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V. GOD, THE UNIVERSE, & US
BS ‘n’ About…
Science & Religion
Until religion and science find a way of making peace and working together, we have no future as a species. Both claim to have the answers as to where we came from, why we’re here, and where we’re headed. But both gloss over some of the most fundamental facts of our very existence, facts so taken for granted that we fail to see their significance, facts so difficult to grasp that they are never included in any of the equations.
First, we are verrrrry small fish in a verrrrry big pond. If Earth were the size of a quarter, the Sun would be a nine-foot high ball of fire, three football fields away. Pluto would be pea sized and 15 miles behind us! The nearest star would be xyz miles beyond that. Light crawls across those three football fields, taking eight minutes to get to us, five hours to Pluto, and won’t reach other galaxies until long after we’re all dead. Most of the starlight we see comes from stars that burned out eons ago, their light just having reached us. Our scale, in relation to what we know to exist out there, is not unlike that of an individual cell to the being I call ‘Bob’.
Yet for all the incomprehensible vastness we can observe, only two things don’t really make any sense. The first is Earth itself. Out here in the middle of galactic nowhere sits this life factory, delicately crafted from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Almost any change in that elemental mixture and life as we know it would be impossible. Move us a little closer or further from the Sun, rotate us a bit differently, or change our axis of orbit, and life as we know it would be impossible. Take away the Moon, which is too big to have broken off yet too big to have been captured by our gravitational pull, and, you guessed it, life here would be impossible. Even taking into account the vastness of the Universe, that is a mind-boggling number of things that had to come together just right. Small we may be, but obviously something very special is going on here.
And that ‘something very special’ is the other thing that doesn’t make any sense: us. Of the millions of versions of life that the Earth has spawned, only we are, or ever were, sentient: We write it down and teach it to our kids. Yet we inhabit physical bodies that were basically just animals for millions of years. Then about 10,000 years ago we started writing it down, seemingly everywhere all at once: China, India, Egypt, Central America, Iraq. Earth enters endgame.
That the Universe is big, the Earth is special, and we are unique are things most of us so readily accept that we fail to truly grasp their magnitude. If we did we would treat our world, each other, and ourselves a lot better than we do. If we did we’d probably be humbled by the isolation, insignificance, and responsibility implied.
Because, all things considered, our situation is not unlike that of a stranded spaceship. We awoke to sentience as caretakers of this unexplainable paradise in the middle of a virtually infinite nothingness. Everything we can see seems bound by some kind of natural order, yet the very fact that we can observe it screams a majesty we can’t begin to understand.
Our search for that understanding has been championed by religion and science. But religion tends to gloss over the order and science can’t explain the majesty. Both treat the Earth as if we have a spare on the other side of the moon. Both treat life as if it is just another renewable resource. Religion seems committed to burning this world down so it can build a paradise among the ashes. Science won’t be satisfied until it destroys the delicate balance that makes life here possible.
It is time to start showing some restraint and using a little bit of common sense. We shouldn’t still be killing each other over tribal disputes. We shouldn’t be messing with the recipe. Our #1 priority ought to be ensuring the very survival of our species, and right now that is far from a given.
The Earth begat us but we won’t be begatting any new Earths anywhere in the near future. Nor will we be getting anywhere else for a very long time. Yet we are one mutation, famine, fearless leader, or holy man from setting this world on fire. We are headed for evolutionary obsolescence. It is probably already too late.
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