If we consider the absurdly specific details, all of which had to be lined up perfectly, in order for you to have been born and exist, on this planet, as you are… it’s breathtaking.

Solar System

Earth is not just a rock in space. Far from it; this rock is very special. It’s 93million miles from the sun, a modest star, all things considering. A little further away, and plants would not receive adequate sunlight for vegetation to thrive on this planet. A little closer, and it would be too hot for life as we know it. There’s also a delicate balance of oxygen. A little less, and we would have huge trouble completing even simple tasks. A little more, and there would be hawk-sized mosquitoes buzzing around. It’s terribly convenient that our planet has a certain amount of water, the right elements, in the right atmospheric conditions.

Even if everything else was perfect and we were still in the solar system without Jupiter or Saturn, we would be bombarded by comets and meteors since they act as gigantic cosmic vacuum cleaners with such a great gravity that they pull space junk in.

We are also in an unsettlingly convenient spot in our galaxy, which is filled with hundreds of millions of stars, many of whom are much bigger and brighter than our sun. It’s a spiral galaxy, and we are not all the way inside one of the arms; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to see very much of the universe beyond us.

At the same time the earth is spinning once every 24 hours, it’s passing around the sun at 20mi every second, which makes one complete journey every 365 days. The sun is concurrently making its own trip around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, traveling about 150 mi./s, which is a leisurely pace, considering it will take another couple hundred million years for the sun (and our solar system) to complete a revolution.

Forces

And what about the fact that the universe has consistent equations and constants that determine everything about the way its particles interact? For instance, let’s think about gravity. Stephen Hawking said, “If the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in 1000 million million the second after the big bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or would never have developed galaxies.” If gravity was a force only a little bit stronger, the entire universe would have collapsed back on itself. If it was just a little bit weaker, the universe would have dispersed to practical nothingness before any particles could coalesce to form planets, much less life.

If the strong force (or the week force) were adjusted, atoms of the elements carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, hydrogen, and more would not be able to exist as we know it. They would be larger or smaller significantly because of a change in the attractive forces between protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

Yes, the universe is big. There are about as many stars as there are grains of sand on every beach on every continent on the planet.

Genetics

Now we have shown our unlikely it is for life even to exist, but what about your life? Your mother and father both had 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent. When a single one of your mother’s hundreds of eggs was met by one of your father’s hundreds of millions of sperm, you were conceived by a genetic combination so unique that we couldn’t re-create it if we tried.

Imagine each parent only had one set of chromosomes to choose from. There would be 4 possible combinations from the two of them. That’s 2×2. Now assume three chromosomes pairs per parent. That’s 2×2×2×2×2×2, which is two to the sixth power (2^(2×3)). The total possible combinations from simply your two parents is two to the 46th power (2^(2×23)). For those of you that don’t have a calculator handy, that’s somewhere north of 70 trillion. The total number of humans who have ever lived is on the order of tens of billions, so that means that, unless you have an identical twin, not only has there never been anyone like you, but that there will never be another person like you in all of history, 1000 times over!

You existing is an utter miracle. If anyone of those variables had been a hair’s breadth to the right or to the left, either our galaxy would not exist, or our solar system would not exist, or earth would not exist, or, perhaps the most statistically befuddling of them all, you would not be here in this moment, reading this right now. Let’s stand in awe of how much perfectly coincided to allow the unique you to exist. Now give thanks to God.

Attention to detail

With such a big universe to handle, I would imagine that God has much bigger things on his mind. Considering the vastness of the cosmic arrays and the well-theorized possibility that other universes besides our own might exist, it’s natural for us to ask the same question as the Psalmist.

Psalms 8:3-4

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

Perhaps even a greater wonder then the fact of our existence is we conspicuous care God takes towards such infinitesimal creatures.

Psalms 139:17-18

How precious to me are your thoughts, God!

How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,

they would outnumber the grains of sand…

I believe the only appropriate response is no different than it was 3000 years ago.

Psalms 8:9

LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Yes, Lord, You are indeed majestic.