I am posting this in /sci/, though it feels like waxing philosophical. Nevertheless:
Space is incomprehensibly vast. It is difficult for the mind to encompass the size of the planet, let alone our star system, beyond that the hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy alone. And yet, space is filled with almost nothing. It's a void, with gases and debris and associated matter. Using science we've ascertained how old the universe is, but even now the vastest majority of humanity turn to religion to answer the intrinsic questions that we have pondered since we gained sapience and a basic understanding of causality. Why THIS? Why are we a small speck of life floating in a vast void of nothingness, with no seeming rhyme or reason to how everything began and continues to exist? Life seems to be wildly rare, intelligent life even moreso, and it is difficult to understand exactly WHY it is here. Why anything is here. Religion itself increasingly fails to answer these questions as our understanding of the universe develops. If a God did create the universe, why do so in such a sea of nothing, in the way it has? Why waste so many billions of years, with no clear goal in sight of where it is going?
It seems either from the view of a purely rational understanding or a spiritual one, reality's origins and continued existence just don't make sense. It's easy to look at a boulder while walking through a field and understand that it doesn't need a purpose to sit there, but to ponder the singularity of space and time itself, and the billions and billions of years it took for that boulder to finally arrive in that field, is not the same. From the perspective of the anthropic principle, we can say that in order for us to ponder existence we must first exist, but it doesn't explain why it was made THIS way, or if it was made at all. It's very frustrating, I wish humanity had a way of finding out the reason for it all before I die. What are your thoughts on the origin of reality?
Space is incomprehensibly vast. It is difficult for the mind to encompass the size of the planet, let alone our star system, beyond that the hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy alone. And yet, space is filled with almost nothing. It's a void, with gases and debris and associated matter. Using science we've ascertained how old the universe is, but even now the vastest majority of humanity turn to religion to answer the intrinsic questions that we have pondered since we gained sapience and a basic understanding of causality. Why THIS? Why are we a small speck of life floating in a vast void of nothingness, with no seeming rhyme or reason to how everything began and continues to exist? Life seems to be wildly rare, intelligent life even moreso, and it is difficult to understand exactly WHY it is here. Why anything is here. Religion itself increasingly fails to answer these questions as our understanding of the universe develops. If a God did create the universe, why do so in such a sea of nothing, in the way it has? Why waste so many billions of years, with no clear goal in sight of where it is going?
It seems either from the view of a purely rational understanding or a spiritual one, reality's origins and continued existence just don't make sense. It's easy to look at a boulder while walking through a field and understand that it doesn't need a purpose to sit there, but to ponder the singularity of space and time itself, and the billions and billions of years it took for that boulder to finally arrive in that field, is not the same. From the perspective of the anthropic principle, we can say that in order for us to ponder existence we must first exist, but it doesn't explain why it was made THIS way, or if it was made at all. It's very frustrating, I wish humanity had a way of finding out the reason for it all before I die. What are your thoughts on the origin of reality?
