THE journey from Philadelphia to San Francisco takes four days by train. I once travelled those 3300 miles to get a sense of the scale of the United States. The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission travelled almost 700,000 miles, taking ten days. To put it mildly, they got a sense of the scale of our part of the solar system.
One of the four, Victor Glover, reflected on the mission after their safe return. He described the sight of the Earth and the moon along the way as an experience that seemed “too big” for his body to contain.
In 1987, the American writer and space philosopher Frank White coined the term “overview effect” to describe the effect on astronauts of seeing the Earth from afar, provoking a sort of euphoria, often with a mystical intuition of connectedness.
Edgar Mitchell, of the Apollo 14 expedition in 1971, described that he had experienced “a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught”. He continued: “My understanding of the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony — a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. I was part of a larger natural process than I’d previously understood.”
More recently, the novelist Samantha Harvey dwelt on the effect of seeing the Earth from space in her 2023 book Orbital, which won the Booker Prize the year after (Book Club, 1 November 2024). She described it as an exercise in imaginative nature writing, albeit from an unexpected vantage point — a “space pastoral”, as she put it.
Often, theology has not been far from the reflections of Western astronauts. When Victor Glover described how he felt, he added that he wanted “to thank God in public” for what he had experienced. Another Artemis astronaut, Reid Wiseman, said that — although “not really a religious person” — when he returned to Earth, he knew he needed to speak to a chaplain and found the sight of a cross moved him to tears in a way he could not explain.
I WROTE “Western astronauts” above, because the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov toed the atheist Soviet line in 1962 (a year after his Vostok II mission). In space, he said, “I saw neither angels nor God.” This puts me in mind of some words of C. S. Lewis: “Looking for God — or heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth.
“Those who do not find God on Earth are unlikely to find Him in space,” he continued. “But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on Earth. Much depends on the seeing eye.”
On the other hand, the vastness of space has been invoked by some, especially in the 20th century, as an argument against religion or a theological view of the world. A good example comes in the astronomer and broadcaster Carl Sagan’s influential book Pale Blue Dot (1994). He wrote: “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant.’ Instead they say, ‘No, no, no. My god is a little god and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
As a statement about this history of thought, this is simply wrong. It displays a staggering lack of familiarity with Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, to name only three. However, Sagan was far from unusual in making that claim. In 1943, Lewis reflected on — and rejected — the arguments he was coming across, against God and religion based on the size of the universe, which some were claiming as “an excellent example of those things which our ancestors did not know and which, if they had known them, would have prevented the very beginnings of Christianity”.
The fact is that we have known that the universe is staggeringly large since antiquity. Consider Boethius (circa AD 480-524), who wrote that “the whole circumference of the Earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens; in fact, if the two are compared, the Earth may be considered to have no size at all.” Like Cicero (106-43 BC) before him, he invoked this fact to teach a proper humility, not as if that dispensed with the idea of God, but precisely as the idea of God also teaches.
WE COULD go further. Our forebears even tried to put some numbers on these distances. Thus Aquinas and Calvin knew that there are planets in our solar system larger than the moon, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (AD 1135/8-1204) estimated the distance from the Earth to Saturn as around 125 million miles. In one sense, he was quite wrong. It’s more like 890 million miles. But in terms of what matters for the human imagination and our felt sense of the scale of things, he was more right than wrong.
Not much rests, on that front, on whether it is 125 million miles or seven times bigger than that. And, yes, we now know that there are solar systems beyond our own, and galaxies beyond our galaxy. Even so, the point remains that our religious traditions have long appreciated that the Earth is “no more than a pinpoint” and adding additional noughts to the size of the cosmos does not change that very much.
Theologians have long been aware that the universe is unfathomably large, and that the Earth and human beings are as nothing when it comes to size. They have also recognised that this is beside the point. As the American rabbi, Norman Lamm, put it: “The claim by a race to spiritual dignity and intrinsic metaphysical value does not depend on a ‘good’ cosmic address. . . God makes Himself available to His creatures wherever they are in His immense universe. He is not a social snob who will not be seen in the cosmic slums and alleys.”
Instead, he wrote, the mistake lies with anyone who thinks that scale determines dignity. God “is not bewildered by numbers”. G. K. Chesterton had said something similar: “I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world — I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size.”
While these writers have come to the defence of theology here, others have been more perturbed by the size of the universe, at least if it contains no other life. In earlier centuries, that was sometimes expressed in the muddled proposition that if God created habitable places, God would make them habited, and uninhabited worlds would be an offence to that logic. More recently, in the 20th century, the French theologian Jean Guitton wrote that a universe with no life beyond Earth would be a “plinth too large for the sculpture”.
To that I would make two replies. One is that it’s too anthropomorphic to say that star clusters and frozen moons, or neutron stars and supernovae, or gravitational waves or the aurora borealis in the skies of uninhabited planets are merely part of the “plinth”, and not part of the “sculpture”. Although I am happy to imagine that there is other life in the universe, even other intelligent life, that’s not the only sort of value there is in the cosmos.
On the other hand, as my second response, if the whole vast universe were a “plinth” for the “statue” that is life on Earth — and human life and culture in particular — it would not be too large or excessive. As Frank Ramsey put it (Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s older brother), “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love — and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does.” Or, as Blaise Pascal put it in the 17th century, “By space the universe encompasses and engulfs me as a point; by thought I encompass it.”
That, probably, is to go too far. We should be humbled by the heavens, as the writer of Psalm 8 was humbled. But, like the Psalmist, we should also find there provocation to recognise human greatness: because we can think and love, unlike the most impressive red giant or black hole, because God has chosen to address us, and because God has come among us, to lift us to the dignity of his sons and daughters.
The Revd Prof Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and the author of Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe (Cambridge, 2023).