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The insignificance of Earth.
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When it comes to the universe and our place in it, believers of the Abrahamic traditions make an astounding claim. A powerful god created the Earth and the humans to inhabit it. He knows each of us personally. He sees all we do, and he knows all we think. God created a place of bliss and another for punishment that awaits us in the afterlife. The religious position assumes the greatness our place in the universe, and the significance of this planet we occupy.
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Reality, however, points elsewhere. While the prevalence of life in the universe is still unknown to scientists, our planet is most trivial any way you look at it. Planet Earth orbits an ordinary star in a fairly typical solar system of a regular galaxy. We lie two-thirds of the way from the center of the Milky Way in a random, unimpressive spot. The Earth is a pebble to Jupiter, just as Jupiter is to the sun. And yet, the sun is a relatively small star.
In an average galaxy, even the biggest star is no more than a tiny speck of light. Our Milky Way has 200 billion stars. In some of the larger galaxies, the Milky Way would, much like a mischievous child in a large classroom, sit unnoticed in a small corner. Those largest of galaxies are nothing but a grain of sand in our massive universe with its hundreds of billions of galaxies.
And yet, with all its trillions of stars, the universe is mostly empty. If the entire universe was a glass box in a laboratory, it would be emptier than the most perfect human-made vacuum. That is because of the massive distances between the various objects in the universe. The Alpha Centuri star system is the closest to our own. It is merely 4 light years away. Assuming perfect conditions, the fastest space shuttle ever created would need over 50,000 years to reach Alpha Centuri. To reach the Andromeda galaxy (closest galaxy to the Milky Way), it would take us billions of years. In cosmological distances, the Andromeda is our conjoined twin.
To think that a personal god created all of this only to watch us follow his arbitrary rules is just as arrogant as it is laughable. It is no wonder that in a survey of the religious attitudes of the members of National Academy of Sciences, 97% of physicists expressed serious doubt or disbelief in the existence of god.
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