Perhaps you’ve heard of the Fermi Paradox. It’s a conundrum first posed by Enrico Fermi in 1950, during a discussion of the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Fermi’s basic idea was: “Considering the vastness of the universe, it is statistically probable that alien civilizations should exist, but that also means we should have seen evidence of aliens by now, so where is everybody?” Fermi (an agnostic), of course, operated under the assumption that the universe was NOT created by God, that humanity was NOT created and placed on earth by God, and that the “other life” Fermi was seeking was NOT, in fact, God.
Carl Sagan produced a famous video in the mid-1990s called “the pale blue dot” in which he illustrated just how small the Earth is vs the whole cosmos around us…
To Sagan (another agnostic), Earth was alone and lonely, and though his ultimate point was “we’re all we’ve got, so maybe let’s not blow ourselves up with nukes,” it was still a point made from the idea that Earth is “alone and lonely,” that there is nowhere else where life has been found. And yet, Sagan believed that alien life existed somewhere in the cosmos. To him, the universe was simply too big for humanity to be the only living, thinking beings. Men like Sagan and Fermi found the idea unfathomable that humanity might be the only intelligent life in the universe, simply because the universe seems so needlessly large for just one species to inhabit it. The argument would be posed: “I’m supposed to believe God made all of this and just gave humanity—and humanity alone—one tiny little dot to occupy in it?” As Sagan once wrote, in speaking of the vastness of the universe and the loneliness of humanity: “Seems like an awful waste of space.”
Is it?
I hear arguments like and I think of Copernicus, who challenged the conventional scientific thinking of his day by arguing that the sun was the center of the solar system and that the celestial bodies (including our planet, the other planets, and satellites) orbited it, as opposed to everything orbiting the earth. He challenged that thinking, not just from a scientific perspective but a moral one: “We are not the center of the universe. We are not that important.”
Fermi says the universe is too big for humanity to be all there is. Sagan says a universe with “just us” is a waste of space. Both ideas conceded the possibility of alien life, which causes a paradox: “The space must be filled with life, so why can’t we see it?” The reason those arguments lead to a paradox is because they reject the notion that the universe was made by God.
To that, an atheist would argue: “It is pointless for God to make all of those stars and planets in the known universe (two trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars, etc). After all, if God made all of that, and then just dropped humanity off on one little planet… what’s the point? Humanity will never see the limits of God’s creation; it’s a waste of space.”
On the contrary, if God made the universe, then the relatively small space humanity occupies within it does not mean the rest of the cosmos is wasted space. If God made the universe, then all the vastness of the cosmos—with all of its colorful nebulae, blazing stars, shimmering comets, and planets of every composition and size—are there for God to behold and enjoy. Ironically, the people who say things like “the cosmos is wasted space” argue that from an anti-Copernican viewpoint: They have become like the self-absorbed thinkers of old, who believed we were in the center of the universe. These new-age anti-Copernicans say that if we can’t visit or see everything the cosmos has to offer, then it must be a “waste.”
No: God made the stars (Genesis 1:16). They shine for His good pleasure, not ours. The heavens, and the vastness of the cosmos, including all that our eyes will never behold, nevertheless declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). Is it arrogance to think we are the ones made in God’s image? Is it arrogance to think we were placed here by the Lord, even if that means being the only living, thinking beings in the physical universe? No.
Why not us? Life exists. Intelligent life exists. Even if you wanted to argue that we are not the only intelligent life that exists in the universe, you must concede that SOMEONE was first. So why not us? Though I don’t base the argument for my existence around a question like “why not us”? I base it on the fact that the universe exists, and the only rational explanation for its existence is that it came into being by a Being great enough to make it so, and that such a Being might want to converse with His creation and tell us who He is and what He wants from us.
~Matthew