Hear me now: I am no fan of natural theology. Nein! God considered as a proposition strikes me as laughably implausible. I believe in God because I believe in the incarnate Son, not the other way around.

But then, since the Son implies God in the more familiar divine-attribute guise, I do occasionally have to consider God in this form. I’m OK with all the usuals. Immortal, invisible, God only wise, omniscient, omnipotent. I recently discovered, however, a divine attribute that I could not wrap my mind around. This one: God is big.

This is ridiculous, right? I don’t mean the “God is bigger than that” line you get from people when they really mean they want you to adopt their ideology and abandon your own. I mean actual size.

I discovered this limitation in my divine-attribute imagination in reading a wonderful book by Natalie Angier, a science writer for The New York Times, entitled The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Angier is a hilarious and lively writer, and the book was a gift—it reminded me that I, too, loved science once, before I got all obsessed with the meaning of life and turned to theology for some answers. The universe is truly marvelous. For all the glory we imagine of the angels, it is harder to imagine anything more glorious that the universe itself, from the astounding speed of teeny-tiny electrons whizzing around atomic nuclei to the life and death cycle of stars.

The thing is—this marvelous universe is big. Really, really, really big. I cannot comprehend it. Actually, this is a literally true statement: my anthropically-attuned brain, intended for survival on Planet Earth, really cannot conceive of the size of the universe. I read and hear the statistics and the best I can do is stagger. The universe is somewhere around 93 billion light-years across. Staggering!

Anyway, in reading this, I made the disturbing discovery that for all His omniscience, omnipotence, and even ubiquity, my God is not actually all that big. He is bigger than my own tribe; bigger than my country; bigger than my planet. But on reflection I realized that I’d only gotten God to roughly the size of our solar system—which is a pretty piddly amount relative to the entire universe. My God was manageably sized, not godly-sized. But 93 billion light years! Good heavens! That is too big. Such a God is too far away. In fact, God Himself suddenly seemed to me impossible; a foolish hope of tiny lifeforms cursed with consciousness and desperate for meaning.

It was at this point of size-induced despair that my sort of kind of cosmological variant on the ontological proof of God occurred to me. I could not conceive of God being so big—impossible. But the universe itself is that big. That big is possible: it exists even now. If the existing, limited, having-a-definite-starting-point universe is so big, then the eternal, limitless, no-beginning-and-no-end Alpha and Omega God can be even bigger. So, to paraphrase our pal Anselm, God is bigger than the biggest thing that can be imagined.

That, of course, doesn’t make me any less small (though I’m still a heck of a lot bigger than a quark!). I have heard people express distress over contemporary science and its postulations about the size of the universe etc. because it makes human beings so insignificant by comparison. But honestly, the Bible has always taught us that. As the KJV so incomparably puts it:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. (Psalm 8:3-5)

God is marvelously big; I am ridiculously small; and yet He loves and saves me. Science blessed me with a Psalm 8 moment. Out of the mouths of babes, sucklings, and even contemporary astrophysics!