Who are we?

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (KJ Psalms 8:3-4)
What exactly is a human being’s purpose in the universe? The vastness of the night sky, seen even with the naked eye, might easily make us feel small and unimportant. John A. Wheeler, a theoretical physicist posed a very similar question: “How come existence?” Through the lens of quantum mechanics, he offered the idea that the universe requires an observer, someone to observe and record it, to make it “fixed” in space and time (quoted from Tim Folger’s “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not looking?”). Andrei Linde, a Russian-American physicist, would later amend Wheeler’s startling intuition with this: “We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness” (Folger).
From the beginning, our Creator endowed us with the capacity to trace the paths of the galaxies and to map the intricate patterns of photons and electrons. Why? Because who we are reflects the spirit of who He is. The Creator’s “breath of life” in the soul of man makes us more extraordinary than the universe, no matter how many stars or subatomic particles we discover. As CS Lewis wonderfully concluded in Miracles: “For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them” (84). (From Living Large, chapter 6. ©️ 2013)