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The Center of the Universe

The Center of the Universe

Last updated on: December 3, 2025 at 8:31 am by Gene Veith

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The Center of the Universe 2025-12-03T08:31:34-05:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I am fascinated by what I call “weird science,” scientific discoveries that instead of “disenchanting the universe” like old-fashioned science did, discloses the mind-blowing mysteries of the universe.

That is to say, mysteries in John Kleinig’s sense: “A secret remains a secret only as long as you don’t know it. Once it is revealed, it ceases to be a secret. But a mystery remains a mystery even when it is revealed. In fact, the more you know about it, the more mysterious it becomes.”

A good example of this is the topic of Cody Cottier’s article for Discovery entitled Where Is the Center of the Universe? Stop Looking — It’s Everywhere and Nowhere at Once. Let’s let him explain it:

In 1929. . .the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that every single galaxy beyond ours is speeding away from Earth, and that those farthest away are receding fastest, according to an article published in Astronomy. At first glance, this might seem to suggest that, by some extraordinary coincidence, our humble planet is in fact poised at the center of the universe.

But there’s another explanation, one better supported by observational data and the predictions of relativity theory: the universe looks the same from every perspective, because spacetime itself is expanding uniformly everywhere, according to Britannica. That means there is nothing special about our vantage point; alien astronomers a billion light-years away would see the Milky Way and all other galaxies receding from theirs.

Cottier gives us an illustration:

Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University, suggests that we think of the universe instead as a soap bubble. Importantly, unlike real-life bubbles, this one has no interior or exterior — forget everything but the surface, and consider that you could wander this sudsy realm for eternity without finding a privileged position.

“Everywhere I go on the soap bubble looks like every other place,” Levin says. “No point lays claim to the center.”. . .

Imagine [a soap bubble’s] surface covered with dots, representing galaxies — as the bubble grows, the dots spread farther apart as the space between them stretches. The universe is, of course, three-dimensional, rather than two-dimensional like the bubble’s surface. Yet it behaves in the same way, expanding everywhere at every moment, with nothing you could call a center.

Now scientists used to believe that the earth was the center of the universe, with the planets and stars situated on transparent spheres that rotated around it. This so-called Ptolomaic model of the universe was scientific, in the sense of being based on empirical observation and being mathematically coherent, but it was wrong, as more and more evidence accumulated.

But the effect of the earth-centered view of the universe was to give human beings a privileged place in that universe. God created the universe for us, it was thought, and everything in the universe literally revolved around us.

When the Ptolomaic universe was disproven, replaced because of more accurate observations by the so-called Copernican model of the earth and other planets rotating around the sun, it created an existential crisis. The universe doesn’t revolve around human beings after all.

Then it was found that the sun was not the center of the universe either. Nineteenth century materialists would maintain that the physical universe is infinite. There is no center. Human beings are insignificant blips that somehow evolved on an insignificant planet in the corner of an insignificant galaxy in the vast, empty darkness of a meaningless universe.

And yet, there was a problem with the earth-centered view of the universe, not just the scientific problem that it wasn’t true, but a theological problem. Furthermore, the author who did the most with the symbolic significance of the Ptolomaic universe recognized that problem and corrected it.

At the very end of the Paradiso, Dante’s depiction of Heaven–which he imagined in terms of the planetary spheres–the fictional version of himself who traveled through Hell and Purgatory to finally ascend to God looks back to see how far he has come. At this point, he challenges his own allegorical structure.

From the perspective of Heaven, can we really say that the earth is the center of all that exists or that everything revolves around human beings? Worse, in Dante’s depiction, in which the Inferno is located underground at the midpoint of the globe, the center of the universe would be Hell.

But then, near the climax of the Divine Comedy, just before he experiences the Beatific Vision of beholding the Triune God, Dante’s character in Canto 28 is given a glimpse of the deeper reality. He sees the spheres that he has just flown through, but they are in reverse order than what he experienced and they are rotating around a point of light. It is revealed to him that this point is God, who is the true center of all existence.

C. S. Lewis, who discusses the symbolism of the Ptolomaic system in The Discarded Image and is thought to apply it in The Chronicles of Narnia, does something similar in exploring the symbolic significance of today’s model of the universe in his space trilogy. In Perelandra, Ransom puzzles over “the enemy’s talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe, with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that ‘lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever; and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness” (p. 213).

But then, in the climactic final chapter of the book, in which the spiritual and physical creatures rhapsodize about the “Great Dance,” the true center is revealed:

“Where [God] is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole [God], even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He!” (p. 216)

And because God is the center, every point in His creation–upon which He lavishes His attention that keeps it in existence–is also at the center:

“That Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the centre. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendour of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason; it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!” (p. 216)

And because even every particle of dust scattered throughout the universe is the center, each person, each sinner–everything and everyone that is the object of His love–is also at the center: “Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there. . . . Blessed be He!” (p. 216).

In an infinite or a soap bubble universe, one can say that the universe has no center, so that existence has no meaning; or, with equal validity, that every point is equally the center, so that existence is charged with meaning!

So you really are the center of the universe. Not in the egotistical sense, the black hole of selfishness, but in the sense of being the object of God’s creation, His attention, and His love.

Illustration: from Giovanni di Paolo’s illuminated manuscript of Paradiso (Canto XXVIII), via Picryl, Public domain.

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