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…
