The Modern Myth of Size

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the
stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the
son of man that you care for him?" -Psalm 8:3-4

It is an odd and prideful occurence that the more humans know about the universe the less they tend to believe in God. To the depths of knowing our human anatomy to the intricacies of learning the earth's biology to the vastness of knowing the dark recesses of space, it seems that the more we know of these things the more we're confident in our own knowledge.

Darwin postulates the evolution of nothing into a cell, because a cell after all is a simple organism fit with just a lot of blobbing mass. Except that it's not. The more we learn about a cell, the more we learn how mindnumbingly complex it is, fit with thousands of interchangeable parts without which only one of those parts the whole thing falls to shambles. And yet, no one seems to challenge the notion that Darwin could have been wrong. That, indeed, it seems rather unlikely that nothing could have become a complex organism like the cell, no matter how long it took. And still, the more we humans learn, the less we believe in God. One would think that the more we know we'd realize the more we do not know. It's really a matter of disposition more than it is a matter of facts.

And so I came to this article. It's a book review of The Age of Wonder about the rapid scientific discoveries during the Enlightenment. In it, we find another curious oddity of scientific hubris that is one of the most classic logical fallacies of all time: the myth of size.

Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old
universe. After looking through Herschel's telescope, Byron wrote, "It was the
comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in
competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to
imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated."

Notice what Byron did there? The emotions that are sparked because of the vastness of space lead him to an illogical conclusion: that eternal life and the human existence must be irrelevant. But as I type I'm writing by way of a small yet immeasurably important object: the computer chip. Right beside my computer is a big stack of folders, bigger than the computer chip, yet much less significant to my work. Size doesn't matter. It doesn't not matter either. Size and significance are two separate categories. The bigness of space doesn't lead to a logical conclusion that humans and their planet are irrelevant.

The Psalmist knew this. He didn't need a telescope to tell him of the vastness of space or the likely smallness of human existence. He knew it to be true, even before the enlightenment. And yet that's what makes his psalm so beautiful. Despite the smallness of the seeming irrelevance of humans, God still cares for them. They are still important to him.

It's not a matter of fact, it's really a matter of disposition.