Introduction
Contrary to the explanation offered in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is not 42. Christianity claims that the universe is a temporary abode for spiritual creatures who are destined to live with or without God for eternity. Until recently, science had no answers about the ultimate fate of the universe. However, humanism (the philosophical arm of atheism), through its manifestos and declarations, claims to offer hope for humanity. Are these declarations consistent with the reason and science that they are supposedly based upon?
Humanist affirmations
Humanism is a collection of philosophies that claim that right and wrong can be determined rationally, without appeal to any kind of religious revelation or dogma. Most forms of humanism are secular or atheistic in form. Throughout the 20th century, numerous humanist manifestos and declarations have been written to delineate the "creeds" of humanism.1 Humanists goals are lofty and optimistic. Along with these humanist manifestos are a list of affirmations, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. The 20th affirmation says in part:
We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.2
Presumably, this affirmation is a comparison between religious and humanistic philosophy. Accordingly, religion would be expected to lead to pessimism, despair, dogma, ignorance, guilt or sin, fear, hatred, selfishness, ugliness, and blind faith or irrationality. With such a list, it is a wonder why anybody would ever want to be religious, much less choose religion3 over humanism. So, just what kind of good things can we expect based upon what we know from science?
Dark energy and thermodynamics
One hundred years ago, atheist scientists assumed that the universe was eternal. However, there were some puzzling data that suggested otherwise. The development of the first and second laws of thermodynamics in the 19th century said that energy could neither be created nor destroyed and that the overall entropy of the universe was continually increasing. These laws suggested that at some point in the distant past, the universe was at minimum entropy. Obviously, the universe could not be eternally constant if its entropy was constantly increasing.
Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity showed that the universe was expanding.4 Soon, observations by Vesto Slipher, Alexander Friedman, and Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe was expanding, demonstrating that it was not eternal, but had a beginning. In 1998, observations of type Ia supernovae at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggested that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.5 The source of this accelerating expansion is thought to be due to "dark energy," which associated with the fabric of space. Accordingly, as the universe expands, the force of dark energy increases. Even now, dark energy is thought to make up nearly three-quarters of everything that makes up the universe.
The fate of the universe
Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman realized that the discovery of dark energy had tremendous implications about the ultimate fate of the universe. In 2000, within two years of the discovery of dark energy, Krauss and Starkman published an article entitled, "Life, The Universe, and Nothing: Life and Death in an Ever-Expanding Universe," in the Astrophysical Journal, documenting the probable fate of the universe.6 As the universe expands, cosmologists will be able to see less and less of the universe, until at one point, only the local group of galaxies would be visible. Of course, an increasingly rapid expansion of the universe implies that the entropy of the universe will continue to increase at an accelerating rate until it reaches a point of maximum entropy. This point will result in a loss of all usable energy as all stars burn out for all eternity. Here are their concluding statements:
The picture we have painted here is not optimistic. If, as the current evidence suggests, we live in a cosmological constant dominated universe, the boundaries of empirical knowledge will continue to decrease with time. The universe will become noticeably less observable on a time-scale which is fathomable. Moreover, in such a universe, the days—either literal or metaphorical—are numbered for every civilization. More generally, perhaps surprisingly, we find that eternal sentient material life is implausible in any universe.
Krauss and Scherrer wrote a more recent, popular piece in Scientific American in March, 2008, The end of cosmology?, which comes to similar conclusions.7 So, although humanism may pretend to offer optimism, in reality, science tells us that all sentient life is doomed to eternal destruction.
Christianity and the creation of the universe
Atheists often ask why God would create such a large universe if He intended it only as a place for human beings. Why not create one star and one planet? In fact, God created such a large universe as a demonstration of His power. The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God.8 It certainly wouldn't be very glorious if the universe were composed of two heavenly bodies. In order to see this glory, God has placed the Solar System a distance from the galaxy’s center at the "co-rotation radius," where it tends to stay between two spiral arms, away from the dust and gas found in the spiral arms that would obscure our view.9 In addition, it appears that we were created at the ideal time when we could determine how God created the universe. If we had been created earlier in time, we would have been unaware of dark energy.10 If we had been created later in the history of the universe, Hubble expansion would be unobservable, along with cosmic background radiation, and Big Bang nucleosynthesis.10 In essence, scientists would have been unable to determine how the universe came into existence, but would have assumed that it was eternal and static:
The remarkable cosmic coincidence that we happen to live at the only time in the history of the universe when the magnitude of dark energy and dark matter densities are comparable... Observers when the universe was an order of magnitude younger would not have been able to discern any effects of dark energy on the expansion, and observers when the universe is more than an order of magnitude older will be hard pressed to know that they live in an expanding universe at all, or that the expansion is dominated by dark energy. By the time the longest lived main sequence stars are nearing the end of their lives, for all intents and purposes, the universe will appear static, and all evidence that now forms the basis of our current understanding of cosmology will have disappeared.10
The ability to see the expansion of the universe is crucial to confirm the predictions of the Bible, since it first claimed this truth11 thousands of years before verification by science. So, the Bible's claim that the heavens declare the glory of God is confirmed by our position in the universe and the timing with which we were created, since we are at the ideal location at the ideal time to see the glory and design of the universe's creation.
Christianity and the end of the universe
Christianity claims that the universe is not eternal, but was created by God as a temporary abode to house God's spiritual creatures.12 After God's purposes are accomplished, He will destroy the entire universe in a cataclysmic apocalypse,13 and create a new universe14 with entirely different laws of physics.15 This universe is the best possible for the purpose for which it was created, which is a place in which spiritual beings can choose to love or reject God. So, evil exists in this universe as the means by which a choice can be made. In the New Creation, there will be no evil and no evil choices, since the creatures who will have chosen God in the current universe would have voluntarily given up such choices. So, although atheism offers only death, the end of consciousness, and the end of knowledge, Christianity presents a universe in which life and consciousness is eternal, and the Source of all knowledge dwells with glorified human beings for all eternity.
Conclusion 
Cosmology shows us that the hope of atheism and humanism is ultimately bankrupt. Without God, the universe has no purpose, other than to just be, and its ultimate destiny is to become increasingly more hostile to life- until life, consciousness, and knowledge are eternally destroyed when the universe suffers permanent heat death. In contrast, Christianity says that the universe was designed by God to be a temporary place where spiritual creatures can determine where they want to spend eternity. The New Creation, God's perfect, eternal creation will replace this universe before it becomes inhospitable to human life, offering eternal life with God - the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom.
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