Lying on your back in the dewy grass on a cool and moonless summer night, you look up at an expanse of stars that speckle the blackness. When you look long enough at one spot, you feel a slight change in the pressure of the ground on your back, almost as if the gravitational pull from the blooming sea of stars is tugging you loose from your earthy home.

But the stars that tug at you are only motes of dust in the vast cosmos. Far beyond the milky span of stars that stretch across the sky is another galaxy of billions, then beyond that galaxy another, then another. They stretch in unending threads until they reach beyond what we can see, and yet they continue, ever more numerous and ever farther, until they reach the edge of everything that is. What stars wheel in the skies of planets orbiting suns teetering on the edge of all that exists?

Why are they there? For what purpose? Perhaps on a planet countless miles away there is someone not so different from you. He’s looking up at a sky of stars you would never recognize and in a galaxy that is just visible to us. He, too, feels the pull of the stars and wonders why they are there. Why do dots of light fill the darkness until the distance stretches their light to invisibility? Why is there something when there should be nothing?

Or maybe there is no one on the other side of the universe looking back at you. You and the rest of humanity are alone, either a divine creation or a fortunate accident. If the first, then a burden of purpose rests upon you. At times it can be heavy, but its weight is comforting as it holds you and your descendants solidly against the earth, preparing and waiting for the return of the Creator to remake and restore.

If the second, then you’re free from restraint, free to recreate or escape to explore new horizons. But then there is nothing else to direct you, no purpose or goal, only the stars and unnerving possibilities. Dare you step out in faith to conquer the cosmos?

If a Creator or the impersonal laws of nature created none but us, then the darkness holds no secrets from our doorstep to the end of existence—just impersonal and implacable balls of glowing plasma, rock, and ice. We’re adrift on an island of light and knowledge in a dark and infinite sea. We can look out across the black gulf and see dots of light, but we cannot touch them, and likely never will.

If you watch long enough, you can see the stars dancing around each other in mathematical motions requiring lifetimes to complete, barely perceptible but always moving. They tug and pull on one another until their gravity pulls at you, still lying in your backyard and shivering from the cold, or perhaps from the knowledge that a look into the night sky is a touch of the divine infinite.