The Cosmos and I

I no longer entertain any belief in religious doctrines or deities, but I am nevertheless sympathetic to the impulse to invent an explanation that helps us forget our intolerable nothingness relative to the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos.

It also makes me dizzy to contemplate the atoms of my body relative to my whole body so many orders of magnitude larger. We stand, as it were, midway between the inconceivably small and the incomprehensibly vast; and, as quantum physics has shown, we cannot really understand or relate to either extreme.

Ever since the emergence in our genome of the apparatus to support consciousness, memory and language, we have made discoveries about ourselves and our world that we couldn't account for. So we have made up stories to explain the unexplainable.

As our capacity for Reason has grown and our technology has expanded our ability to perceive and understand the inner workings of things very small, very large and very far away, we have been able to discover that the stories we invented in the infancy of our species were just whistling in the dark.

The time has now come when to continue to rely on the supernatural is to deny the real font of every blessing: Reason, Science, Ethics, Technology, and our own ingenuity and drive to understand and improve ourselves and everything around us.

We are in the habit of associating ethical behavior with religion, but that association is nothing more than a happenstance of history. We can learn and teach ethics better and more effectively without the divisiveness that religions invariably impose on their followers.

I do not know whether the thing that thinks my thoughts will continue to exist after my body ceases to function, and frankly I don't really care, not deeply anyway. If I do continue to exist in some form, I hope it will be an agreeable existence. If I don't, I won't be around to be bothered by it.

But whatever state follows this one, if any, my stunningly improbable little spark of consciousness, my brief flicker of existence in the cosmos, though just a ripple in an inconceivably vast ocean of matter/energy, is nevertheless glorious to me.

 

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