“If universe big how God real?” So goes the tongue-in-cheek version of an atheist argument against God’s existence. More seriously: If the claims of Christianity and the other monotheistic religions are true, why would God have created a vast universe in which humanity—so central to God’s plan in these religions—is such an insignificant part?
This argument is open to some obvious counters from believers—that size is rarely positively correlated with importance, for instance—but believers need not dismiss its logic wholesale: the vastness of the cosmos really should lead us to question humanity’s place within it.
Living in a pre-industrial age, the Psalmist saw the Milky Way every clear night. He was confronted with his insignificance compared to the immensity of the universe, and asked:
When I see the heavens, the work of Your hands, the moon and stars which You arranged, what is man that You should keep him in mind, mortal man, that You should care for him?(Ps 8:3–4)
The littleness of the individual who lives within the vastness of the universe naturally leads to two related conclusions:
1. My self and my immediate surroundings are not everything that exists; and
2. Humans did not create and cannot control everything that exists.
Let’s call these conclusions the “Dark Sky Mindset.”
At some level, the Dark Sky Mindset is necessary for any person to consciously enter into a relationship with God. Without recognising that there are things outside one’s own self and one’s immediate surroundings, it is impossible to engage with the transcendent. Without appreciating that the universe is not simply one’s own creation, a “thing” comprehended by one’s immediate, mundane experience, it is impossible to start asking: What vastly incomprehensible intelligence made this, and why?
The light pollution created by modern industrialized cities fundamentally arrests this process.
A person living in any major city in the world will look up at night and see at best a small handful of individual stars, and at worst, no more than the dull glow of their city’s lights. A 2016 study found that 80% of the world’s population lives under light-polluted skies, with the skies above Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia particularly illuminated.
For most of the world’s population, then, the night sky produces none of the wonderment and awe expressed by the Psalmist. Rather, the heavens above as the earth beneath insinuate themselves as basically ignorable parts of the man-made environment: asphalt and concrete below and a purple glowing “airspace” above.
Of course, people living in large cities are intellectually aware of the scale of the universe. They know, through education and common sense, that the world pre-exists humanity, that humans did not create it, and that the universe is vast and full of billions of stars. But this knowledge will not be felt, not be driven home in its profound significance, unless humanity stands with the Psalmist under a stelliferous sky.
At the level of experience, the resident of a large modern city can unconsciously adopt two conclusions fundamentally different from those above:
1. For all intents and purposes, all that exists in my world are myself and my immediate surroundings; and
2. Everything in that world is made or controlled by humans.
While the Dark Sky Mindset opens a person to further questions about the nature of reality and its origins, this second set of conclusions (which we could call the “Light Pollution Mindset”) effectively says: “Don’t wonder.” Worse, it changes our basic stance from that of the recipients of a mysterious universe we did not create to the creators, or at least the managers, of a truncated, little cosmos.
This disorders our relationship with the natural world. Pope Francis has vigorously critiqued this “technocratic paradigm,” the belief that “reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power,” that is, from human efforts. If the natural world is not a gift that comes from beyond, but something that comes from humanity, saturated, as it were, by human works, then this paradigm becomes easy to adopt: there are no limits to human use of the world or its resources.
This mindset affects the environmentalist movement. Unlimited human technological advancement, many argue, will save the environment from human depredation: we can invent our way out of environmental catastrophe. By mechanically sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, undertaking experimental terraforming in the atmosphere in order to lower temperatures, and artificially freezing the Arctic Ocean, humanity can remedy the effects of climate change and transition to greener ways of living, all without having to change our modes of consumption or our economic systems. Even though the goal of this approach is to “restore” the natural world, the proposed restoration would not lead us into harmony with the created order, but into a more profoundly mechanized world, in which not just the night sky but the oceans, the air, and the climate itself first “speak,” not of the gift of God, but of the cleverness of man. The “natural world” would become equivalent with “the fixed world.”
This hubristic tendency leads into the second, and more spiritually consequential problem, of the Light Pollution Mindset: Antichrist.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has the following to say about the Antichrist:
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Anti-christ, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism. (CCC 675–76)
The key element of Antichrist as described in the Catechism is a false messianic hope that places humanity in the position of God. If this is the defining feature of “the Antichrist’s deception,” then the Light Pollution Mindset is a species of that deception. By creating a world that gives the appearance of being entirely made by human hands, light pollution elevates humanity to the role of creator of its own little universe, while literally concealing “the heavens” that so awed the Psalmist.
Even worse, the constant light of the modern city is a kind of false paradise, an imitation of the Heavenly City. In the Apocalypse, St. John describes the heavenly Jerusalem:
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day—and there shall be no night there.... (Rev 21:23–25)
And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever. (Rev 22:5)
In the heavenly city, darkness and night are dispelled by the constant radiance of God. Our earthly cities have made a parody of this: the night and darkness are dispelled by the sickly glow of millions of lightbulbs. And like all man-made earthly paradises, the light-polluted city is a pale imitation of the real thing. The bright night caused by streetlights, empty office buildings, and advertising billboards is not a thing of beauty and wonderment, but just another part of the sickening uniformity of modern technological life. It is not an eternal day: it is a disrupted night.
Unsurprisingly, the false earthly paradise is bad for us. Anyone who has tried to get to sleep with a streetlamp shining in their bedroom window knows the effect that constant illumination can have on sleep. Relentless light can significantly alter our circadian rhythms, leading to sleep disorders and, ultimately, other health issues, including obesity. Even without reaching that extreme, longer bright hours make it harder for parents to put children to sleep, which in turn can lead to parents staying up longer themselves.
It’s not only our bodies that feel the effects of light pollution: all society is gradually reshaped. Constant lighting allows businesses to stay open ever later, encouraging even more relentless consumption and requiring workers to work increasingly unnatural shifts. This feeds a 24/7 work culture that removes any notion of night as a time for “rest” and sacrifices even the most basic bodily rhythms to the market.
A few years ago, a meme did the rounds claiming that Pope Gregory XVI banned gas street lighting in the Papal States in 1831, because “God very clearly established the delineation between night and day, and putting lights up after sundown flew in the face of God’s law.” The story is apocryphal, but it provides an obvious solution to the spiritual problems of light pollution: ban all lights at night.
Unfortunately, this solution is unlikely to gain any traction outside of an infinitesimally small sub-group of Catholics and a slightly larger group of radical environmentalists.
There are more moderate solutions in the same vein, though. City councils could require businesses to turn off all their lights when they are closed. The number of streetlights could be limited in a way that minimized their contribution to light pollution while still providing road and pedestrian safety. Motion sensors could be added to streetlights in lower-trafficked locations, so that they turn on only when needed. Lower-luminosity lights could be used in streetlamps and other public lighting.
These are achievable public policy solutions, but they can only mitigate the problem of light pollution. And putting too much faith in such approaches risks falling into the classic error of the technocratic paradigm: that we can fix environmental issues without converting our hearts or our lifestyles. A first step, then, should be to focus on our own interior conversion to a rightly ordered relationship with God and His creation.
If you live in a light-polluted area, make the effort to spend time in nature areas to experience a dark(er) sky. This won’t change the physical reality of your day-to-day living environment, but it will be a reminder that the world is bigger and more beautiful than the anthropogenic concrete megalopolises, and the sky more bejewelled with God’s grandeur than any human lightscape. In other words, it will help build up a Dark Sky Mindset.
You could choose to move yourself and your family to the countryside to enjoy dark skies all the time. A more achievable change is to rethink your use of artificial light at home. How late do you stay up each evening? How much do you use technology to exercise a (false) mastery over the natural rhythms of day and night? How is your light and technology usage in the evening mastering you, affecting your circadian rhythm and making you systemically unhealthier in the process?
The same questions could be posed to the Church. How often are our churches, even beautiful heritage churches, floodlit at vespers, evening Masses, or night-time adoration? Is the false day this creates an environment conducive to experiencing the Divine? Why is it that the Easter Vigil and Rorate Masses, with darkened church and candle-light, are so enduringly popular?
Maybe it is because when we allow ourselves to sit in the darkness we allow ourselves to see Him who is the light shining therein.