I'd like to digress for a few minutes to consider the mind boggling revolution in physics and cosmology of the 20th Century. Copernicus and Galileo established that the earth and planets revolve around the sun in the 17th Century. This overturned established doctrine, but did not in itself pose a major challenge to the human centered philosophy of the Abrahamic religions, in which we are the principal preoccupation of the all powerful creator God.
However, as astronomers continued to look through telescopes and discovered the vast number and great distance of the stars of our galaxy, that belief became less tenable. Then, in 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered the universe. With the newly available 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson, he found that the so-called nebulae, cloudy appearing objects, were in fact galaxies beyond our own. Then, in 1929, he found that the universe was expanding -- that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from us. Combining this observation with Einstein's revolutionary understanding of space-time, cosmologists were able to run the movie backwards, as it were, and determine that the universe originated as an incalculably small, dense singularity which, about 13 1/2 billion years ago, began to expand. (The current best estimate is actually 13.8 billion years ago.) The quantum theory, also first developed in the 1920s, enabled physicists to model what the early universe must have been like and how it evolved into the universe of galaxies, stars and planets we live in today. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965 confirmed predictions of this theory.
The Hubble deep field photograph, made by the space telescope named for the aforementioned Edwin Hubble in 1995, found 3,000 galaxies in one 24-millionth of the sky.
Astronomers estimate there may be something like 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe, each of them containing an average of 100 billion or more stars. (Everything you see above is a galaxy.)
Meanwhile, we've figured out that the earth is about 4 1/2 billion years old, give or take -- exactly when it became enough like the planet we know to be called "the earth" is a little fuzzy -- and that life on earth began at least 3 1/2 billion years ago, maybe more. Homo sapiens is at most 400,000 years old. Unfortunately, although these assertions are in the realm of fact, not opinion, not everyone believes them. They are fundamentally incompatible with religion. If God actually caused all this to happen, he couldn't possibly give a shit about us. You would think this discovery would have had a major impact on our culture, and our self concept. But for most people, it really hasn't. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.
4 comments:
If people can't begin to accept that they're inconsequential, then it follows that they have to make some shit up. The prioritizing of that shit, by definition, entails that they must deny facts. They do this by proclaiming more loudly the bullshit in their heads. It's the equivalent, for adults, of placing their hands over their ears like children may do and yelling, "NYAH-NYAH-NYAH, I can't hear you!"
Like Jack Nicholson said in the film A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!"
But people who can't handle the truth HAVE to replace it with SOMETHING. [This also explains the incredible lawlessness and bullshit of the current Republican party.] So they replace it with bullshit, pagan-based religion that soothes their terrified minds and absolves them of any sense of personal responsibility.
I am a visual person, so I like to see time lines. Really puts the inconsequential in focus.
I've never seen an incompatibility between science and the God concept. Much of my 'evidence' is the sheer improbability of the accidental universe. Constants off by just a hair and none of this would exist. And the probability of all of these constants falling into place are astronomical.
But that's just me.
We're here because this is the universe in which it is possible for us to exist. Or, we are what we are because this universe makes us possible. Either way you want to look at it.
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