Man's view of the universe has progressed from when he first gazed in awe at the heavens and decided that the sky was a vast dome, or firmament, which had holes through which light shined to produce the pinpoints of light called stars. The problem was that some of the stars moved, and they called these wanderers 'movable stars.' This dome also included the sun, and the whole dome revolved around the earth in 24 hours. Then Galileo used his crude telescope to discover Jupiter and four of its moons. As a result of his observations, he postulated a heliocentric solar system, and that the movable stars were actually planets like the earth, revolving around the sun.
Since these primitive beginnings less than a century ago, man has discovered that the earth is a part of a giant spiral universe, the Milky Way, composed of millions of stars, and that there are innumerable other such universes, or galaxies, scattered like dust across the cosmos. Because of certain scientific observations such as spectral red-shift, astronomers have postulated a "big bang" theory for the origin of all things.
Nowadays, they are toying with the idea of multiple universes, sort of like bubbles, each one diverse from the others, and each one with its own fundamental physical laws. Some cosmologists say that our own universe, which is some 14 billion light years deep, could only be a small patch of a vast bubble of a much more vast ensemble produced by an endless chain of big bangs.
Someone has said that we live in a "lucky" universe. A change of only half a percent in the force that holds the nuclear structure together would cause catastrophic changes in nature; if it were a little larger, stars would not burn; if it were a little smaller, molecules could not form. Brandon Carter, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge, has pointed out that these coincidences are not due to luck. He has invented what he calls the "anthropic principle." It declares that the universe is somehow designed for life; the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
This theory seems very close to admitting that the universe has a designer. Much of what we see in nature confirms the existence of design, from the tiny cells to the starry heavens we see order and design. Creationists's believe in a divine Creator, or designer if you wish, and that in Him do "all things consist." Since God has stated that He made the earth (and probably the universe) to be inhabited (Gen. 45:18), then I believe it is logical to assume that God must be the "anthropic principle."
