Let’s get one thing straight right now: The purpose of the universe cannot be to supply a place for human beings.

If your church wants to claim that there are intelligent, civilized, religious (and ensouled!) space aliens out there every 8-10 planets or so, the purpose of the universe being to house ensouled religious beings is still pretty stupid. Remember that the background energy of each unit of space is non-zero. The universe is positively awash in energy.

We might consider an intergalactic cubic meter to contain a small amount of energy compared to our energy-dense planets and sun, but the sheer number of cubic meters of intergalactic space is impossible for a human to truly comprehend. We can look at a large number written in exponential notation and declare it larger or smaller than some other large number. We can plug the number into this calculation or that, but there’s no way for a human being to comprehend the number itself.

There is no everyday experience we have of counting things that high or even looking at that many things: our eyes include a finite number of retinal cells, only a subset of them sense light, and thus even if all of them were activated at once, and each and every one perceived a different specific object, and the brain successfully processed and “understood” each cell’s signal as a discrete object, we’d still be dealing with a finite set of perceived objects that is so dramatically less than the number of cubic meters of interstellar space that even the quotient of cubic-meters-over-seen-objects would be a number too vast for human comprehension.

To say that the expenditure of energy used to create this intergalactic space would be wasteful in a universe created for the purpose of housing religious, ensouled beings is an understatement that literally defies description.

But take it that one step further: imagine that the doofuses who say that the universe was created just for humans are correct. Now, not only all that intergalactic energy is wasted, but so is all the energy contained within every galaxy other than the Milky Way. Though it’s a trivial addition to the total, unless you believe that stellar nucleosynthesis was necessary to create the elements – presumably because a god who can create universes can’t actually create atoms for some reason – then all the energy used to create the Milky Way other than that used to create the solar system was also wasted. That’s the vast, vast, vast majority of that energy, by the way. Our solar system contains less than 1 part in 100 billion of all the Milky Way’s energy. Put it another way, you could save 99% of the energy used to create the Milky Way and you still would have spent too much by a factor larger than one billion.

To spend all that energy on the creation of a home for a single species whose important bits (the souls of its individual members) take up no time or space at all is so stupid that any god who came up with the idea for this universe as a home to ensouled humans would have to be so daft as to render us daft to even consider that such a being might be worthy of worship.

Sure, theology being what it is people can dream up other reasons why a god might create this universe. But that misses the point: the point is that even if this universe was created by a god, human beings can’t be the purpose of that creation or even a priority within that creation. We can’t even be a priority within the Milky Way, given the amount of energy spent on our habitat vs the total amount of energy contained in this galaxy.

If there is a god that purposefully created this universe, that purpose wasn’t humans.