This was created at a time when European societies found a new appreciation for the language of mathematics. Thus [the Christian] god is depicted as constructing the world itself using the tools and precision of mathematics.
That expression says “My calculations were off, and not just by a little.”
The compass… the circle.
Do you know what the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is?
It is a giant spherical compass of light, 46.5 billion light years from the center (that’s us) to the edge.
And this compass keeps on expanding ever wider, at the speed of light, in fact.THIS in my view is the circle being traced by God in the painting.
Wierd that God, the creator is a guy who looks like white Jesus. Jesus didn’t create the universe (nor did Adonai) even in the Christian Cinematic Universe. (Adonai was the god of Israel, and was promoted to custodian of the earth – the firmament.)
In the 20th century we developed an understanding of the scope of the universe (its breadth and rate of expansion) that renders silly (and pretentious) the notion God is a hominid ape, or male, or white. In fact everything other than the local group is out of our reach (assuming humans survive the imminent great filters and some epoch reach to other stars).
So even within this universe we are microbes on a speck of dust imagining we are central to God’s plan.
In the 1990s, we considered the possibilities that our universe may itself be caused by natural events, that ours is one bubble in a sea of foam, and any creator is multiple event horizons away, and we are as important to God as microbes beneath the earth’s crust (12+ miles down through solid rock) are to us.
