Two Trillion Galaxies, Just for Us?

Modern astronomy has revealed a cosmos almost impossible to hold in your head: hundreds of billions of galaxies at minimum, each with hundreds of billions of stars, spread across 93 billion light-years and 13.8 billion years of time.

Against that backdrop sits the central claim of the major monotheisms: the creator of all of it is personally concerned with one primate species on one planet, listening to our prayers and tracking our behavior. That claim deserves a careful look.

The Numbers, Honestly

First, an honest note about our title. A 2016 study estimated the observable universe holds about two trillion galaxies, most too faint for any telescope to see. A 2021 measurement using NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, taken from the darkest sky ever observed, suggests the real number is lower: hundreds of billions. Scientists are still working it out, and that’s science doing its job. Notice that the argument doesn’t care which figure wins. Two hundred billion galaxies or two trillion, the conclusion is the same.

Our own Milky Way holds an estimated 200 to 400 billion stars. Our sun is one of them, ordinary in every measurable way, and NASA’s Kepler mission taught us that planets outnumber stars, with billions of roughly Earth-size worlds likely orbiting in habitable zones in our galaxy alone. Earth isn’t the center of anything. It isn’t even unusual.

Time tells the same story. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, Earth about 4.5 billion. Anatomically modern humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years, which is about 0.007 percent of Earth’s history. Written records cover about 5,000 years: roughly 0.0001 percent. So the claim on the table is that an eternal being created 13.8 billion years of cosmos, then focused its primary attention on the last sliver of one planet’s timeline, when a few particular religions appeared in one corner of it.

How the Claim Kept Moving

Here’s the interesting part: religion used to make this claim in a testable form, and the test failed. Medieval theology placed Earth at the literal center of creation, with the heavens circling around us. In that cosmos, special divine concern for humanity made structural sense. Then Copernicus moved the Earth, Galileo showed it obeys the same laws as everything else, and Newton showed one force governs it all. Each discovery made Earth more ordinary.

Believers adjusted, and honestly, most did so gracefully: geocentrism was dropped, heliocentrism accepted. But the core claim of special concern didn’t get abandoned. It got relocated, from Earth’s physical position (testable, and shown wrong) to humanity’s spiritual significance (conveniently untestable). When a claim moves out of reach every time it’s shown wrong, rather than being given up, that’s a pattern worth noticing. We see it in the god of the gaps too.

Could a God Still Care About Us Anyway?

Of course. An omniscient being could attend to every planet the way an architect could care about every brick. Scale doesn’t make cosmic concern impossible. What scale does is remove the reason to expect it. A developer who builds ten thousand identical stores might have a favorite, but you’d want some evidence before believing the whole mall was built for that one store’s employees. With the universe, the claim is bolder still: trillions of stars and worlds, and the whole thing is fundamentally about us. Absent evidence of that concern, the sheer proportions make it look like exactly what a small social species, evolved to think in terms of parents, tribes, and attention, would naturally imagine about its sky.

Interestingly, some ancient thinkers were more clear-eyed about this than we tend to be. The Greek gods weren’t doting cosmic parents; Zeus had his own agenda, and humans were bit players. The Stoics went further: they accepted that the cosmos doesn’t revolve around you, and taught people to build meaning from virtue and reason instead. That’s a philosophy already at peace with what the telescopes would eventually confirm.

What Would We Expect to See?

If the universe were made for humanity, we might expect a cosmos scaled to us: a sky arranged around our world, a timeline that begins roughly when we do. That’s the universe our ancestors sincerely believed they lived in, and it’s the universe their scriptures describe. If instead humanity is one recent species on one ordinary planet, we’d expect what we actually found: crushing scale, deep time, and no detectable special arrangement anywhere. Every improvement in our instruments has moved us further from the center, and never once back toward it.

None of this diminishes us, by the way. A universe this large, understood by creatures this small, is a genuinely remarkable thing, and the wonder is real whether or not anyone built it for you.

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