© 2002 Bud Bromley
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
How big is God? One approach is to ask, “How big is the universe which He pervades? Or, at least, how big is what we presently know of it?”
Let’s start with a map on which the whole Earth is but a circle 1/4 inch in diameter, a garden pea. Then the moon is a tiny glass Indian bead 1/16 of an inch in diameter, located 7.53 inches from the Earth. The sun is a beach ball 27.25 inches in diameter, located 81.4 yards from the Earth, slightly more than 8/10 of the way down a football field. Our outermost planet, Pluto, is a sand grain 1/25 of an inch, or about a millimeter, in diameter, and is 1.8 miles from the sun. Consider that again. The whole Earth which is really about 8,000 miles in diameter, is but 1/4 inch across on our map, yet Pluto, on that same map, is 1.8 miles away from the sun. We are already talking about a map that extends 1.8 miles, and we have just barely begun!
Astronomers often use a unit of measure called a light year. It is the distance which light, going at 186,281 miles per second, goes in one year. It goes about 5,878,680,189,000 miles. To get some idea of this huge distance, think of a meter stick, which is 39.37 inches long. The meter stick is marked in centimeters, and millimeters. The millimeter is about 1/25 of an inch, and there are 1,000 of them to one meter. Let this meter stick represent one light year. Now suppose that someone could get in a car and drive at 65 miles per hour, day and night, with no stops, no holidays. If he drove, non-stop, for 10,317 years, he would have driven just one single millimeter of the way along the meter stick; that is, he would still have 999 more millimeters yet to go to complete just one light year.
To return to our map, which is scaled down just slightly over 2 billion times, one light year is 2926.5 miles long. That is, if we put the sun on a strip of paper starting a few miles east of Los Angeles, our strip of paper would have to stretch nearly to New York City to include just one light year. Remember that our Earth is a 1/4 inch pea.
How many peas would it take in a line to go from Los Angeles to New York City?
Sirius, often called the Dog Star, the brightest star in our sky, is about 8.7 light years away, or 25,460 miles on our map. That’s about once around the Earth in miles. Our paper strip, starting with the sun just east of Los Angeles, would have to go clear around the whole Earth and back to Los Angeles in order to include Sirius, which is one of our very near neighbor stars.
If we can find the Big Dipper, and, starting at the bowl, follow the curve of the handle on beyond the handle, we come to a bright reddish star, Arcturus. Arcturus is 36 light years away, which is 105,354 miles away on our map, or over four times around the Earth. If we continue on around the curve from the Dipper’s handle, we can come to a moderately bright star, Spica, in the constellation Virgo; it is 257 light years away, or 752,114 miles on our map. Our moon is about 240,000 miles away, so our map is already over three times as far out as is the moon! In the bright winter constellation of Orion, the brightest star, Betelgeuse, is 587 light years away; this is 1,717,864 miles away on our map. Orion’s second brightest star, Rigel, is 880 light years away, or 2,575,332 miles away on our map. Deneb, one of the three bright stars forming the winter triangle (Deneb, Vega, and Altair) is the star at the head of the Northern Cross, a part of the constellation of Cygnus. It is 1630 light years away, or 4,770,218 miles on our map. Over four million miles of a map is hard (impossible?) to comprehend, but we are still with stars we can easily see, stars in our near neighborhood! And don’t forget–the real universe is slightly more than 2,000,000,000 times bigger than is our map.
The nearest galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy, thought to be about 2,000,000 light years away. How shall we comprehend a million? Put 1,000 meter sticks together in a line down a road; that will be 1,000,000 millimeters. You are walking down that road. As you walk, visualize the millimeters (twenty fifths of an inch) you are whizzing past at every step. Slightly beyond six tenths of a mile (.6214 miles), you will have passed one million of them. If you were hired to put a pencil dot on each one of the millimeter marks, and you could average three dots per second for eight hours a day, it would take you eleven days, four hours, and 44 minutes to dot all one million marks. Can you imagine going “dot-dot-dot” every second for even just eight hours?
Now put together your understanding of how long one light year is, with your understanding of how many a million is, then double it, and you will appreciate the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galaxy. Astronomers can photograph objects several billion light years away; this is several thousand times as far away as is the Andromeda Galaxy. We can talk about these numbers, but our real comprehension of these distances was overwhelmed long before this.
Incredibly huge as this known universe is, God created it, God sustains it, God fills it, inhabits all of it; and yet, God is probably incomprehensibly greater than even this immense chunk of which we know. The size of God, to fill all this, and more, is but one dimension of His infinity. The intelligence of God, to have devised all this is another dimension of His infinity. And the power of God to sustain all this, all at the same time, is still another dimension of His infinity.
And the greatest miracle is that this inconceivably infinite God lovingly invites each one of us to call Him “Father!”
Bud Bromley is a retired mathematics and English teacher. He is the son of an American Baptist minister, yet Bud tells us he was a much more intelligently logical scholar than the unfortunate stereotype of a hard nosed conservative clergyman. Bud was a flying radio operator in the CBI theater in WW II. He first encountered The Urantia Book in 1957, and was carefully skeptical. However, he reports that when he got to Paper 4, section 5 , paragraph 4, (a refutation of the atonement doctrine) he was compelled to exclaim: “Yes! This has got to be right!” And, ever since, he has been an earnest student of the Urantia Papers. He tells us he has been puzzled often, but never turned off. Bud can be reached at: