Hubble Ultra Deep Field picture

I'm a space nerd, which means I love reading about what space geeks have discovered about our universe, and looking at the pretty pictures NASA releases. The Hubble Ultra Deep Space photo has been around for a few years now, so most of you probably have heard about it and seen it, but just for a refresher, here are some images. I've made the widest angel view of the image my desktop background. (As I said, a space nerd as opposed to a space geek.) And this YouTube video provides for a better perspective of just how small a slice of the sky these pictures are taken from.

Think about it: over 10,000 galaxies in what I think has been described as 1/170,000th of the sky. Each galaxy has between 100,000 and 100 billion stars, with varying numbers of planets. How utterly foolish it is to think that this big, wondrous universe was set in motion by a petty, belligerent war-god who gets pissed off if you touch a woman who's on her period or have sex before being married in his name.

Of course, the utterly foolish people who believe that kind of nonsense will answer "how foolish to believe all of this could have come about by random chance", which is a bit of a straw-man. Although some chance has been involved in the universes formation, it's certainly not random, and most of the universe's formation has followed basic laws of physics that were started with the universes formation. Even the "Big Bang" is theorized to not have been a chance encounter, but only another event in a string of events that are inevitable. I love reading the various multi-verse proposals, and encourage anyone else interested to do so as well.

Anyway, I just started thinking about this today when reading the nonsense J.L. Hinman (and others) spout about the little, man-made god they believe in.