There is emotional power in the smallness of human existence when set against the skene of the terrible vastness of the universe. This power drives what remains, along with the Problem of Evil, one of the most effective atheist arguments. The pedigree of its use is impressive: from Carl Sagan—“We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people”—to, more recently, Gad Saad.
Dr. Saad, fondly known to many as the Gadfather, is an evolutionary psychologist, YouTube creator, and defender of the truth. He is unafraid to challenge the delusions of this age—from the censoring of free speech in academia to the notion that a certain religion (we all all know which one) is entirely peaceful. But, he is an atheist, and in a recent youtube video, he implicitly argues against God with a kind of reductio ad absurdum:
Look at the vastness of the universe. Abrahamic faith requires use to believe that despite that inconceivable vastness God cares about the goings-on in the Middle East, a tiny portion of a world lost in sea of galaxies. But that is absurd; therefore, there is no such God.
The Gadfather shares some staggering cosmological numbers: there are 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy, which is between 100 - 180 thousand light years in diameter, situated in a universe containing two trillion galaxies. He does not come out and say that these staggering numbers prove that the Abrahamic God cannot exist, but his deployment of sarcasm implies its overwhelming unlikelihood:
“The Lord of the Universe is uniquely focused on what amounts to a nano inch…. But boy does God care about us, and uniquely cares about that particular region in the middle east.”
I feel the emotional power of this argument. When one looks out on the ocean, and imagines treading water somewhere offshore, too far from anywhere to swim to safety, the insignificance of your own life in such a circumstance, the smallness your own weak body—it takes your breath away. Now blow that up to the entire universe, and all the air is sucked out of your own assumed self-importance.
Emotionally, rhetorically, it packs a punch. But rationally, I have never found it particularly convincing.
The argument fails to disprove the existence of God because it is not, logically, directed toward such a disproof. If it proves anything, it proves only that God could not possibly care about us. Like the problem of evil, it amounts to a question of which attributes God would possess if he existed, not whether or not he exists. It does nothing to overcome the classical arguments for God’s existence: the ontological argument, the various varieties of the cosmological argument, Aquinas’s Five Ways, the aesthetic and moral arguments, the argument from essence and existence. The God that these arguments purport to demonstrate can be as cold and distant and uncaring and incomprehensible to us as we are to the bacteria that live in our lower intestines.
But even as an argument against the Abrahamic God, and in particular against the notion that he cares about us, it relies, it seems to me, on several faulty assumptions. First, it assumes a kind of anthropomorphism: if I were given charge of 2 trillion galaxies, arguably teeming with all kinds of life, I would be hard pressed to care about any particular planet, much less the dusty barbarians of the ancient middle east. But God, if he exists, and if he is the way classical theism conceives him—as the ground and source of being, and as perfect and infinite Intellect—has no such human limitations on his capacities.
Second, it assumes that size matters, that the vastness outweighs us in our smallness. But a single human, with the capacity to reason and to love, is more important than a billion, or even a trillion, empty galaxies. The universe is vast and terrible, but the human mind and heart is greater. If anything at all matters in the universe, it is us, and not all the space dust and barren icy rocks.
If we take away these assumptions—that God is like us limited in his capacities, or that our smallness means we are not worth the attention—then the argument fails as an argument.
And yet, its emotional and rhetorical power remains. So let’s consider Saad’s video another way: as an unintended apologetic.
You see, the God of the Jews is a bit of a paradox. He is not like the gods of other nations. Take, for instance, the Greeks. The chief gods in their pantheon were not the primordial constituents of reality. Zeus was merely the grandson of Sky and Earth, and he lived on a specific mountain in Greece. He was the King of the Gods, but he was decidedly parochial. So, if he cared about the goings on of the great men of Greece, it is not too surprising—they lived on the same islands as he did, after all.
But the God of the Jews did not live on Mount Horeb, he merely visited it. His power was no weaker on the banks of the Nile than it was by the waters of the Jordan. The Temple was not his home, but merely his dwelling place among his people. Nor did he have a physical form, or even a name, like all the other gods of the earth. He was, simply, “I AM WHO AM”—not one being among many but Being Itself. He was no grandson of sky and earth, but the Pre-Existence who spoke all things into being. He was the Voice who from the heart of the whirlwind said to Job:
“Where were you when I founded the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its size? Surely you know?
Who stretched out the measuring line for it?
Into what were its pedestals sunk,
and who laid its cornerstone,
While the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
Zeus was a Greek, so he concerned himself with the affairs of Greeks. But God was not a Hebrew, and yet—and yet—he chose the Hebrews to be his people set apart, his royal priesthood. Indeed, Saad is correct, it is a strange and seemingly contradictory thing that the Great I AM, should bother with a tiny bronze age tribe of little import.
In Christ this seeming contradiction is not a difficulty, but an apologetic:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”
Christ preached to the people of Galilee—peasants, nobodies, not even the heroes like Achilles or Odysseus about whom the Greek gods were only intermittently and half-heartedly concerned—and assured them that the Great I AM had counted every hair on their heads, that they were loved and valued by the Lord of the Universe.
The numbers in Saad’s video intensify Christ’s apologetic. God is the God of two trillion galaxies, and yet he has counted every hair on your head. Far from diminishing our estimation of God, or shaking our confidence in his existence, the vastness of the universe, since it does not an cannot disprove God’s existence, can serve only to convince us that God is truly Love Itself—that he should deign to be born a slave on our tiny planet, in this infinitesimal corner of the universe, and die at our hands, because of all our petty and squalid sins, in order to demonstrate that we, we dustmotes born and dead in a nanosecond of a nanosecond, are loved.
The Gadfather says: “But boy does God care about us.”
Amen.