SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL ...

... but big, astronomically BIG, is incomprehensible.  I have already, in the book "From Illusions to Illumination" (pp. 181-187), expressed my amazement at the beauty and size of the universe (not to say the multiverse).  Not so long ago in human history, at the time of the composition of the Jewish Bible for instance, people thought that stars were lights stuck on to a celestial dome, a lid over the earth.  We now not only know better.  We are discovering the literally incredible realities of space, and the mind-blowing fact that many of the phenomena we are finally beginning to perceive, ceased to exist millions of years ago.

Most of us continue, as I am doing right now, to profit from the warmth of our star and the glorious sunshine it is providing on this Summer day at my beach-house on the Atlantic coast in France.  No one could give a fig - if they even knew - that the sun's rays took eight minutes to get here.  If anyone ever told them about it, they might be impressed to learn that if tiny Pluto were able to send light to our planet, it would take not a few minutes but seven hours to get here.  That's when some of us start to wonder about the stars, what is beyond them, and why on earth (!) God would have bothered to create and set this expanding purposeless universe into meaningless motion.

Someone had to, hadn't they ?  Well, no.  The man in "Porgy and Bess" said it best : "It ain't necessarily so."  Atheists don't know why such an enormous universe exists, but non-atheists, if they are honest, should admit that they don't either.  Unless you accept what God-talkers, theologians, continue to say  - like their predecessors, long before we could even begin to chart the solar system  - that a god (whom they invented) made all this just for us puny earthlings to discover and admire.  Can you believe that ?  I can't.

                                                                  DELENDA   RELIGIO

Comments

[thom]

Non-rationalists believe quite a lot of incredible things - or say they do. I read recently that cosmologists now think (believe?) that the universe may be infinite. The tentativeness, typical of most scientific pronouncements, is praiseworthy - unlike the bullying doctrinaire certainty of credulous non-rationalists. But what does it mean to say that something is infinite? Non-finite, having no bounds - facile euphemisms spring to mind but do not advance the understanding. Long, long after all trace of human existence has disappeared from planet Earth, the universe will still be here (or rather there) doing what it has apparently always done - existed.The interpolation of "God" into this extraordinary mystery does not agvance our understanding one iota.