Why did God take 14 Billion Years to Create Human Beings?

Towards the end of my earlier article, “Why did God take 14 Billion Years to Create the Physical World?” I said:

The development of complex, rational, spiritually aware beings under material-universe conditions is a long, complex task that had to go step-by-step from the primeval amoeba all the way to the human body and the mind it contains.

In this follow-up article, prompted by further questions in the comments section by the reader named World Questioner whose questions sparked the previous article, we’ll dig into one more aspect of why God took so long to create the universe.

Traditional Christians who lean towards the literalist side believe that God created humans in less than a day. Today’s science says that it took several billion years for biological evolution to produce human beings, and nine or ten billion years before that for physics to produce our habitable earth.

Personally, I’ll go for the timescale presented by modern science. As I said in the previous article, if God is truly infinite and omnipotent, this vast, ancient universe is a much better reflection and illustration of God than a small universe that’s only a few thousand years old.

Besides, human beings are immensely complex creatures both physically and psychologically. Few people realize just how complex we are. Let’s take a closer look at the wondrous creation that is us.

Human creations

(Full disclosure: I used Google Gemini to provide most of the facts and figures in this article. Readers are welcome to look up human sources for themselves to verify any of the figures that might seem suspect. If any of them are off, I will be happy to correct the article based on those human sources.)

We humans are rather proud of our creations. From stone tools and arrowheads, we’ve moved to high technology and producing highly complex machines. The average automobile, for example, has about 2,000 parts, but if you count all the individual nuts and bolts, it’s more like 30,000 parts. And we’re popping out almost one hundred million of them per year. Impressive!

But wait, there’s more! A modern aircraft has more like six million individual parts, if you count each bolt and rivet. That’s also about how many parts there are in our biggest rockets, such as the iconic Saturn V rocket that carried the astronauts to the moon over fifty years ago. And the International Space Station beats ’em all, with an estimated part count of over ten million total parts and fasteners.

However, although the International Space Station is the most complex thing we humans have put into orbit, here on earth the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland is estimated to have hundreds of millions of individual components. It is the most complex machine ever built by humans.

But wait, there’s even more! If you count each transistor of a modern computer chip as a “part,” our most advanced GPU chips now pack over two hundred billion of them onto a chip the size of a postage stamp. And if you multiply that by the number of chips in our largest supercomputers and data centers, we’re talking ten to one hundred quadrillion parts in our most complex machines. That’s a one followed by 17 zeroes.

Take that, God!

God’s creation

God just yawns. “Got ya covered!”

Taking that last one, let’s compare the largest supercomputers and data centers to the human brain and nervous system. The human brain has about 86 billion neurons, and there are tens of billions more in the rest of the nervous system as it spreads throughout the body.

That’s an impressive number. And if you multiply it by the 8 billion people on the earth today, we humans are walking around with one hundred million times more “chips” than we humans have ever produced (about six to eight trillion computer chips produced to date).

If you drill down to the level of transistors on printed computer chips, and the analogous biological switches represented by the individual ion channels and receptors in the neurons—of which there are one to ten million in each neuron—today’s human population represents hundreds of thousands or even millions of times more “transistors” than our total manufacturing output of computer chips to date.

Even a single human brain has ten times more “transistors” than our largest data centers.

Body parts

Now let’s look at part counts.

Physiologists say that the human body has about 78 organs. Not too impressive, compared to a car’s 2,000 parts.

That is, until you start counting each individual part of the body separately, rather than systems of organs, such as the muscular system or the skeletal system. Now we’re talking about 7,500 parts in a human body. If you want a list of them, and you have a thing for Latin, take a look at the “Terminologica Anatomica” list of standardized Latin names for parts of the human body maintained by the Federative International Programme on Anatomical Terminology. That will definitely keep you out of trouble for a while!

“But,” you say, “Cars still have more parts! You said cars have 30,000 parts!”

Cell counts

Ah, but that’s comparing apples to oranges. That 30,000 number counts every single nut, bolt, screw, and clip in the car. Human bodies don’t exactly have nuts, bolts, and clips. But just to make some reasonable comparison, let’s count the number of cells in a human body, since these are the basic building blocks of all the organs, much like the nuts, bolts, rivets, and castings in a transmission are the basic building blocks of the transmission.

So, how many cells are there in the human body?

Drum roll please . . .

30 to 37 trillion.

Cars can’t even compare. Even our most complex machine, the Large Hadron Collider, with its estimated hundreds of millions of parts, is a mere piker compared to a single human body.

You know, that thing you walk around in every day without giving it a second thought?

Organelle counts

And cells are not the smallest parts we’re made of. Not by a long shot. You probably learned in high school biology that cells have three parts: the cell membrane, the cytoplasm, and the nucleus.

Not so fast! Each cell is a complex organism on its own, containing 2,000 to 5,000 distinct organelles and structures. The multiplication is a bit complicated, because different cells have different numbers of organelles, and red blood cells, by far the most common cell in the body, have very few of them. But taking that into account, if you do the multiplication, you come up with about twenty-seven quadrillion parts in the human body. That’s 16 zeroes, or digits, after the initial 2, if you’re counting. An order of magnitude lower than the number of transistors in our largest data centers.

But . . . I’m holding out on you. That doesn’t count the ribosomes in the cells. These are the basic “processing units” of a cell, whose job is to synthesize proteins. Each cell contains up to ten million of them. Include the ribosomes in our human body part count, and you’re up to about 45 quintillion parts in the human body, which brings us up to 19 zeroes—two orders of magnitude higher than the number of transistors in our largest data centers.

So, you are walking around in a body that, for its complexity and part count, puts our most complex and vaunted technology to shame. We humans are nowhere close to producing anything as complex as the human body.

Machines vs. biology

That’s especially so because even a raw part count doesn’t give the full picture. Once we manufacture something, it’s set in stone, so to speak. The transistors in a computer chip are simple on/off switches, and they’re fixed in place and unchanging from the time they are manufactured until the chip wears out and is discarded. But our smallest “parts” are themselves complex, living, biological structures that are always changing and adapting to the changing conditions and environment in which they, and we as human beings, live.

And one more factoid: Those huge data centers that still don’t have quite the raw processing power of a single human brain require hundreds of megawatts of power—enough to power a medium-sized city. Our brain does it all on about twenty watts—what it takes to power two or three of today’s standard household LED light bulbs.

So as I say, when we brag about our amazing technological achievements, God just yawns. There’s no real comparison. God wins hands down. It’s not even close.

Fourteen billion years

That is what God took fourteen billion years to produce. Or about three and a half to four billion years, if you count it from the time the first simple life forms appeared on earth. We’re talking about something fantastically more complex than anything we humans have ever produced.

And really, we’re talking about something more complex than we humans ever will produce, even after a million years of technological development. I stopped drilling down at the level of organelles and ribosomes because the point was made. But the complexity doesn’t stop there. It keeps right on going down to the molecular, atomic, subatomic, and quantum levels—and who knows what else beyond that? That’s just as small as we’ve have gotten so far.

Could God just pop that all into existence in a few days, as the Young Earth Creationists think? Turn off your brain and say, “God is omnipotent,” and the answer is “Yes.” But think about it seriously, and the answer is, “No, that’s just not how God operates.”

All around us, we see that God operates through means and by step-by-step processes. Nothing just pops into existence. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end that unfolds over time. That’s the nature of the material universe, with its time and space. And as I said earlier, the vast spaces and timescales we see in this material universe are a far better reflection of the infinite nature of God than a small universe that has lasted only a few thousand years.

Aside from the enormous complexity of the human body itself, and of the systems and environments required to sustain it, the basic answer to the question of why God took 14 billion years to produce us is that God, being infinite and eternal, works on vast scales of time and space, not on little ones. God is not in a hurry. Time and space mean nothing to God, because God is outside of time and space.

God therefore sets everything up step by step, putting in motion processes and laws that unfold over vast timescales in this relatively dead and resistive material universe, until the foundations are finally laid for incredibly intricate and complex beings such as ourselves to be able to arise and survive on one tiny little speck of rock and dirt in our tiny little corner of this unimaginably vast universe.

And I haven’t even talked about the even greater complexity of the human mind and heart.

God created the universe for us

Materialistic scientists and thinkers look out at this vast universe, and how tiny we are in it, and conclude that we are just a footnote and a sidebar in the unfolding drama of the universe. Here, in this little pocket of entropy, the universe just happened to blindly produce us. And in the future, it will just as blindly wipe us out and move blindly onwards without a thought that everything we humans have ever thought, felt, experienced, and done is obliterated and gone forever.

That’s not how I see it.

According to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), “The ultimate purpose of creation is a heaven from the human race” (Divine Providence #323). We are not a mere footnote or sidebar in the vast drama of the universe. We are not just a pale blue dot. We are the core purpose of the universe. We are the whole reason it exists in the first place.

Yes, of course, materialists roundly reject this idea. They consider it pure hubris to think that this whole vast universe exists just for us on this tiny little speck of a planet orbiting an ordinary star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. But materialists see only the lowest level of reality, which is the material universe. They do not see or consider the higher and greater levels of the universe, which are the spiritual world and God. When you put this material universe into that wider context, it takes on a whole different meaning.

The human microcosm

Even from a scientific perspective, we humans, with our complex physics, biology, and psychology, have a reasonable claim to be the most complex system in the universe. Yes, stars and galaxies do have amazingly complex physical and chemical processes going on within them. But we humans have most of those physical and chemical processes going on within us also—aside from the nuclear fusion part—and we layer biology and psychology on top of them. Astrophysicists can spend whole careers studying the complex processes and life cycle of the immense nuclear furnace represented by a star like our sun. But even that pales in comparison to the complexities and intricacies of the human mind and heart.

If we look at it this way, it is not so crazy to think that we humans are the apex and purpose of creation. We take the physics and chemistry of the material universe and raise it to whole new levels that don’t exist in those blind, unconscious physical processes. Each one of us is a microcosm of the universe, and we have higher levels that the physical universe itself doesn’t have.

Our material-universe nest

So yes, God spun out this entire universe over a timescale of fourteen billion years, and on a spatial scale of 93 billion light years for the observable universe, entirely to provide for human beings, and for an eternal, loving community in heaven for the human beings God created. That’s us.

Far from causing us to pale into insignificance when we look out at those huge scales of time and space, and how tiny we are compared them, what this vastness communicates to us is the infinity of God’s love and care for us—that God would create all this incredible complexity of time, space, and function because that’s what it takes to provide this little biological nest here on this little planet so that we humans can be born, grow up, become the people we want to be, and then move on to heaven to enjoy the treasures of human life, love, understanding, and relationship with each other and with God forever.

That’s why God took 14 billion years to create human beings. Nothing else would properly express the immense scale and intensity of God’s love for us. And nothing else would reflect our true nature as fantastically intricate and complex beings created in the image and likeness of God.

For further reading:

• How did God Create the Universe? Was the World Really Created in Six Days?
• On Pluto, Atoms, and Other Things (such as Heaven) that Just Keep Getting More Complex
• God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
• Wavicles of Love
• Containers for God