Why does the universe exist? Why is it as it is? Why should it be so vast and awe-inspiring? This question crosses people’s minds and people make significant choices when they deal with the question. One option is to just not deal with the question. Someone might think for example that it is an unanswerable question. Others might follow modern scientific ideas and say there is no “why” to the universe’s existence, that the universe just spontaneously happened. But this is not a satisfying answer.

Recall the book called Contact, written by the late Dr. Carl Sagan (published 1985). The book Contact was made into a movie. In Contact, a radio signal is received from space that is found to have a message in it from intelligent beings. So people on Earth find that the message is actually elaborate instructions for building a machine which will transport someone across the universe. So an astronomer, a woman named Dr. Arroway, makes the trip in the device and has an encounter with an alien being. There is an intriguing statement about the question of life in the universe repeated multiple times in the Contact movie. It begins when Eleanor Arroway is just an inquisitive girl who asks her father if there were people on other planets. After first saying he didn’t know, her father responds with the statement, “If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” Dr. Arroway later repeats this statement to school children.

Dr. Arroway in the story comes from the atheistic mindset, she does not believe in God but she accepts the concepts from modern science that the universe is billions of years old and it came from the Big Bang. The “wasted space” comment is I think implying a certain naturalistic (atheistic) argument that goes something like this. First, the universe formed not from the creative activity of an intelligent Creator but by natural processes over billions of years. Out of deep time and many combinations of processes forming stars and planets, life formed by natural processes in rare instances on certain planets in the universe. Given the many billions of years and the vast number of combinations of scenarios in how planets form, there is bound to be life forming on other planets the same way it formed on our own planet. I think this is Arroway’s thinking in the story. So I think the concept of “wasted space” from Dr. Arroway is actually a misnomer. If there is no “why” to the existence of the universe, then on what basis could you say that the vastness of space is wasted? She is saying that since we exist, other intelligent life must exist also, somewhere. This is not a “scientific” conclusion, it is more of a hope from a certain world view. Dr. Arroway thinks that it would be a “waste” if we were the only intelligent life, considering the vastness of the universe. There is a statement in the Contact book to the effect of, how could there be billions of worlds going to waste, as barren lifeless worlds? But the naturalistic mindset views the universe as a product of a kind of numbers game. It is because of the vast numbers of planets and stars out there and the long periods of time that we were lucky enough to exist. Out of many stars and planets the “waste” is that most of them don’t support life, but it is often believed that a few of them would and we are ‘lucky’ enough to be on one of those planets that support life. On the other hand, Biblically, it is not a numbers game at all! Isaiah 45:18 (NIV) makes clear that Earth exists by deliberate design for life, especially for us.

“For this is what the Lord says —
he who created the heavens,
he is God;
he who fashioned and made the earth,
he founded it;
he did not create it to be empty,
but formed it to be inhabited . . . .”

The scientific evidence for many extrasolar planets, discovered some years after the publication of Sagan’s Contact book, would be seen as supporting this view by many. But if Dr. Arroway were a real astronomer today, would the discoveries about extrasolar planets support the same “wasted space” concept? There are certainly many extrasolar planets. The scientific evidence for this is good. In our galaxy the Milky Way, it is not unreasonable to say there is likely to be as many extrasolar planets as there are stars in the galaxy. The number of stars in the Milky Way is now estimated at about 200 billion. Some stars have no planets but some have multiple planets. Astronomers debate the habitability of some of the extrasolar planets. Some are of the right distance from their stars to have a temperature range that could allow for liquid water. But this in itself doesn’t tell us if the exoplanet even has water. Even if there is a life-friendly atmosphere and liquid water on an exoplanet, there are effects from the star that could make life impossible. Many stars are not so stable as our own star and solar flares could destroy life on many of the known exoplanets. The scientific question of how life would arise on our own planet without a Creator is not really a resolved issue either, so we do not really know enough to confidently assert that life could arise on an exoplanet, just because it exists on Earth. So the question of life on extrasolar planets is really a question science cannot answer. There is reason for skepticism and yet there are planets that could be in the habitable zone for other stars. But in real scientific research, no one has found evidence of an intelligently coded message from space as in the Contact fictional story. Still many hope for something like the Contact story to happen one day.

The Biblical view suggests a very different way of understanding the universe. In the Bible, the important issue is not are there intelligent alien beings similar to us, but is there an intelligent Creator worth knowing and worshiping? What if the universe is first and foremost a means of communication from an infinite Creator-God? It is not vast for the purpose of supporting many different intelligent life forms, but it is vast primarily for helping finite mankind to imagine an infinite Creator. Since an all-powerful being could do anything easily, it would not be too much for an infinite Creator to make a vast universe to stimulate our thinking. The Bible presents God as unlimited in power and all-knowing. He is spirit, yet can exist in human form, as in the person of Jesus Christ. Solomon stated “the highest heavens cannot contain you…” when he was dedicating the temple long ago in ancient Israel (1 Kings 8:27, NIV). King David once wrote in Psalm 139, “If I go up to the heavens, you are there…” (Psalm 139:7-8). Psalm 19:1-4 makes the well-known statement “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands….” What is this “glory” that the heavens declare? I think it is about God’s greatness and his nature as One who wants a relationship with us. The glory in the universe should motivate us to want to know its maker, and our Maker. The Bible does not really even entertain the notion that natural processes could be adequate to create the universe. Only an all-powerful Creator could be an adequate first cause, in the Christian world view. But the Bible, as the special revelation of the Creator-God, uses nature and sometimes references to the universe to help human beings grasp how God is so much different and greater than us.

Consider the passage below from Isaiah 55:6-9 (NIV).

“Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he
will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely
pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

It has always seemed an amazing thing to me that the infinite Creator would have any interest in our lives. Yet, Scripture actually goes so far as to “measure” God’s love by the vastness of the universe! Psalm 103:11 puts it in the strongest terms, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.” I once wrote an article about a Gamma Ray Burster object (GRB 090423, CLICK TO GO TO). By the usual way scientists interpret redshifts to indicate distance (Hubble’s Law), this object would be over 13 billion light-years away from us! It was a very brief powerful burst of energy and scientists are not sure how so much energy could be generated. This has been described as one of the most distant known objects in the universe.

Biblically, the universe is not big and impersonal, but big and personal. It is something from an infinite Being who wanted to give finite human beings with limited imaginations something tangible to help us imagine what He is. If you try you can find another way to look at the universe, but I would say the other ideas are neither logical nor satisfying. I’ve wrestled with how secular science tends to view the universe differently than the Bible. The naturalistic origins theories from secular science are not so well established as most people think they are, including Big Bang theory. Science has not ruled out supernatural creation by a Creator, it simply cannot model it. We cannot argue that supernatural creation did not happen just because science cannot model it or quantify it.

So, what if the universe is a communication?  If it is, we must learn to listen the right way.  Perhaps there is a message we have missed, about the Creator.

The book of Jonah in the Bible contains a well known story that has often been dismissed as a myth. Many things in the Old Testament have been dismissed as myths but I believe the Old Testament is an actual history of real people and real events. It is amazing how often the question comes up on the internet, “Can a whale swallow a man?” Both believers and unbelievers have often asked this question or some question related. Believers often wonder what kind of sea creature it was that swallowed Jonah. Unbelievers will often say it is impossible for a man to survive being swallowed by a large fish or whale.
Usually neither the believers nor the unbelievers have many facts to go on to answer the question. I have not addressed the question before, so here is my take on it.

First of all, I’ve always found that assuming the Biblical account to be a myth never helps really understand it. Ideas that are put forward to explain away miracles in the Bible often have more problems than believing the miracle. So, I think we should take the story of Jonah as a real event, but we should get what facts we can to help understand it. Modern scientific knowledge cannot disprove miracles in the Bible. But modern knowledge can sometimes shed light on how to understand details of the Biblical account. On the other hand, we should not “demand” a scientific explanation for everything in the Bible before we believe it. This is reasonable because there are plenty of confirmations of the truth of the Bible from verifiable facts, including from the book of Jonah. The Bible has authority as God’s word and we should believe it. Even if someone doesn’t believe the Bible, the proper way to evaluate it is really to assume it’s true, then explore the facts and the details of what it says and see how plausible it is. But if you reject the concept of God doing miracles the Bible will not make sense. It is a starting assumption that the God of the Bible can do miracles. In addition, there is no way to escape Jesus’ implying the story of Jonah was a real historical event. (See for instance Matthew 12:39-41.) Jesus spoke on multiple occasions about the “sign of Jonah” referring to Jonah being inside a fish for three days and he made it an analogy of his own death and resurrection. He also said that Nineveh repented at Jonah’s preaching. So Jesus implied the story of the people of Nineveh repenting and believing was historical in connection to Jonah. If Jesus believed it, so should we.

Second, the point of the story of Jonah I think is more about the lengths God will go to to reach people. Another major point is there can be serious consequences for believers who will not obey God when they are called to a ministry, especially as a prophet like Jonah. The story of Jonah is often brought up as a kind of evangelistic warning for nonbelievers to not run from God. But that may be a misapplication of the story. The unbelievers in the story were the ones who benefited by learning who the true God was, they were not what you could call the “guilty party” in the story. The account of Jonah focuses not on the sin of the people of Nineveh but on their ignorance. God was giving them a chance to repent and change. (Note that the Biblical book of Nahum, written more than 100 years after the book of Jonah, certainly does focus on the sin of the city of Nineveh. Nineveh eventually came be known for some terrible atrocities and is called the “bloody city” in Nahum 3:1.) Though God was showing compassion to Nineveh, Jonah had a kind of hatred of them as Assyrians. Jonah’s attitude was wrong and thus he resisted going to Nineveh to speak to these people. So what happened to Jonah was God’s way of giving Jonah a painful attitude adjustment. So when God’s prophet would not obey God’s call, God called a fish to deal with the prophet.

Jonah is also mentioned in II Kings 14. From this we know he was in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and his ministry and the writing of the book were probably sometime between 770 B.C. and 750 B.C. This would have been before the city of Nineveh was at its peak in size and influence, and before Assyria had reached its peak in terms of the territory it controlled. Thus the Northern Kingdom of Israel had not been conquered by Assyria yet.

Now about the issue of a man, like Jonah, being swallowed by a sea creature. I will not dig into the word study of the terms used in scripture but the Bible does not use terms specific enough to identify what the sea creature was. (For an article on the Biblical words used, I’d recommend this article by Apologetics Press.) Today marine biologists have much more specific definitions of animals than the terms used in the Bible. Whether a Bible translation uses “great fish” or “whale” or “sea monster,” all of these are fair translations because we can’t be sure exactly what it was. Many people merely assume it was a whale, but the Bible is not that specific. Recent translations do not usually say “whale.” So, what do the actual facts about whales, marine reptiles, and large fish (and the Mediterranean Sea) tell us?

A number of different sea creatures have been proposed to be the possible one to have swallowed Jonah. Knowing what creature it was is not necessary to the Biblical account but it just seems like an irresistible question. First of all, whatever creature it was, it must have been able to swallow Jonah whole and then vomit him up later. The Biblical account doesn’t mention Jonah having any injuries from the experience. Perhaps there could have been minor injuries it doesn’t mention but Jonah survived the experience. This would require something quite large. Some extinct marine reptiles would have been large enough, but I will leave them out of consideration because as far as we know they would have been extinct at the time. But this is not certain really. We cannot identify the creature with certainty; we can only proceed on the basis of what we do know. So some of the proposed creatures to be considered are the following:

• A Sperm Whale
• A Killer Whale
• A Whale Shark
• A Basking Shark
• A Great White Shark

I will deal with the Sperm Whale first. There is a story reportedly from 1891 in which a Whaling Ship called the Star of the East found a man inside a Sperm Whale that they caught. The man’s name was James Bartley and he is said to have survived when they cut him out. This story has a number of specific details that make it sound like a real account but I would not trust it. There is a “James Bartley” page on Wikipedia that says historians have tried to verify the account. Historians found something from a woman of the time who was said to be the wife of the captain of the Star of the East. The woman said there was no truth to the story. Also the Star of the East was not actually a whaling ship apparently. Sperm Whales can be large enough that a large one might be able to swallow a man but many of them couldn’t do it I suspect because their esophagus or gullet may not be big enough for them to swallow a man whole. Also, whales are not usually found in the Mediterranean Sea, where Jonah would have been. So I would not rule out a Sperm Whale completely but it seems like an unlikely candidate to me.

Next I will consider Whale Sharks and Basking Sharks. These are very large sharks but they are more like many whales that filter through large amounts of water for small things like plankton and small fish. They could never swallow a man whole. Their mouths are very wide and they could get a man in their mouth, but their “throats” are small. There is one video of a whale shark closing it’s mouth on a diver, that I found on YouTube. But if a whale shark got a man in it’s mouth it would let the man out because they couldn’t do anything to the man.

Killer Whales could be a possibility because they have been known to swallow some very large animals. There have been cases where a Killer Whale was known to have swallowed a Moose as it swam between islands! But in the wild, Killer Whales never try to eat humans. There are a few cases where they seem to have bitten down on a man by mistake. But they never try to eat a human. However, in captivity, Killer Whales can be dangerous to their trainers and there are a few cases where a Killer Whale trainer has drowned due to the Killer Whale pulling them under the water. I think a Killer Whale could be a possibility because they are known to swallow their food whole. Whales have three stomachs, the first of which is meant to break up the food mechanically. Whales actually swallow rocks to keep in their first stomach to help break up their food. I was surprised to find that the Mediterranean Sea is considered a possible location for Killer Whales.

Then there is the Great White Shark. Great White Sharks have been commonly seen in the Mediterranean Sea, they sometimes follow boats to eat garbage thrown off the boat, and they do sometimes swallow their food whole. There are many cases of sharks attacking humans but Great White Sharks do not always bite or chew up their food. Great White Sharks can certainly be large enough to swallow a man whole so I think the Great White Shark is the best candidate for a creature that could have swallowed Jonah. In fact there is another little known fact about sharks that could be relevant to Jonah. They can do what’s called everting their stomach. This is basically turning their stomach inside out so as to ‘vomit’ out things they cannot digest. Then they pull their stomach back in! Just what Jonah needed, in God’s timing. So I would put the Great White Shark as the best candidate, the Killer Whale as second best, and the Sperm Whale as third best.

There are however multiple miracles implied in the Biblical account of Jonah surviving his experience. First, God communicated with the creature and sent it to swallow Jonah. This is the first miracle. Secondly, I do not know how to explain how a man could breathe for three days inside a fish or whale, so that may be another miracle. I think for the man to be kept whole and not chewed up or digested for three days is not necessarily a miracle but it could involve exposure to stomach acids and some nasty gases. Then another possible miracle is where it says God spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. The miracle could again be in the communicating with the fish so it did this as intended.

In considering the plausibility of the story in the book of Jonah, there are some archeological details worth noting that I think show the basic historicity of the account. So if you set aside the issue of Jonah being swallowed and consider the rest of the story, it seems to be historically accurate. First of all, Nineveh is described in Jonah 3 as a very great city and in Jonah 4 it states that there were 120,000 people there. This is a large city and yet this is probably before Nineveh became the capital of Assyria. Jonah 3:3 says it was a three day journey for Jonah to walk through the city. This is indeed a large city by ancient standards and is consistent with what is known about the history of the city.

Also the people of Nineveh would probably have been afraid to offend Jonah or harm him because of their beliefs. Assyrians believed in multiple gods, one of which was named Ea. Ea was considered the god of waters and of sorcery. When Jonah came up out of the sea, having been inside a fish or whale, the Ninevites would have taken that as an omen or they may have thought of him as a messenger of Ea. We don’t know everything Jonah said to the Ninevites but Jonah’s experience would have gotten the attention of the people of Nineveh. I think the people of Nineveh must have turned away from their false gods. They must have come to understand Jonah was speaking for the true God. So God decided not to send the destruction on the city. Because they responded to God with humility and repentance, they were spared. But unfortunately, later, by the time of the prophet Nahum, the sin of the city had become much worse and they did not respond to God’s warning then. Thus the city was eventually destroyed. From history and archeology we know the city of Nineveh became the capital of Assyria and became rich and powerful from trade. But it was eventually conquered by the Babylonians in 612 B.C.

In the end the story of Jonah and Nineveh ends with a happy ending! Jonah obeyed the Lord and preached to the city, and the city believed and repented! Also, some sailors on the boat Jonah took got a pretty good lesson about who the real God was also. Is the lesson from the story of Jonah more about believing God can do miracles, or about unbelievers coming to faith, or about believers not giving up on unbelievers? Perhaps all the above.