Given that the universe is 14 billion years old, and that life has been evolving on this planet for over 4 billion of those years, one might reasonably ask why God chose to create nature over such vast expanses of time and space when He could have wrapped it up a lot sooner. I think the first thing to note is that in doing it this way, God has created a universe with lots of information that gets rinsed out in the mathematical wash. In other words, the notable things in the universe - like stars, planets, chemistry, biological life and, ultimately, humans - are highly unrepresentative of the exceeding mathematical profligacy in the rest of the universe.
This
seems to be a truth reflected in the natural order of things: there is a
plethora of thermonuclear spillage when planets are created; there are dozens
of thorns for every rose; there are many more non-beneficial mutations in DNA
than beneficial ones; there are millions of sperm that are unsuccessful
alongside the one successful one that engenders a fruitful union in
fertilisation. Even in the arts, or the economy, or in trade-based competition,
or in sport, or in epistemology, the winners are far outnumbered by the losers.
How much
truer that is of life in the universe too. To consider just how vast even our
galaxy is; if you shrunk our galaxy to the size of the earth, then the solar
system we inhabit within that galaxy would be about the size of a bowling ball.
And as far as we know, we are the only life in that whole galaxy, maybe even
the whole universe (a remarkable fact if it's true, given that there are around
1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe). One thing is abundantly
clear: the special things in nature are very very rare and highly
unrepresentative of the rest of the mathematical baggage in it.
The
upshot is, there are many patterns in physics that are mirrored in human
behaviour too, especially when it comes to power laws, and Pareto
distributions. Perhaps the nature of the universe is some kind of symbolic
representation of deeper truths related to God's creation story. Perhaps it's a
part of the 'all good things to those who wait' philosophy, or a 'big rewards
to those who work hard' philosophy, where value comes at a cost, and takes time
and effort. All the most impressive designs in human terms require prodigious
amounts of planning, foundational work and intricately executed design
techniques that factor in the complexity of the whole project, not just
individual parts.
Knowing
how we emotionally and intellectually engage with reality at a human level, I
can conceive of what might be behind the Divine wisdom of a vast, lengthy
creation story, in which the banality of the gas, dust, rocks and gravitational
and magnetic fields could represent a symbolic demystification of creation as a
fait accompli event spanning much shorter execution time. Perhaps the vastness
of creation is God's way of illustrating just how much cosmic magnitude went
into the intellectual process - and how comparably meagre our own intellectual
prowess really is in trying to fathom such a mind. Intelligence is, after all,
the ability to explore avenus of possibility by sifting and selecting - so why
should we be surprised if God exhibits this with the creation of the universe,
like all artistic geniuses do? Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything less.
We are
told two big things about this creation in terms of God's cosmological
masterwork: in Romans 1:20 we are told that "Since the creation of the
world, God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been
clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are
without excuse." And in Psalm 19, we are told that "The
heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His
hands". That is perhaps a good conclusion one can draw for why God
used such vast amounts of time and space: they are the revelation of the huge
mathematical permutations in designing something so complex: a design that has
His fingerprints on it in the constitution of the mathematical bias written
into nature's fundamental blueprint of a biased random walk. And if you don't
understand how amazing a fundamental blueprint of a biased random walk is, you
don't understand it at all. Consequently, a signature from God of that level of
mathematical genius is going to require a physical substrate spanning vast
stretches of time and space, just as a painter would require a vastly spacious
canvas in order play out the exhibition of his artistic genius on a grand,
iridescent scale.
Linking those two concepts together: the vastness of space and time, and
the highly unrepresentative pockets of order painted onto a giant canvas of
disorder - ask yourself this. Don't we feel that bit more special being one in
a billion than one in a small group? If Jack says to Jill "I love you
more than anyone in our social group" or "I love you more than
anyone in our church congregation" we all know that that is not
anything like as powerful as saying “I love you more than anyone else in the
world”. The more unrepresentative a love is when it deviates from the mean
of weighted experience, the more it is treasured as something amazingly rare,
special and wondrous. Perhaps God’s capacious expanse of the skies and His
chronologically extensive timeframe for dong His creation is an illustration of
just how exorbitantly rare, special and wondrous we are.
Or maybe think of it in terms of the mathematically biased random walk -
perhaps as redolent of our two beloveds, Jack and Jill, having no chance of
meeting without their mutual friends getting together and making special
arrangements for that to happen. Perhaps those two beloveds would have been
lost without the intervention of those that loved them. And perhaps when we
think of the vastness of the matter in the universe, that those particles would
be 'lost' in the interstices of a prohibitively large search space without
God’s intervening genius to bring them together with the blueprint of a biased random
walk. The vastness of the universe and the broad timescales could well be an
exhibition of the Divine genius (Romans 1) unlocking the vastly complex
combination lock that helps gritty 'lost' matter 'become 'found' - like two
beloveds finding each other against all the odds. God’s story is, after all, a
love story between Creator and creation.
That’s my
best conjecture for why God used an enormously complex, spatially vast,
chronically extensive canvas to demonstrate His artistic genius: it is the genius
of a rare, unique, profoundly beautiful, deliberate love story where that which
is lost becomes found, and is embraced by the Creator through the Incarnation,
just as when the father embraces his prodigal son on his return from the
doldrums. The grandeur of the universe may well be a simulacrum of the entire
gospel story: that the whole creation narrative is based on Christ dying for
our salvation - and the mathematical cost of life, represented in the vastly
expressive canvas of mathematical and physical nature, may be an illustration
of the cost of life in terms of salvation - the price God paid for the
creatures He loves. That is to say: our Father God has shown through His Son
Jesus that He is willing to bear the greatest costs imaginable (Philippians
2:7, 2 Corinthians 5:21) for the things He loves - and that may be as true of
the univeral nature of things as it is the individuals He created, and for whom
He died.
