GOD is an abbreviation for saying “We just don’t know”

Given the fact of our existence and the fact that there is no obvious meaning or explanation for it (in an anthropocentric sense), yet with minds such as we possess nevertheless demanding explanations (we insist on fitting the entire universe into our heads!) we naturally posit the next best thing in explanation which is GOD.

This really is no answer at all. Firstly, it removes the mystery that is so immediate to us and shifts it into a misty realm of which we are forbidden to enquire further. The very second you want to start questioning further you are admonished along terms such as these; “God works in mysterious ways” or “Who are we to question GOD?” or “There is a reason behind it all that fits in with GOD’s plan”

The mystery is therefore shrouded in a cloud and removed from our experience of it. Carl Sagan spoke eloquently of this mystery and described his sense of the universe in terms of a “soaring sense of the mystery of the universe”.

It is incredible to think of human consciousness contemplating the origins and meaning of the universe. It should never have happened! Think about it; life has been around for at least three billion years. For just about 99,999% of that time life has been evolving and developing into various creatures all of which lived, procreated and died with no thought at all in their brains beyond the immediate dictates of their environment and the needs of survival.

Now here comes an animal, a primate, a hominid whose brain has developed in such a particular direction that it can actually question it’s existence and even construct theories of the origins of life and the universe that are remarkably close to what has actually occurred!

The brains of these hominids (us!) are mirrors in which reflections of the universe echo and reverberate. In some deep sense our minds, our consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself!

How profound and how unique! And it is all an accident, a fluke of evolution. And yet, observation will confirm, we are nevertheless products of this universe, the result of the self-same evolution of biological life on earth. We, like all creatures, including the aforesaid 99,999%, live, procreate and die. Yet there is this added dimension to us; mind, consciousness. It is this mind that can experience the “soaring sense of mystery” which is our universe and us in it.

Yet not at any point do we reach a conclusion as final as “GOD did it”. We reach no conclusion at all, we merely contemplate this infinity and majesty, forever reaching out and attempting to grasp it better. Our theories (cosmology/ evolution) are about as good answers as we will ever get. To try probe further, to try answer the why questions is just plain non-sensical. There is no answer to why, the universe and us in it, just IS.

To say GOD did it is to make it paltry, banal and boring. It limits the universe to a small box, a box that fits safely and snugly within the human mind. A mind that is unaware and blinded to the mystery of the universe. In fact to say “GOD did it” is the same as saying “We just don’t know and we do not want to experience any mystery about the universe”

Yes, beyond cosmology and biology we do not know much. Beyond the brute fact of our existence we can only wonder, and hope. Is there a Deist GOD? A being, a force, a principle that is infinitely beyond the reach of our minds? A SOMETHING that is ultimately the cause of the universe and everything?

Maybe. We don’t know, and probably cannot know.

Even contemplation of a Deist GOD tends to remove the mystery and wonder of the universe. Ultimately, the universe is all we can experience. And there is so much of it to experience! Consider life, consider DNA. Consider this majestic process of evolution occurring over countless eons leading to the millions of forms of life, alive today or the few preserved in the fossil record.

Consider a galaxy such as our own. Measuring it’s size in kilometers or miles is meaningless. We have to measure it’s size in light years, and even then it’s size is incomprehensible to our brains. Spanning over a distance 30,000 light years from end to end. Get that? It takes light, traveling at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second, 30,000 years to travel from one end to the other! This is as old as the entire history of modern Homo Sapiens.

In that galaxy are 100 billion stars…And in the known universe another 100 billion galaxies!

Are there other life forms in this great vastness? Or is life on planet earth just a very lucky co-incidence, enabling us now, as sentient beings, to retrospectively question our existence? Is it precisely because we have evolved brains that can contemplate these questions that we indeed do so? Is our contemplation an anthropocentric coincidence?

Or is our universe, the observable 15 billion light years, merely one of many billions more, maybe even an infinite number more? Is there some higher principle at work here, one in which life, consciousness and self awareness simply have to arise given the infinite number of possible universes?

Questions, so many questions. The mystery remains. What will you choose? Will you say “there is no mystery, GOD did it?”

Or will you embrace the mystery, knowing that the final answers are not available, knowing that, for all the certainty we ostensibly derive from a GOD belief, it is nothing more that an illusion. An illusion only one step removed from the mystery that refuses to disappear?

Hey, if you''ve taken the trouble to read this far, pop me an e-mail and give me your views -

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