In the beginning there was inanimate matter. Later came self-replication. Cosmological origins are not of overwhelming interest to me, the ultimate point of “creation” of matter, energy and the laws of physics as we know them is almost by definition unknowable. The concept of what happened “before” space-time existed only shows the fragility of human common-sense intuition, it does not help us understand about the origin of the Universe, it obscures the truth. Christians and other theists often ask atheists how our belief system accounts for “creation”. What happened before that, and before that, and before that, AHHH! But what happened before THAT! Time does not exist in the way that common-sense human minds see it; not every event happened after some other event. This line of thinking leads to sore heads very quickly, there is no easy answer to it that feels right to the human mind except perhaps the idea that mumbo-jumbo the king of gods existed before everything and created the world out of ear wax, ant droppings, “the waters” or whatever also happened to be there before everything else. If anybody asks what happened before mumbo-jumbo made the world or who made mumbo-jumbo that is then it is sore head time again, WHACK! “Stop asking so many stupid questions child!” The Christian “explanation” for the existence of the Universe does not help one little bit. Now there is complexity before that there was simplicity, before that there was God. I am not going to ask the tired old cliché question about who created God. There is no point to it. Any explanation about the origin of the Universe will always come back to a fundamental “uncaused cause”. We could argue until the cows came home, for all eternity, about what caused the Universe to come into existence. It is a waste of time. We will never know, we can never know. We may get some better theories but they will never silence the religious explanations. You cannot prove a religion wrong. If you could it would not be a religion. You could prove atheism wrong, it is not a religion. In my Universe I exist. That much I am confident about, or at least, that much I can't be bothered to try to deny. One of the more interesting bits of advice I received at University was that if ever you got into conversation with an existentialist you should steal his drink and see how hypocritically he reacts. I am not sure, existentialists as a group tend to be small weaselly types who talk a lot about world peace but tend to get thrown out of pubs for fighting. (The PC lobby might object to that sentence as stereotyping, fuck 'em, I keep an open mind to everything, even prejudice. Look at any illustrated work of Dickens, chock full of stereotypes that stand up quite well to experience. Where would a casting director be if he cast a skinny Falstaff or a short fat Christ?) All the evidence that I have seen from numerous sources leads me to construct a theory of existence around some idea of a Big Bang as the first knowable cause. That was followed by around ten billion years of physics, chemistry and astronomy, a Universe working to understandable, if not fully known, principles. Then the interesting stuff happens. The next bit is biology and replication science. The creation of complexity from simplicity. Few religious people can get their heads around replication science and evolution. Even atheists can get it wrong. One of the best atheist websites around has a profoundly mistaken idea about replication. Genes (and memes) do not try to do anything. They have no will. Genes are replicated and proliferate if they have the right properties and if the circumstances around them permit it. There is no force for evolution. There is no evolutionary ladder or scale. We are not “higher up” than anything else that is alive. Every living thing that exists today is there for one simple reason. They are at the end of an unbroken 4 billion year chain of success. A run of luck against odds that would make a bookmaker's calculator melt. Everyone's a winner. Not a single one of your ancestors ever died in childhood. Not one. None were eaten by sharks, dinosaurs or sabre-tooths, well, at least not before they bred successfully. If you think that is amazing, and you should if you are not brain-dead, just think about how lucky you have to be to be a living headlouse, virus or rabbit. Get your head round that and you are on your way to freeing yourself from religion. The power of the numbers in the odds against your survival are all you need to explain the complexity of the way you are made up. |
AtheismPoliticsLifeFeedbackForumHome |
Tweet |
© 1999 - 2012 by Martin Willett. |
mwillett.org: Martin Willett's World |