The Argument From Scale Is An Own Goal

The scale of the world points to God

The world is big and old! I recently tried to measure the universe with a tape measure, and I concluded that it was at least as long as my tape measure. I asked my grandparents, who are in their 80s if the world was older than they are, and they confirmed that it was, meaning it must be at least 80! In fact, rumor has it that it’s even bigger and older than that! A wise owl confirmed this fact.

Lots of people think that there’s a strong argument against God’s existence from this fact. “How arrogant is it to claim that a God made the world for us?” they ask “when we’re an infinitesimal speck on the face of a vast cosmos.” Or to use an analogy I heard once from Jeff Lowder, believing in God based on the universe being well-suited for us is like finding a tiny clean speck on an otherwise dirt-covered car and using that as evidence that Mr. Clean owns it.

Now, for those of you who don’t know (including me until I googled it about five minutes before I started writing this article) an own goal is when, in soccer, you score against your own side. My view: the argument from the scale of the universe is an own goal. It overall counts against atheism, making the existence of God more probable. The atheists scored a goal against their own side.

First of all, let us ask: why is it that a very large universe, where life is rare, is evidence against God (the fact that you can make a quip about it does not a reason make). The idea seems to be roughly two-fold:

1. A big universe is wasteful, so long as God only has interests concerning human beings.

2. If God wanted to create, then he’d put life on most of the planets. If life is good, God wouldn’t be satisfied just having it on a few planets, just as Mr. Clean wouldn’t be satisfied just having a tiny speck of his car clean.

I think the first of the two ideas can be put to bed quite easily in quite a few different ways. First of all, while human designers have some reason to avoid wastefulness, a designer that is totally unlimited in what he can create has no such reason. God, in his omnipotence, does not have to waste resources building an unnecessarily large cosmos. If God makes a world that’s too large, he does not go overbudget on his building project, nor does he have to buy more resources. There is, therefore, simply no reason at all to expect God not to avoid gratuitous creation.

Second, sometimes even we humans set up large systems for the sake of something very small in the system. Scientists create petri dishes to study bacteria, even though the petri dishes are incomprehensibly larger than the petri dish. If bacteria were sentient, would it be arrogant for them to claim such a world was built for them? Would anyone be persuaded by the new atheist bacteria quips about the puddle analogy.

Third, there might be all sorts of other great goods that come from a very large universe. Perhaps a very large universe is conducive to a particularly rich form of scientific discovery. Or perhaps some aesthetic value comes from the immeasurable grandeur of the starry heavens above us. A world only the size of our solar system would, in my view, seem to be quite thoroughly impoverished relative to this one. For the atheist to claim confidently that no sufficient good comes from a great cosmos, they’d need to provide a reason for that—but no convincing reason that I’m aware of has ever been given in support of this contentious proposition.

Fourth and finally, why think the world is made for us even if God exists? The universe might be—and is guaranteed to be if it’s infinite—full of aliens. If the great cosmic expanse is filled with other intelligent aliens—as, indeed, it likely is—why think the world was made for us? While the view that the universe was not made for us specifically may run contrary to the assumptions of some particularly fundamentalist Christians, nothing in Christian theology opposes the existence of aliens or the notion that the world was partly made for their sake. The same is true, of course, of other religions. The mere fact that something is typically assumed by Baptist grandmothers and other American evangelicals is rarely a good reason to accept it.

This first argument, therefore, is a colossal failure. It neglects the fact that God is not resource constrained, thus neglecting a feature of God shared across the world’s monotheistic religions, and assumes that God made the world for us alone, something we have no reason to accept and plenty of reason to reject.

What about the second argument—if life is so good, why is it so rare? This argument is, in my view, more serious, but ultimately unconvincing. If there is a God there are two possibilities regarding how much he creates:

1. There’s some specific number of people he wants to create. It could be that he wants to create only a single civilization or that he wants to create every possible person. The core idea of this proposal: there’s some number of people, so that when God creates that number he will think, “my job in creating is done—nothing more to do here.”

2. God wants to create as many people as possible but can always create more. On this picture, God can never make every possible person, because there can always be more people no matter how many already exist. Because God never creates as many people as he wants, his attitude in regards to people is: the more the merrier.

If the first proposal is true then God would create however many people he wants to create and then stop creating. But if he does this, then we have no reason to think that the universe would be filled with people! If, for instance, God creates every possible person, we have no reason at all to think that he’d shove them all in our universe, rather than disbursed through an incomprehensibly large multiverse. No matter how many people God makes, he can put them wherever he’d like—we have no reason to expect he’d put them in our universe.

What about the second proposal? Well, if God can always create more—always double the number of universes—then he has to stop at some point. But if he must stop creating at some point, then we don’t have a reason to think that he’d fill the universe with life. Once again, no matter how many people he creates, we have no special reason to expect him to put them in our local universe.

Thus, given God’s total lack of resource constraints, even if he loves creating, we don’t have any reason to expect him to fill our universe with life.

Other problems abound for this argument. One of them is that it neglects something quite crucial about what theists believe: theists are hardly of the opinion that all is right in the world. Generally, theists hold that we live in a fallen world of some sort—that something bad happened so that our world became screwed up. My preferred explanation, which I’ve laid out here, is that God tasked archons with making the world supremely amazing, on the grounds that if the archons succeeded, this would bring about a strong relationship between us and the archons—one that would last forever and thus be worth any finite amount of evil. However, the archons failed, which is why the world is screwed up. Christians often hold that a fall of some sort is why the world is screwed up.

But if theists hold that the world is screwed up—which anyone aware of rape, pediatric cancer, and flesh-eating parasites should—then the barrenness of the world can simply be another way that it is screwed up. Perhaps, in accordance with my theodicy, the archons were tasked with filling the world with abundant life, but because they failed, life is scarce. Thus, the theist isn’t at a loss to explain the barrenness of the world: presumably their explanation for all the other horrible things in the world will also apply here!

In addition, if, as our best physics seems to point in the direction of, the world is infinite, the argument from scale is even more badly mistaken. If the world is infinite, the relative commonality of life is irrelevant to its overall prevalence: whether there’s life on every planet or every 10 billionth planet, there are still infinite people.

This can be seen with a concrete example. Suppose that there are an infinite number of planets, each of which is labeled one through infinity (1, 2, 3, 4, etc). Each of them have 100 people. Let’s give each of the people numbers for names: planet 1, therefore, has people 1-100, planet 2 has people 101-200, and so on.

But now let’s move the people around: let’s move person 1 to planet 1 billion, person 2 to planet 2 billion, person 3 to planet 3 billion, and so on. Now, only every 1 billionth planet has a person! So just by moving the people around, we went from a world that was densely packed with life to one that was comparatively barren. Thus, how densely packed a world is cannot be an indication of how many people there are in the world, as it implies that you can change the number of people in a world just by moving people around. A world with life on every planet, therefore, wouldn’t really have more life than one with life on every 10 billionth planet, assuming the cosmos is infinite. Thus, if the world is infinite and barren—as, indeed, it looks it is—that’s not evidence against theism, even granting the earlier assumptions.

In contrast, I think a world that’s infinite and barren actually favors theism. It makes sense the world would be infinite if there’s a God; it’s good to create, and God has no limit to how much he could create. It’s, therefore, likely that he’d create infinite people. Infinite people is less expected on atheism (especially because an infinite universe conjoined with atheism likely undermines induction).

Similarly, a barren universe isn’t terribly unlikely on theism. If God didn’t place the various life-forms far apart, but instead packed them all together, likely many would violently colonize the others. Having space be a barrier keeping other life forms apart prevents aliens from wiping each other out, as well as bringing novel diseases to each other. In contrast, if atheism is true, a barren universe is unexpected. On atheism, I’d think the most likely scenarios would be either no life—because life is too hard to get—or ubiquitous life, because life is easy to get. It’s surprising on atheism that the real situation is a mix of the two, where life is easy enough to get that it exists somewhere but hard enough to get that it’s rare.

I think the universe being barren is maybe a tie between theism and atheism, though it also maybe favors theism. However, the universe being very large—and likely infinite—in my view clearly favors theism. Thus, the vast scale of the universe is a point in favor of theism. As we’ve seen, the reasons to think a vast or infinite cosmos wouldn’t exist if God did are each flawed on several counts—an infinite cosmos is far likelier given a God than given atheism. The fact that it seems our universe is quite vast—and perhaps infinite—is thus a point in favor of theism. The argument from scale is an own goal; theism is more plausible than it would be if we’d discovered that the universe is small.