Was the Universe Created Just for Us?

One of the really interesting questions in science and religion is "Was the universe created just for us?" Years ago when the Bible was written, and for many years after, it was blasphemous to even pose the question. Everyone believed the universe was created for us -- there was no question about it. Furthermore, we were the center of the universe -- everything revolved around us in more ways than one. As astronomy developed and we learned more and more about our universe, however, it became obvious that we were not the center of the universe, and it now seems very unlikely that the universe was, indeed, made just for us. The main reason we can say this is that we now know how big the universe is, and we know we are a mere speck in it. Furthermore, as far as I'm concerned (and I'm sure most astronomers would agree with me) the probability that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe is very large -- close to 100 percent.

We also have to ask that if God created the universe just for us, why did He make it so big? It is, indeed, so big, that we haven't really found an edge to it yet. And there's the problem that if we did find an "edge" we would have to answer the question "What is on the other side of this edge?"
To give you an idea how big our universe is, consider the following. We live in a galaxy we call the Milky Way, and it has approximately 200 billion stars in it (about equal to all the grains of sand in all the beaches on Earth), with our Sun being an average-sized, relatively cool star. And the overall universe has at least 200 billion galaxies in it (one for each of the stars in our galaxy). Of course, we're not sure  how many galaxies there actually are out there -- but we know it is at least 200 billion. And that makes it a pretty big place. This brings  us back to the question: Was the huge universe created just for us? It 's hard to believe that it was. Let me know if you think differently, or have a good argument for the fact that it was.


Barry Parker:  Webpage: Barryparkerbooks.com. My most recent book is "Learn from Yesterday, Live for Today, Hope for Tomorrow"