Humanity's Insignificance

There is an objection to Christianity that I have heard many times, and I'm afraid it's a rather stale one.  I don't think it holds any weight, and in fact with historical Christianity in view it falls flat.  The objection is that Christianity fails to take account of the immensity of the universe, and just how insignificant all of humanity is next to it.  In fact, Christianity puts humanity at the center of the universe.  You'll find this objection in the writings of Dawkins, Sagan, and many others.

But as it turns out, these objectors were anticipated by some 3,500 years.  In the words of a shepherd,

When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

The idea of man's smallness and insignificance has found its way into Christian writing for centuries.  This is not news. In the words of C.S. Lewis,

It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things.  It comes to intensify them.  Without such sensations there is no religion.  Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

There we find what may be the source of the objection (and so many others like it) - "the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity."  It isn't that Christianity as properly understood is somehow found wanting.  The problem is that really shallow forms of Christianity have a powerful influence on our culture, and it is often taken as representative of orthodox Christianity.

But read the psalms, the proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the words of Jesus, the writings of the early church fathers, and the writings of Luther, Edwards, Spurgeon, and so many others - and you'll find that humanity is in fact insignificant.  Utterly insignificant.  And yet the Creator of the universe cares for us and loves us.  That is one of the great mysteries and sources of wonder in Christianity - that God loves us despite our smallness. Lewis explains it well.

If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it.  Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.