Saint Superman Feels the Awe

that any normal person should feel when contemplating the size of the universe. As Douglas Adams notes, the distance to the local pharmacy is peanuts compared to the size of the universe.

Humans, being inveterate poets and incorrigibly religious, can’t help but suffuse their perception of the immensity of the universe with religious significance. But without revelation they can draw all sorts of wrong conclusions. The principal wrong conclusion is the pagan tendency to prostrate oneself before mere size and power. So the Wellsian of the last century (one of whose number was Carl Sagan) tended to declare in a stentorian voice “Man is insignificant compared to the size of the universe!” (To which Chesterton sensibly replied, “Man is insignificant compared to the nearest tree.”) The psalmist feels the power of the Universe’s vast size, but does not cave in to power worship:

When I look at thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.
Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the sea. (Psalm 8:3-8)

This is one of those passages that gives the lie to the easy self-congratulation of the modern devotee of scientisms, who imagines that ancients somehow were too stupid to look up in the night sky and feel exactly the same sense of awe that we do–as though we discovered the sky. The ancients were perfectly aware of this commonplace. But they did not allow it to overcrow their spirits with the notion that this somehow proved that an eternal and omnipresent God could not take notice of them, just as it did not persuade them that if you shrink the earth enough, you can pretend there is no difference between people and bacteria. It was the modern world that would make these leaps of illogic and conclude that the size of the earth relative to the universe somehow constitutes and argument for atheism.