Galaxies like Grains of Sand (Hubble Space Telescope, Fair Use)
Riders on the Earth
Why HWA’s Unfinished Furniture Model Doesn’t Work
By Scout
There is something we need to think about. As Archibald MacLeish wrote, “we are riders on the earth together.” We are a little group of people, and we ride on a planet called Eretz circling a star called Shemesh. We are all riding on this bright cerulean planet as it moves through the grand expanse of the Cosmos. And the grand expanse is thickly populated by celestial objects. These shining celestials pose a constant question to us as we look up at the vault of heaven about human destiny that is not answered.
There is a huge problem with the idea that our destiny is to colonize the Cosmos. Such a colonization is the basis of HWA’s Unfinished Furniture model. That is the idea that the Cosmos is unfinished, is now in a state of disarray, and glorified humanity in resurrected form will ascend to the stars and finish it. The problem is quantifiable. There is not enough of us. The observable Cosmos is too large. I will begin with the calculations.
The Arithmetic
The famous Andromeda galaxy is estimated to hold about a trillion stars. Earlier in my lifetime, nobody knew if there were any planets outside of our solar system. I remember a deacon giving a sermonette in the WCG and fabulously calculating how many stars we would each get in the next life. I wondered what I would do with a big bunch of hot, uninhabitable stars. Roast weenies? Toast marshmallows?
Then there was an epiphany. Astrophysicists realized that as a planet crossed the disk of the star it was orbiting, at the right angle of viewing, it would cause the luminosity of the star to fluctuate. Spectrographic analysis gives them further information about these distant planets. The astonishing conclusion they have made is that our galaxy is rich with planets. There are more planets than there are stars. After reading about this, it occurred to me that our Cosmos has an enormous potential for supporting life as we know it. We don’t know how many of these planets are in the Goldilocks Zone, the orbit where planetary conditions would be conducive to life. Some number greater than zero. Maybe much greater than zero.
I will be brief with the arithmetic. The Andromeda galaxy contains about a trillion stars and is about 260,000 light years across the disk. This means that it contains more than a trillion widely spaced planets, but I will assume a trillion. Scientists estimate that 117 billion people have lived on the earth since the emergence of Homo Sapiens. This population figure is inflated for Armstrongists because it includes what they would call pre-adamic men who have no salvific potential. If we deduct pre-adamic man, the population figure becomes 108 billion. I will use this smaller number even though I think it is still too large. In the Andromeda galaxy alone, then, there are about nine planets per person.
What this means is that if you terra-form all the planets, as in the HWA’s Unfinished Furniture model, you could dump the entire population of all human beings that ever existed into the Andromeda galaxy, alone with each person living on a planet unimaginably distant from the next person. This is not a kingdom, society, or culture. This is isolation.
The problem is that there is not enough of us, even with an optimistic population figure. It is estimated that there are 2 trillion galaxies in just the observable universe. The problem is staggering. This was not a problem in the ancient Semitic model of the Cosmos, where the blue sky held water, was not that far away, and had little lights twinkling in it. But modern science has given us a different dataset. All speculations, including HWA’s, are overtaken by enormity. The size problem suggests some larger, unknown purpose is afoot. This means there will have to be some changes to our thinking. I have a few conjectures.
The Conjectural Options
Option 1: Humans Continue to Reproduce. Most readers of the New Testament believe that at some point in the future, all physical human beings will have been resurrected and there will no longer be physical human beings. The problem of colonizing the Cosmos suggests this might not be the case. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. This connects human reproduction to the constructive use of the planet. What, then, about the Cosmos? Maybe a strain of physical human beings will continue. I don’t think the Bible specifically states that human physical life will cease. Maybe this planet will continue to be the baby factory that it now is. The downside is that with a nine-month gestation period and the investment of time in raising a child, populating the Cosmos is going to be very, very slow. The upside is that there is an eternity to do it.
Option 2: Maybe the Cosmos is already populated. How would we know? This distances are insurmountable for us now. Does it seem reasonable that there would be an incomprehensibly large Cosmos with only one tiny, out-of-the-way planet bearing a population? What is the value of empty? The upside of this option is that it solves the formidable problem of deploying a population from a single planet. The downside is that if the cosmic populations are fallen, as we are, Jesus would have to go to each planet and be sacrificed. Once is enough. So, this is not a likely option.
Option 3: Maybe we are more localized than we think. Perhaps deep space is not for us. The Old Testament is very earth-centric. And on earth, the focus was on the promised land. The model involves a certain people living in a certain location with a set of national laws and blessings. With the Gentiles in outer darkness. How much of Creation do we need to be happy? Maybe our locus is this solar system, and the rest of the Cosmos is for another purpose. Maybe deep space is so irrelevant to us that we will never even know its purpose. Maybe for us, it is just a display for our aesthetic fancy.
Scenarios that Don’t Work
The HWA Scenario: The Unfinished Furniture scenario just does not work. There’s not enough of us to make it work. Even if we were not bound by spacetime. We would expend a huge amount of time, it would seem like an eternity, nudging planets into the Goldilocks orbit and terra-forming them. And in the end, the whole Cosmos would be made habitable, but there would be almost nobody to live in it. It is an appealing idea, but the arithmetic against it is inexorable.
But even worse, we don’t know how big the Cosmos actually is. We instead think in terms of the observable Cosmos. We haven’t found any boundaries. It could be a trillion times larger than what we can see. Or more. As resurrected spirit beings, we might have great capabilities but there is the problem of sheer numbers – too much creation, too few beings.
The Atheism Scenario: The atheistic solution to this problem is that there is no God, no afterlife, and nothing that links human destiny to the stars. Atheism does not have a big picture. Philosophically, the difference between a human and an amoeba in a godless universe is only a matter of size. Both are just physical organisms, in the atheist view, in transit throughout life towards the finality of death. But before the atheist solution can be applied to this downstream problem, it must settle matters way further upstream. Like, why is there something rather than nothing? And why does the something have organization? I am not persuaded by atheism.
Summation
It is presumptuous to believe that our little population of riders on the earth will colonize the Cosmos. We are too few in number. And in addition, God says to rejoice forever in what he creates. It sounds like the creation is just going to get bigger and bigger. Even though we might have super spirit being capabilities, what would be the point in making the whole Cosmos habitable? It’s like having trillions and trillions of beautiful mansions with only a few hundred people to live in them (The arithmetic is even worse than my figure or speech.) We need to go back to the drawing board. In all the homiletic glibness, we are missing something.
