The Far Side Of Infinity – Sacrilegious Sunday Musings
I – who know nothing.
No offense intended but some of you may not approve or agree. That’s OK … I don’t know enough to disagree with you – or to even suggest you’re wrong.
As I see it, humans – not just humans, life – were either made or just happened. I find either theory highly improbable but here we are and I have no other ideas. I suppose I lean toward “made” which implies a belief in a maker – aka “God”. Whether the trinity monotheistic god, or one of several other “gods” is beyond my knowledge – one must lean on belief … which is not the same as “truth”. The alternative is that our world “just happened”. I find the string of that argument more unbelievable than “we were made”.
But by either thought, what’s on the other side? The Big Bang theory suggests that the universe began with an incomprehensible explosion … but gives no idea as to what existed before the explosion. Us – humans – came about by a series of improbable events lumped together as “evolution”. Evolution is a poor explanation of race; an even poorer explanation of non-optimal adaptation to our environment(s). Very few humans run around completely naked as do the animals. Why not if we evolved to our environment?
I like the God theory better. But not by much.
Isn’t it funny that most peoples have some sort of tale of creation?
Sometimes I think all gods exist – even the Devil is a god. They sit in some room playing heavenly poker for souls – may the best god win. At this time, Christianity and Islam represent the largest faiths in the world, but those religions – including Judaism – all theoretically worship the same god; are offshoots of the same core belief. They play poker at the big-boy table (a family argument – like WWI. Who did Abraham sacrifice?).
But who’s to say the god of the Oingo-Boingos is not the one true god? Or who’s to say there is only one true god?
But assume the existence of a neutral god or gods. Where do these gods exist? Assume the rightfulness of evolution: In what space did the Big Bang occur? And if not a big bang, what? Some say the universe is expanding. Expanding into what? where?
Who’s to say we’re not just quarks on a larger scale atomic structure?
What’s on the other side of infinity?
Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.“
Does this make the world and all in it simply someone’s lab experiment? Did the dinosaurs die off because the lab manager decided that experiment was a failure? Is “the rapture” just a prediction that the humankind experiment is also a preordained failure? Will humankkind even leave as much behind as the dinosaurs?
Why is it humankind as we know it only came into existence since the last ice age? – 30 thousand, 50 thousand years ago; a trivial time ago if geological theory is even close to correct. Or only 5 or 6 thousand years ago???
No one explains the time between “human” bones millions of years old in Africa and the time of “cavemen”. Or between the time of cavemen and the Sumerians. If mankind evolved from origins in central Africa, why is it no major civilization occurred there? Lots of “empty time” there for PhD students to speculate upon.
How is it that “technology” – steam power, reapers, cotton gins, oil – was never of much use until the last 200 years or so? I can track my family back to before Watt’s steam engine. The Chinese, the Romans, the Egyptians, etc – never discovered or utilized such things?
Everlasting life? A heady promise by the priest class to keep the sheep in line? Is “everlasting life” a curse? When you’ve done everything to boredom, what’s left?
I have a neighbor that truly wishes to save my soul. Believe in Jesus, she tells me. I believe Jesus was a historical figure but what does “Believe in Jesus” mean? His existence, his beliefs? … or just worship the man himself? Or better yet, worship his mother. Is this not idolatry Moses warned against? Is not idolatry simply the worship of a different god?
And are we not all children of god?
Jesus the peacemaker?
Matt 10:34 “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.“
Luke 22:36 “Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.“
Was it not a reformed tax collector (Paul) that actually began the Christian religion some years after Jesus’ death?
What if a former IRS agent today started a religion?
History records the tragic fact that men have gone to war and cut each other’s throats because they couldn’t agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.”
Walter P Stacy 1895 – 1951
Why is it I can’t get over the idea that when we die, we simply “turn off”? There is no more.
Genesis 2:7 “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.“
Genesis 3:19 “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.“
Ecclesiastes 3:20 “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.“
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
But what do I know?
Good stuff DT, but a subject that never goes anywhere.
Some “believe” and some do not, and that’s all there is to it.
Why is it, though, that it seems people only “believe” after they have gotten to a certain point in their life?
Why didn’t they start believing at say, 4 or 5 years old.
You know what I mean, the jailed criminal that “suddenly found god”, the down on his luck urban drunkard that reaches an epiphany one dark and lonely night.
None of us knows, yet, what happens after we die, just as we don’t know what happened before the big bang. I am confident that, in time, research and technology will find out what it is all about.
Me?
I believe in each of us lies the “spark of life”, the essence of a larger presence in the universe, and I think we experience this essence when we dream. Dreams are not “created” in the person but rather are a glimpse through a window into the larger picture. A picture of what was and always will be, filtered through the human mind to fit human parameters and experiences.
If you are capable of speaking, reading, and writing in more than one language, which one do you dream in?
Hmmm…. I am no theologian and not up for sainthood anytime soon but I am game to weigh in.
There has to be a Greater Power or otherwise where did matter come from or when did time begin? Both items defy physics as we know it without a boost from Him. Where did God come from and when did he start? He is so overwhelmingly powerful and knowledgeable that our minds could not comprehend. That is where the faith portion comes in.
Big bang? When did it start or begin to start and how did it create matter without the Greater Power? Big Bang could simply be God snapping his fingers. I do not believe God and Science are incompatible. Science is merely a way of defining what God made. Did man evolve from apes or did God make man as described in Genesis and plop him on earth at some point in time? Either theory, or other, is fine with me and has nothing to do with my salvation.
Yes, Jews, Muslims and Christians all came through Abraham and Moses. Most humans of any variety have some belief in a god. They worship something be it the moon, dirt, rocks, many gods in the either, etc. Just got back from Cebu Philippines where Lapu Lapu killed Ferdinand Magellan in the 1500s after the Filipinos got tired of him. Yet they embraced the Christian faith that he brought them. The tour guides at Ft. Saint Pedro said that prior to Magellan, the locals worshiped dirt and rocks, then kind of giggled.
Currently I am working my way through the Old Testament and into the middle of Chronicles 1. Getting to this point reading serially from Genesis reminds us that life has historically been brutal. One race or group controls its people and territory until another more powerful group takes it away from them. Jews, Hittites, Cannanites, Egyptians etc. all killed, raped and pillaged from one another for centuries. It goes on today all over the world but at the pace of time, which appears much slower. Russians are currently taking land away from Ukrainians. White settlers took land away from the Indians prior to the Apaches who fought and took land from the Souix and Comanche, etc. We think we are currently above all that in the US? We currently allow legal murder of unborn children by the millions. Hell, it is a money making industry. Gangs in big cities have little regard for human life. Mere animals. We flew to the moon, have electricity and advanced medicines yet we are only a few steps away from being quite primitive if our current order disappears. Man’s natural state is war – Michael Walsh.
So why Jesus? Why not? Out of the Big 3, Muslims splintered off from the plan. Jews completely missed the boat and killed the humble Savior sent to them. Jesus is the New Covenant. He added to the Big 10. Love God with all your heart. Love your neighbor as yourself, even the left wing pinko marxist commie trash next door.
I am kind of Catholic. I do not pray to saints or Mary. I pray to God alone. I would be embarrassed to confess my sins on this site as I have been foolish and selfish in years past. I am not above sin currently, I am merely working my way through life and am forgiven. I am a work in progress as I believe we all are. I believe Jesus is Lord and the lone tattoo on my back states that.
We are all searching imperfectly.
Wonderful reply, Snake, to DT’s thoughtful post. I am Catholic too. None of us pray to Mary or the Saints but through them. I read a poem on the Society of Classical Poets today that seems to illustrate the “unbelieving” aspect of Faith.
In fact she has two poems posted, both extremely well written and interesting but to
this reader, seeming to express the same thing. Hope the link works.
Simple answer to the creation of the human species. Genesis 1:27, God created man –God is a uniplural noun in Hebrew, more than one. (The mighty ones created). When this happened nobody knows–could have been hundreds of thousands of years ago. Genesis 2:7, And the Lord God–singular-YAHWEH created/formed a being which he named Adam. This happened approximately 7,450 years ago. This Adam man was a different creation than the first. This Adam man had different attributes than the first man. When this Adam man was created, the earth was already populated with humans.
Genesis Chapter 1 and Genesis Chapter 2 are two different creations.
DT – not sacrilegious. You have not dishonored any sacred objects, only truthfully articulated your thoughts and
also caused us to think and give thanks
if we have the grace of Faith.
Thank you
Here’s a fun thought exercise.
Consider the lowly deck of cards. We’ve all held them and played with them from Go Fish when we were children, to poker and other such games as adults. There are 52 cards in a normal playing deck. How many different ways are there to arrange those cards? Tick tock, tick tock. The answer is surprising. Expressed in math as 52!, that is 52 Factorial. And the answer? Is roughly 8 * 10 to the 67th power. So if you started dealing out a deck. And it took you only one second to deal each deck and to pick it up and shuffle it for the next deal (unlikely, unless you are an omnipotent being who exists outside of time itself), it would take 8 * 10 to the 67th power of seconds.
That’s a lot of seconds. To deal each possible combination. Assuming you didn’t accidentally re-deal a previous combination in the process, forcing you start anew from the beginning.
Scientists claim to have been able to calculate the age of all of the universe since the Big Bang as roughly 14.5 billion years. I’ve seen recently that some of them have revised that to around 24 billion years now. That would be expressed as 2.4 times 10 to the 10th power. It’s easy to calculate the number of seconds that is. Each year contains 60* 60 * 24 * 365 seconds, roughly. If you were halfway decent at math in high school, you can calculate that in your head. It’s not a very much bigger number. At least not compared to the number of different combinations you can deal from a deck of 52 cards.
Now consider the number of combinations that are available in each human cell, except for gametes, the reproductive cells. Each human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each chromosome contains roughly, on average, 900 genes. Each gene contains at least two alleles, a sort of on-off switch. So in keeping with our metaphor. The number of combinations that would need to be dealt to create the first human being (ignoring a host of other chicken-or-egg issues with that scenario) would be roughly 46 * 900 * 2. Factorial. 82,800! That must be an incomprehensibly large number. And if a mistake occurred along the way, it would all have to be tossed and the Universe would have to start the deal over from the beginning.
Evolution is mathematically impossible. And not by just a little bit. There hasn’t been anywhere close to enough time since the Big Bang. Even if scientists are off by a hundred TRILLION years. That leaves only one reasonable conclusion. Unless scientists have got the age of everything they claim to know wildly wrong.
Not to disagree with you – I don’t, but let me point out that regardless of the odds against, an event that happens has a probability of 1.
Everyone assumes a coin has two sides and the odds of heads or tails is 50%. I once flipped a nickel and it ended up on its edge. What are the odds?
My friend David Marks doing his legendary nickel test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CML_fcKtjcA
In a conversation with him about 15 years ago I gave him a pen that I had made out of a piece of structural laminated lumber and a piece of Corian countertop and he was knocked out by it. I took that as a compliment.
Funny coincidence.
Some folks that used to be our next door neighbors moved to Santa Rosa about 10 years ago to be near their daughter and they are now neighbors to David and his wife. Strange that, no?
Thanks Ghost, I enjoyed that video! That is a machine that certainly must have been designed, constructed and tuned by an intelligence with foresight and a certain amount of time sufficient to make it all happen. And that ignores the men and machinery to extract the ores, transport them to smelters for refining, then to various factories to make the parts…it is all a bit more than first meets the eye, isn’t it? What are the odds?
I, Pencil.
Thanks for the reply, D.T. And a belated thanks for the rebirth/cloning of the Mothership.
Probability isn’t the issue. It’s not even a major player in this part of the discussion. (i.e.: Life has happened, so the probability that life will happen is, indeed, 1.) But that is (somewhat) superfluous to a discussion of HOW life happened. The false idea of the evolution of life presumes, implicitly, an infinite amount of time for that life to develop from something that starts out as just nominally more than nothing. (Evolutionists sidestep the prickly matters of both time and dirt in their fevered imaginings) For the (mathematically impossible*) probability that the coin will land on “heads” 82,800! times IN A ROW! And that doesn’t consider other issues of probability like, for just one, the chirality (handedness) of the chemicals that build the spiral helix DNA molecule and other molecular structures that are necessary for self-replication. Even if precursor chemicals, or primitive forms of life that can survive the cold and un-shielded radiation of space, arrived on Earth completely by chance from a distant galaxy that was formed by a different BigBang™ a gazillion years ago, as has been seriously posited.
Our reality is constrained by a finite amount of time: 30-50 billion years on the way out from nothing, and another 30-50 billion years for the trip back to nothing. That’s it. There isn’t nearly enough Time for the Fickle Finger of Fate to work its Magic. Unless those coins are being flipped at blinding speed by an omnipotent Being of infinite intelligence. (*Mathematician Emile Borel calculated that practical impossibility occurs at 1*10 to the 50th power, defined as the threshold at which there is no realistic chance of an event EVER occurring.)