Is believing in the Universe a belief in a higher power?

The Universe is vast beyond human comprehension. It appears to have started in its present iteration 13.74 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Just a time that long stagers human understanding. We know that our Universe is at least 13.7 billion light years in every direction we can see. It could be bigger, but we wouldn’t know because light from anything further away wouldn’t have gotten here yet. A diameter of 27.4 billion light years = 161,070,895,000,000,000,000,000 miles. To put that in perspective, the fastest spaceship we have yet designed, traveling 10 miles per second, would take 719 trillion years to travel that far.

Just our own Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 light years in diameter, or 470,279,985,000,000,000 miles across. We sit about 30,000 light years from our galactic core. The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 billion stars. In addition, many of the “stars” we see in the night sky are not stars at all, but other galaxies, some much larger than ours, that are located relatively close to us. With ever better telescopes, we see that there are galaxies all around us in every direction for as far as the most powerful telescopes let us peer. We know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each having hundreds of billions of stars. We are now learning that most stars have multiple planets, so the total number of planets defies definition.

Whether it’s the Big Bang flinging out everything that’s here; all the natural laws to govern matter, energy, space and time; the awesome power of a gamma-ray burst; the explosive power of a type 1A supernova; or the mystery of super-massive black holes; the Universe is certainly a power so beyond human ability or understanding as to leave any who appreciate it speechless. It is ineffably powerful. So does believing in the Universe amount to belief in a higher power, or does that only pertain to believing in things that don’t demonstrate any power at all?