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Up until relatively recently people considered our solar system and the stars above (whatever they were) to be thee center of god's creation. Eventually some of the dots in the sky were recognized to be planets that revolved around our earth, as did the Sun, all of which made up our solar system. This was corrected when it was confirmed that the Earth and these other planets went around the Sun. Some time later it was discovered that the stars were just like our sun: our Sun was star. With better equipment, astronomers then found that some of the other "stars" were actually great "clouds" of light, which they called nebulae. Further investigation revealed that these nebulae were actually tremendous accumulations of stars, which they termed galaxies. (The term "nebula" has since been changed to denote great clouds of interstellar dust and other ionized gasses.) And there are trillions of these galaxies. So our "universe" went from being a solar system, to include the vast reaches of space, But the structure of our universe doesn't end there. The gravity between galaxies has drawn them into enormous clumps, which in turn form galaxy superclusters---our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster. Moreover, the distances between all these elements of the universe are enormous, usually denoted in light years; the distance light travels in one year. The closest spiral galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), which is two million light years away.
To give you an idea of how immense the universe is,
"Right now, the observable universe is thought to consist of roughly:
10 million superclusters
25 billion galaxy groups
350 billion large galaxies
7 trillion dwarf galaxies
30 billion trillion (3×10^22) stars, with almost 30 stars going supernova every second"
source
Within the Milky Way galaxy our star is 1 among 100-400 billion other stars.
And:
So, the question is, "Why"? Why did god bother with it all? While the existence of our plant and the life on it depend on the configuration of our solar system, they don't depend on the existence of neighboring stars, the Milky Way, other galaxies, galaxy superclusters or any other far reaching structures of the universe.
Of course, I don't expect any answer to be more than speculation, but I am looking to see how one squares the enormity of the universe, both in size and content, with the contention that it was all designed by god.
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Hi Skyrim. (Lol)
At first those who dwelled in different lands thought that we fell off the world if we travelled beyond the horizon and that the world was flat. But after time we found that we lived on a globe with other land masses and that other races and tribes existed in other lands.
In the as of yet completely ‘unexplored’ universe we see the same thing but on a massive scale. I don’t believe that the entire creation was put in place just for us. We are told that we are not alone by our Founder, Baha’u’llah Who states...
Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute. – Baha’u’llah,
And His Son Abdul-Baha explained further...
The earth has its inhabitants, the water and the air contain many living beings… then how is it possible to conceive that these stupendous stellar bodies are not inhabited? Verily, they are peopled, but let it be known that the dwellers accord with the elements of their respective spheres. These living beings do not have states of consciousness like unto those who live on the surface of this globe: the power of adaptation and environment molds their bodies and states of consciousness, just as our bodies and minds are suited to our planet. – Abdu’l-Baha, Divine Philosophy, pp. 114-115
