Universe

The universe is everything there is in regards to material existence. There have been and continue to be a number of competing ideas about the universe, but most agree that the universe is expanding. The size, shape, and age of the universe, as well as how it began, are, however, all points of contention.

Shape

The common view among cosmologists is that the universe comprises more than the three dimensions that we see, and that the universe is expanding in another dimension.

Imagine you are at a random spot on a spotted balloon, when someone inflates the balloon you'll see the spots moving away from you, so it would seem you are at the center of the expansion. Furthermore, the further away the spots are the faster they move away from you. This is also true for the universe: the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us.

Further imagine that you are a creature that only exists in two dimension. That is, you have width and depth, but no height. So living on the surface of the balloon, you cannot see the shape of the balloon itself. If you went for a walk in a straight line, you would actually go around the balloon and end up where you started, despite not being aware that you were travelling in a circle.

The theory goes that the three dimensions of our universe that we can see are like the two dimensions of the surface of the balloon, which wraps around on itself in another dimension, so that if we travelled through space in a straight line, we would eventually return to our starting point.

One consequence of this idea is that the universe therefore has no edge (just like there is no edge to the surface of a balloon) and therefore no centre. Thus for any location in space, it would appear that that location is at the center of the expansion of the universe.

If we were really at the centre of the universe, this would support the idea that the Earth occupies a "special place" in the universe, which would support the biblical idea of creation, even though the Bible does not claim that the Earth is physically in the centre of the universe. So many scientists find the idea that it only looks like we are at the centre of the universe an attractive one.

Size

A recent calculation placed the visible universe at about 156 billion light years across.^{[Citation Needed]}

Currently scientists are only able to account for 4% of the matter in the universe, though new theories of dark matter recently emerged to account for this.

Many scientists believe that the universe erupted into being from a singularity approximately 14 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since. The size of the universe creates a dilemma of faster than light speed movement, but it is speculated that the expansion of space itself can exceed the speed of light even if the objects within it moving on their own can not.. As an analogy, imagine ants (galaxies), sitting on an elastic rubber cord. that can't walk faster than 20cm/s. So normally two ants moving away from each other could not exceed a speed of 40cm/s relative towards each other (speed of light). However, if the cord itself is pulled while the ants are moving (expansion of space), the ants' speed can be greater.

Young Earth Creationism View

Young earth creationists hold that the earth and universe are approximately 6,000 years old. Young earth creationist scientists state that there are multiple lines of evidence pointing to a young earth and universe; the old earth and universe paradigm has numerous anomalies and uses invalid dating methods, and there are multiple citations in the secular science literature that corroborate the implausibility of the old earth and universe paradigm (for details see: young earth creationism).

While there are differences in regard to the age of the universe, there is not necessarily a difference in viewpoint in regard to its size. For most Young earth creationists, the universe is as large as God wanted to make it.