It's amusing how we sometimes attach significance to physical size and sometimes we don't. A distant planet or nebula may make an awesome desktop background, but if I could choose between letting the planet melt or a 4 cm bolt in my car's engine, I'd keep the bolt. The earth is hardly even mentionable on a cosmic scale. From any unbiased point of view, it shouldn't even be noticed. BUT as far as we know (except for a few brief vacations into orbit or to the moon) it has been the location where every story of human life has taken place. The earth used to seem so massive and all-encompassing and stable, but we're really living in a thin shell of compacted carbon that suspends us between a ball of burning magma and an infinite sphere of vacuous space. Frightened? Well just think how easy some kind of cosmic accident would be that could destroy all of human life. When Jonathan Edwards said you were sustained above the reach of the fires of hell by a thread and God's grace, he didn't even know that two miles below your feet would be a big boiling boulder of liquid fire.
I think that everyone should learn a little cosmology. We know about the sun, the moon, the solar system, but there's some really incredible information out there about stars and nebulae and space itself that isn't hard to understand, but it's really amazing. I might actually post on it again, just because it's so incredible and thought provoking. If people did start learning more about the universe, I think it would have two effects (among other things).
First, I think it would increase the awe that we have in the world around us. Christians should attribute that awe directly to God. I think basking in the glory of God's creation is a first rate form of worship. It's beautifully biblical. Check out the 8th and 19th Psalms. When I think about how big the universe is, it's so humbling (honestly I don't know why people always say they feel humbled when they get big awards, those are the kinds of times I feel least humble. Knowing that you're smaller in the galaxy than a bacterium in a rhinoceros, that's humbling. The great thing about science is that it makes the doctrine of creation an increasingly big deal. We believe God made everything that exists. That hasn't changed, but our definition of "everything" has changed enormously. The more we know about what and how much God created, the more credit we can attribute to Him.
Second, I think cosmology undermines the humanist ideas that we have. This isn't the normal definition of humanism, but I think of humanism as the belief that the universe exists solely for the purpose of humanity. Even though humanity is important, I think the fact that God created an enormous universe and only gave us a teeny tiny corner for our playground should hint to us that God had other plans for the universe even beyond his incredible plans for the earth. Maybe there are aliens, or maybe he just likes staring at nebulae and supernovae in his spare time, I don't know, but if anything stirs my imagination, it's wondering what in the cosmos God is doing with the rest of the universe.
