A few months ago I wrote a couple of blogs about the Garden of Eden and how God specifically prepared the Garden as a special home for humanity. This is how the new heaven and earth discussed in Revelation is as well. God cares for us and wants to live with us. This recent Christmas we were reminded once again that Jesus’ birth is literally “God with us”, God taking on human form to live among us and provide salvation to those who will believe.

This concept of God preparing a special place for us to live is explored in another sense in a book I read about a decade ago and I’d like to spend a few blogs reviewing that work. The book is Why the Universe is the Way It Is by Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe.

The chapters of the book are written to address specific questions and these will be the focus of my next few non-Life of Paul posts. The questions center around what it is that makes the universe in which we live specially designed for us and how its design fits into God’s over-arching plan for His creation. The questions are:

• Why such a vast universe?
• Why such an old universe?
• Why such a lonely universe?
• Why such a dark universe?
• Why a decaying universe?
• Why a realm beyond this one?
• Why this particular planet, star, galaxy and universe?
• Why believe the Bible?
• Why not a perfect universe?
• Why these physical laws and dimensions?
• Why two creations?
• Why is the new creation better?

Over the coming weeks I plan to summarize this book’s answers to these questions. So, to begin with, why such a vast universe?

As we live here on our planet Earth, it is mind-boggling to consider how big the universe is that contains our tiny planet. The current best estimate, based on photographic telescope evidence, is that the universe contains something like 50 billion trillion stars in over 200 billion galaxies. That’s 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, of which our sun is only one. Ross illustrates this number by suggesting that it would require that many dimes piled 1,500 feet high to cover the entire land surface of North America.

Another vastness of the universe goes beyond the sheer volume needed to hold the number of stars and galaxies. The total mass of the universe is actually quite larger than the mass of the visible stars and galaxies, due to other objects not visible to us (e.g. planets, comets, and other non-luminous matter). It has been calculated that the amount of total mass in the universe is EXACTLY the amount of matter needed to produce the right rates of fusion in the nuclear furnaces of stars, which in turn produces all the elements heavier than hydrogen. Hydrogen fuses into helium, which fuses into XXX (all the other heavier elements). If there is too little universal mass, fusion is too slow and inefficient and doesn’t make enough heavier elements. If fusion is too fast, the lighter elements are consumed and all we’re left with is heavy ones.

A second reason the mass of the universe is critical is the expansion rate. Too little mass and the universe expands too rapidly and cools too fast. Too much mass all the matter would coalesce into super-massive black holes and prohibit the formation of life-essential conditions. Our universe has exactly the right amount of mass to make it able to produce the temperatures and elements necessary for life.

Without descending further into the details, Ross lists a table of components of the mass of the universe, as follows:

Component	Percentage of total mass
Dark energy	72.1%
Exotic dark matter	23.3%
Ordinary dark matter	4.35%
Ordinary bright matter	0.27%
Planets (subset of dark matter)	0.0001%

Studies show that these percentages have varied over the 13.7 billion year history of the universe, but they have consistently maintained the values necessary at all particular times to keep the universe working exactly as it needed to to produce the conditions necessary for life on Earth. This is a concept known as fine-tuning, and there are multiple examples of fine-tuning present in the conditions of the universe.

I’ll probably talk about some of these finely-tuned conditions in other posts. I read an analogy in another book one time (I can’t remember the specifics) that was something like this: The universe has at least 140 factors which are finely-tuned for life to exist on our planet. Imagine a a great control panel with dials, switches, and gauges that control these 140 factors. Some of the factors are just on/off types of factors, while others are so delicately tuned that they can’t vary by more than a micro amount. If someone were to change a dial or flip a switch on this massive control panel, it would affect many if not all of the other factors and the ability for life to exist would be compromised, if not completely destroyed. Not only that, but as the various factors change with time, the other factors have to be adjusted to maintain life’s possibility.

That’s how our universe is. It is so finely-tuned that even atheist scientists have looked at the numbers and said things like:

• The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known that we were coming. – Freeman Dyson
• It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun… except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. – Stephen Hawking

So the sheer size of the universe is just right for our existence. Next time we’ll look at why it was necessary for the universe to exist for 13.7 billion years before we were able to come along to enjoy it!