Lately I’m looking into the scientific evidence to find out what I believe about the beginning of the world and how it came to be. As a believer in Jesus, it is really cool to see that the scientific evidence points very clearly towards the Creator. The question I keep asking myself is: Why is man so important? If the world is as old as science says it is, man only entered the stage in the last moments, and when considering the size of the universe, the earth is really small!
I often really have that feeling of Psalm 8, where David questions why God is mindful to human beings and cares for them, when seeing all the stars in the heaven. And it may be just that it makes it even more special that God cares for us, but I sometimes feel so insignificant. How do you deal with this?
Well, according to the Bible, not because of anything they have done to earn such status, but because God chose them to be image bearers. I don’t think there is any “scientific evidence” that humans became notably “special” at some point in their evolutionary history. The image of God thing is a faith claim based on special revelation. And throughout the Bible, God’s choosing of people or groups is grace-based, not merit-based, and reflects his own plans and purposes, not what makes sense.
Hi Daniel, and welcome to the forum. Those are some good things to ponder… I agree that we can feel small and insignificant when seeing our place in the universe and in time. But I like to think that if we’re smaller than we thought we were, it only means God is also bigger than we thought he was. Jesus is really the pin that holds everything together… he came to this tiny, insignificant place to try to show us who God is. That reminds me of really neat meditative reading on Fernando Ortega’s album about the Crucifixion of Jesus (I think it’s an excerpt from something)… it describes the last hours of Jesus’s life and how he was treated, but every few sentences, he repeats the phrase from Psalm 139: “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” Those two sentiments held up together like that really highlight the solemnity of who we are and who he is.
To me the reason why man is so important is because of the evolutionary ecological means that a all knowing a god created that resulted in beings, humans, that could comprehend mentally and emotionally of the love he has for us.
A tale for me that helps explain it would be how we keep working on creating more functional and functional robots. We have vacuums, we have lawn mowers, we have this and that. We have some that have larger parameters then others to give the impression of AI. Let’s say somehow one day we ended up creating a robot that looks similar to us and has real AI. It’s self aware, and can draw it’s own conclusions and even have presences. It gets to where it can appreciate us or resent us or whatever it chooses. That robot than ends up winning the heart of a man. That man falls in love with that robot. Why did he fall in love with that robot instead of a vacuum or lawn mower? Because they could not engage him in the same way.
That’s a myth and like any myth it’s not meant to be 100% logical , or perfectly sound. It’s simply meant to attempt to make something similar enough to out experiences that we can grasp something from it. For me it works perfectly with why God choose us. We were the first to be able to be chosen.
There is no reason to presume that man is particularly important to anything but the Earth. As Klax and I have discussed, the chances of mankind ever leaving the Solar System are slim (me) or completely nonexistent (Klax).
But… limiting our scope to the Earth, no other species has expanded its awareness and concerns like human beings have to every species of the Earth, the very smallest components of things, and to the farthest reaches of universe and all the things that can be seen in it. Some might make the mistake of thinking it is our rationality which makes us great. But we have discovered that rationality is not only pervasive in the universe but our own is easily surpassed by machines. No what is far more significant is the fact that we care – that we look at everything and seek to understand them. Machines only do that sort of thing because we tell them to.
Even when we take the Bible seriously… it really only speaks of this world and shows very little awareness of what lies beyond. So whatever importance it may place in mankind cannot be presumed to extend beyond this planet.
Yes but it is only to a believer that the discoveries of science does so. Yeah we have that big “I told you so” in the fact that the universe has a beginning. But that is really as far as it goes. I even find reasons for belief in God in the facts of quantum physics but I have to confess that this is a completely subjective conclusion and hardly amounts to evidence which can be considered objective no more than the fact that the universe has a beginning.
But doesn’t Jesus say that God is mindful of the birds? Yes I think the Bible (even in the very same passage) says God is more mindful of human beings. But are we really warranted in thinking this means God doesn’t care about others elsewhere as much or more than He is of us?
That there are things that point to him is not the same as scientific proof, however. There is a biblical reason why he does not want scientific evidence to prove his existence, plus another argument that proof of his existence would negate love.
It is interesting that you cite Psalm 8. I think it is an argument against YECism:
YECism belittles the import of Psalm 8:4, not only because of the vastness of the size of the universe, but also because of the vastness of its antiquity.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Hi Daniel99
Two of God’s attributes are that He is transcendent - above and beyond all infinite things from eternity, in which you, me, humanity, Earth, the entire universe are nothing - and immanent - He is as up close and personal is it is possible to be, He fits you like a glove, He sustains every vibrating string of your being, He feels you back as if you were the only thing in existence. And soon face to face.
