  We provide detailed evidence for the claim that nonperturbative quantum
gravity, defined through state sums of causal triangulated geometries,
possesses a large-scale limit in which the dimension of spacetime is four and
the dynamics of the volume of the universe behaves semiclassically. This is a
first step in reconstructing the universe from a dynamical principle at the
Planck scale, and at the same time provides a nontrivial consistency check of
the method of causal dynamical triangulations. A closer look at the quantum
geometry reveals a number of highly nonclassical aspects, including a dynamical
reduction of spacetime to two dimensions on short scales and a fractal
structure of slices of constant time.
