moving away. You just can't imagine how amazing these discoveries were back in 1924. All of a sudden we humans were more insignificant than we thought.

We owe a lot to Islamic and Arab astronomers, not only for instruments like the sextant and the concept of longitude and latitude but also for the names of stars. One notable astronomer was al-Khwarizmi. He not only invented algebra, he used what we now call Arabic numerals, including the zero. He also calculated the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets as well as the longitudes and latitudes of thousands of cities and landmarks. He lived during the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to the 13th-century when Muslim scientists added much to our knowledge of nature. Muslim scientists didn't believe that the universe was an accident. They considered the heavens to be an aid to mankind. It's only in modern times that we think of ourselves as being insignificant.

Just how insignificant are we? That question was just recently answered by observations with the Hubble Space Telescope in low orbit around the Earth. It's known as the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. A image of a small part ot the center of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field within the constellation Formax showed galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago. This tiny area of space only roughly 2 archminutes in size shows 5,500 galaxies, adding to the 10,000 galaxies discovered in the HUDF exposure. It's difficult to really appreciate what this means. What this indicates is that our puny galaxy is only one of anywhere from 200 billion to 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

When we look up at the night sky, especially in an urban location, we only see a very tiny fraction of the stars that our out there. Even if we go out to a location that's distant from city lights, we still only see a fraction of the stuff that's in the heavens. It wasn't until mankind had telescopes did we get to see the glory of what's really out there, but it wasn't until the Hubble telescope that we really found out how amazing it is.

There are several incidents that illustrate how insignificant we are in the universe. I will only talk about two that I consider the most important.

The first incident that indicated how tiny we are in the universe occurred in December 1968 with the launch of Apollo 8, the first time that man had traveled to the moon. The mission was to orbit the moon and then return to Earth. That's when the crew recorded a view of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon. This stunning color picture demonstrated for the first time that our little planet is a precious oasis in the vastness of space.

The second incident was the so-called Pale Blue Dot photo taken by the Voyager I spacecraft on February 14,1990 form 3.7 billion miles away. It shows the Earth as a tiny blue dot in the darkness of space.

The Cassini spacecraft obtained more spectacular photos on July 19, 2013 while orbiting Saturn. These series of photos show a tiny blue dot with a companion white dot adjacent to the rings of Saturn. This photo framed by Saturn's rings demonstrates how tiny our little world is. It tells us that our planet is just a tiny speck in an enormous universe. We are as insignificant as a dust particle blowing in the wind.

However, I see another way to look at it. I believe that these photos show how immense our universe is and subsequently how powerful the God that created it is. Our planet might only be a tiny speck in a vast universe but we were meant to be here. If nothing more we were created to appreciate how great God is and how much He loves us to give us the ability to see all of these amazing things, the most important of which is life. Life may have evolved from tiny one celled creatures but consider how complicated life is. Only a Creator could have planned and devised this extremely complicated universe and the very amazing way that life appeared and evolved into something as complicated as we are.

When you realize how immense the universe is and how many galaxies there are in it, you must conclude that there are other intelligent species out there somewhere. As creative as God is, I can't accept that He only made us as an intelligent species. If you could say anything about God, you would exclaim that He loves to create and His ultimate creation is intelligent life.

Many scientists believe that the universe is an accident. There is no way that this enormous and amazing universe is an accident. Our existence proves that we were designed to be here by a powerful and loving God. We were put here to love God and appreciate His love for us. Amen.

Thanks for reading.