Musings on God, Science and Mortality...

 

When Nietzche’s madman told us “You’ve killed God!  Now what will you do?” He had a point.  For literally thousands of years we have been tying morals, truth and our very purpose and meaning to any number of gods.  Religions disseminated truths, specified acceptable behaviours, explained why things happened, gave us actions to take in the face of events that were otherwise out of our control.  We identified ourselves by them.  We belonged.

Take away our God and you take away our identity, our place in the world and our understanding of it. 

You take away our Story.

Humankind have always been storytellers.  From the dawn of (our) time we have used stories to entertain, convey deeper truths, help us remember important things, instruct, inspire and challenge.

You could argue religions are mostly stories people started taking too seriously…

But what happens when people begin concluding that the gods they have been so firmly attached to may not, in fact, be real?  When their Story begins to fall apart around them, leaving them bereft of purpose, guidance and that foundational sense of belonging?

Secular Humanism is a great approach to working out the problem of morals and ethics, but it is a little dry on the storytelling side of things.

Science and the Scientific Method has been the greatest single tool for determining the truth of the reality around us that humankind ever developed, but, you know…

Take the sun for example.  Science tells us it is mostly helium and hydrogen, compressed by the force of gravity so hard it forms a plasma and begins a process of atomic fusion which generates enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat and radiation, which we call light.

Good to know, but not nearly as fun, engaging or memorable as “The sun is Helios, who drives a chariot across the sky each day and sails around the ocean each night in a huge cup”…

We need stories.  And we need to feel we are part of one that is bigger than ourselves.  Our brains are wired up that way.  We are The Storytelling Ape.

But if you look at the knowledge we currently have in the right way, we ARE part of a story.  A vast, timeless story full of violence and nurturing, birth and death, the mundane and the unutterably beautiful.

The origin of our universe is still shrouded in mystery.  It fizzled and fizzed, cooled and coalesced until whirling clouds of gas fell in on themselves and the first stars ignited.  They blazed in furious glory before burning themselves out, in their cataclysmic death throes spraying ever more complex elements into the cosmos, producing every element that makes everything, including us.

 We are literally born of stardust.

 We soar through space on a big round spaceship bound to one of these gigantic, elemental forges.  Ours is a bittersweet story of a species who became aware of the incredible beauty of the cosmos we are a part of, only to realise the cost of this comprehension is to also be made aware of our own mortality and the fragile, brief nature of our existence.

In this story we are completely dependent on this planet we travel on, and the star it travels with, for our survival.  We belong to it.  We are literally MADE of it.

…but we are also utterly dependent on each other for our joy, our purpose, our sense of belonging.  We are alone, sailing through the deep, dark cold of space and dancing on the surface of this little orb in defiant, transient warmth.

In the grand scheme of things our lives may be the tiniest pin-pricks of light in a cosmos completely unaware of their existence, but collectively we write a grand, epic saga of innovation, discovery, adventure, exploration and survival.

But no matter how grand the overall story of humanity might seem we must never forget what while individual lives may be the briefest pin-pricks of light, to the holder of that light it is literally everything there is...