We humans have always had a tough time imagining God's size and power, largely because we're diminished when we contemplate Him, and it hurts our pride. We would much rather deceive and aggrandize ourselves into thinking we are gods with total control over our lives.
Ancient people felt the same sense of inferiority even though they never could have dreamed how vast our universe really is; and the truth arrived all at once, in the 1750s. Thomas Wright and Emmanuel Kant shocked the world by proving that our own Milky Way galaxy was a rotating, flattened disc made up of millions of stars; just one of several galaxies nearby which they called "island universes". This was almost as troubling as Copernicus' proof that the earth wasn't the center of the solar system.
In the 1920s, using a vastly more powerful telescope than anyone had before, Edwin Hubble proved that our galaxy contained over 100 million stars, and there were millions more galaxies in the universe. Also, for some mysterious reason they were expanding and accelerating away from us at fantastic speeds - almost 186,000 miles per second; or 670 million miles per hour; which is the speed of light in a vacuum. Hubble actually was confirming the observations and proofs that Georges Lamaitre - a Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, and astronomer - had discovered two years before Hubble.
Now we know that our Milky Way galaxy is well over 100,000 light years in size, and contains over 200 billion stars. Not only that, there are a trillion galaxies in the observable universe, which likely contain 100 billion stars each, and they're being pushed outward by some mysterious force, labeled Dark Energy. Our observable universe is 13.8 billion light years in size, and began with the Big Bang, a titanic blast emanating from an atom-fragment-sized oneness.(Link) These facts are now known as the Hubble-Lamaitre law.
This discovery was nearly unimaginable, even for Albert Einstein who stumbled onto these truths years ahead of Lamaitre and Hubble. But Einstein thought they must be wrong, and that he might be ridiculed, so he fudged his calculations and pretended it wasn't true. When faced with Lamaitre's calculations, Einstein replied, "Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable." Before long, though, he told Lamaitre his proofs were "...the most beautiful... explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." To the end of his days Einstein regretted his timidity.
We can understand why Einstein doubted himself, and must admit that these truths are impossible to fully grasp. But there's more. Much more.
Nuclear physicists have now proven that the distance between our humdrum, everyday world and the very smallest unit in its subatomic, or quantum, world is almost as vast. The fact is, we're not solid at all. We're mostly space; like steam. This is why x-rays, radio, and television waves pass easily through us. In other words, each of us is an inconceivably huge universe to the particles we're made of. The tiniest measure of all is called the Planck Particle*, an unimaginable nothing, compared to which a single proton - a tiny piece of a single atom - is as big as a galaxy. This video will explain it:
See what the Big Bang really was:
Can there be a mind behind this network of laws and orders? Can there be a creator? Obviously there must be. Natural Laws expressed through mathematics and astrophysical observations prove to be universal throughout all creation. Curiously, though, many scientists think these truths argue against the idea of God. "How could a mind be so inconceivably huge?", they ask. "Why couldn't it be?", this author replies.
Just as everything we do requires thought, planning, effort, and knowledge, so must the cosmos. Knowing this, are there any limits to the Lord of Creation? He is the designer of limits. Limitlessness is clearly a feature of the mind behind all we see and know.
How powerful is God? It's absurd to imagine there are any limits to His power. Everything is His; time, space, matter, energy, dimensions of time and space and riches we can't conceive of. The revelations of Scripture have been given to us for over three-thousand years, and they've been doubted by many the whole time; today more than ever. But it's massively ironic that many sciences have now proven what Scripture has always said, like God's Creation springing forth out of nothing, and all at once; the Big Bang. Yet more people than ever reject the religious view. Why? Because wars have been fought over religion? Mankind is very good at inventing pretexts for the grand theft of others' nations. The bloodiest century of all by far, the 20th, saw atheistic wars; very few religious wars.
"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the answers of man."
G.K. Chesterton
Consider the miracle we're living through right now, being able to search out the universe in each and every detail with ingenious tools we built for ourselves over the last thousand years. No other species on earth has a fraction of our power to do almost everything we can imagine, and gain knowledge nobody ever had before.
*The Planck Particle is named after Max Planck, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who discovered the quanta, or subatomic world of particles; the building blocks of all things in the material universe.
Part 2: The Purely Material View of the Universe
The 20th Century was the first in human history to largely jettison the spiritual world; that is, the non-material world of God the Creator. The successes of the Industrial Revolution and its genius inventors (Watt, with his steam engine; Edison's lightbulb and phonograph; The Wright's airplane) gradually persuaded people generally to turn away from religion and the spiritual life. Science and Reason effectively replaced and became a sort of god that offered material answers and solutions to genuine needs; and eventually, everything else we might want.
However the "God is dead... and we have killed him" crowd turned to Communism, Fascism, and Nazism as a replacement. The "superman... scientific man" was seen as the evolution away from religion. Known as the "Left wing" of politics, they flourished. The Fascists and Nazis called themselves anti-communists, but both embraced socialism - Left wing central government control - as the solution to all our problems. Religion was suppressed or even crushed, because our true Creator threatens the legitimacy of any and all dictators and plutocracies. We've had over 120 years to see where these philosophies lead and to assess their outcomes. The evidence is abundant and hideous. Our world is now truly on the brink of annihilation from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that are now in the hands of the haters of God.