Video: How Big Is The Universe?

Short answer: no one knows, and many scientists qua scientists probably know the least of all.

If the age is being calculated using most Big Bang theories, it’s probably wrong. Assuming Alfvén was being truthful of what Lemaître’s said (the 3:00 mark), establishing a timeline of creation using Aquinas would be starting down the wrong path. The grammar of the creation account in Genesis 1 strongly implies that God didn’t create the world ex nihilo, but instead created the universe from “stuff” that was already existing. Please note Heiser’s brief explanation of how we think versus how an ancient Mesopotamian man would think, and thus how an ancient Mesopotamian man would communicate through his writing.

True, God created this “stuff” in the first place, but whatever that primordial raw material was doing just sitting there was irrelevant to the Genesis writer or his audience. Whether it was around for a Planck second or a trillion years before creation started, or in some manner we’re not able to conceive of, was also not a concern. There’s not any way they could know aside from divine inspiration, and God didn’t see it fit to include those details in scripture. Genesis 1 wasn’t supposed to be an exhaustive explanation as we modern minds would expect it.

Here’s my take, based on absolutely nothing but what I’m currently thinking: I don’t think the universe is completely separate from the eternal realm but is more subsumed by it, like a walled garden inside a vast estate. We are closed off from accessing beyond the garden while in mortal bodies, while unincorporated divine beings would have no problem (with the Lord’s permission) coming and going in some fashion. If there is a cosmological border to the universe, we wouldn’t be able to perceive it, nor would the determination of the beginning of its creation be accessible to us—there’d an infinite parade of confounding variables waiting to march through and blow our whole structure of knowledge away. Our universe’s origins weren’t meant to be known to us this side of mortality.