The size of the universe makes the desert god just a grain of sand.

A while back I did a post on this but I since stumbled across this amazing clip from “Through the Wormhole” narrated by god himself, Morgan Freeman. Check out the scale of the universe, from a hula hoop to 15 billion light years away, and then back down to the atom level….amazing.

Now when I watch that I have what some people might call “a religious experience.” The size and grandeur of the universe is almost beyond comprehension.

What baffles me is how people can see this magnificent universe and believe that, not only are we the only intelligent life forms to inhabit it, but that it was created especially for us. It blows my mind almost as much as comprehending the size of existence. I think Christopher Hitchens says something really relevant to this in the first minute of this short three minute clip; keep in mind the scale of the universe that you just saw in the other video:

We’re just entertaining ourselves

This is just an observation. We’re revolving around the sun, stuck on this planet, entertaining ourselves. What do I mean by that? Well sports are a prime example. Today is the world cup final. The winner will be decided until the next world cup final in four years. All sports are like this. Every season teams are put together and they battle it out to decide the champion, then they do it again. It’s like two prison inmates playing a game of checkers over and over again, each one declaring themselves the “world champion” at the end of every game. Ok, so that’s a crude example. Actual sports are a lot more complex with statistics, strategy, etc, but I hope you get what I mean. Basically we create drama as a way of keeping ourselves entertained. Sports are one way to create drama. One could say that sports are ultimately pointless (and as a nerd with no physical ability, I’m tempted to do this) but that would be misunderstanding the point of sports. It’s not to determine the champions, it’s to create artificial drama as a way of keeping us busy.

When we’re not busy with sports drama, we’re busy with war drama. Yes, wars are horrible things and they’re fought for a number of real reasons; but as bad as they are they keep us entertained. (And by “entertained” I don’t mean “oh wow, this is fun!”) War creates drama, something to do, something to struggle against with an end goal in mind. Then at the end of the war we make movies retelling the drama experienced by people in that situation. Every war gives writers, movie makers, and video game producers new material.

When real stories are not enough we invent new ones. We take elements of the real world, mix them up, alter them, and create new stories. The sci-fi genre comes to mind. How many video games/movies are there about saving the world, or saving the universe? They’re fun an all, but the themes start to get repetitive.  You, the lone hero, must battle against impossible odds to save the universe from some looming threat, yada yada yada.

So this is the perfect reason why we need to drastically increase the budget for NASA. We need to leave our solar system, meet other species, and kill them.

Just kidding, though space isn’t called the “last frontier” for nothing. It would certainly give us more material.

Well I can’t think of anything more to say on this topic, so I guess I’ll end here. Again, this was just an observation of the big picture, not a judgement. Please don’t misunderstand me, I love the stories we come up with. (Well, not Twilight) The human imagination is extremely powerful, and we create some great stuff. I guess I was just elaborating on that saying “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

All the more reason we should leave our solar system and conquer! For the emperor!!!

My #1 reason for rejecting faith

If I had to give one reason for why I disagree with religion and its view of reality, it would this:

It is true that I make some assumptions. I assume that I exist. (I think therefore I am) I also assume that the universe exists based on my observations. It is true that my observations could be wrong, and that we are all just brains in a jar, or in the matrix. It is true that since I don’t know the future I can’t be absolutely 100% positive a ball will fall when I drop it. These are the shortcomings of observation.

Yet even with these shortcomings, religion and observation’s views about reality are not equal. Simple stated, observation produces practical benefits that religious belief does not. A thousand years ago the majority of human population was busy trying to produce enough food to keep from starving, and they often did. Nowadays, through the application of observation, 2% of a first world country can supply enough food to feed the other 98% of the population. A thousand years ago we didn’t know why the moon moved in the sky. Now we know, and not only that, we’ve traveled there and returned home safely. Two hundred years ago we didn’t understand what caused infections and disease, now we have anti-biotics and modern medicine that save thousands of lives daily. All of these advancements were the products of applied observation, science. Unless you live in a cave (which you don’t since you’re on a computer reading this) you use the benefits of science everyday.

The history of the relationship between science and religion is a history of religion making claims, only for science to come along and disprove them. This is simply because religion was originally invented to explain the then unexplainable. Why does it rain? The gods make it rain. Why does the sun move across the sky? Ra in his sunboat moves it. Why are there seasons? Because Persephone ate from the fruit of the underworld. How did life arrive on the planet? God made it. Why are there so many languages? The tower of Babel. These are just a few basic examples but the list goes on and on. The religious understanding of how reality operates is skewed in many areas, from medicine, to anatomy, to astronomy, to physics, to biology, and chemistry.

Yet religion can hardly be blamed for this. The sacred texts of the world’s major religions were written centuries before the advent of the scientific method. They did the best with what tools were available. So given this pattern in the history of science and religion’s relationship, I feel it is reasonable to assume the pattern will continue; much the same way that based off of previous observations I can predict that a ball will fall when dropped. This is related to the idea of the “god of the gaps”. The idea behind “god of the gaps” is that god resides in science’s gaps in knowledge. Even Newton reached a point where he couldn’t go any further and declared “god did it”. Yet since the advent of science these gaps have been slowly filled. Everyday the gaps that god can live in get smaller and smaller. There is nothing to suggest that the trend will not continue.

<Edit> Afterthought: I forgot to mention the complete lack of evidence for the existence of any supernatural beings. There is just as much evidence for the existence of Ra as there is for Yahweh, zero. Now I’m not saying they can’t exist. If I did I would be making a positive assertion which would shift the burden of proof to me. (Despite the fact that it is impossible to prove a negative) Yet as long as people claim that being X exists, they have the burden of proof. The bigger the claim, the bigger the amount of proof required. Claiming that there is an all powerful, all knowing, invisible being(s) in the sky is a huge claim. You use this same logic everyday. If someone said they had a diamond the size of a car in their backyard, you’d want to see it. Our legal system works off of this same concept. Innocent until proven guilty. The prosecution makes the positive assertion that the defendant is guilty. It is up to the prosecution to provide enough evidence to prove their claim. Until guilt is proved, the court operates under the assumption of innocence. Religion is no exception.

To tie it back to the original post, people often try to claim natural things in the world as evidence for their god. Even if it was evidence for the existence of a higher power, there is no reason to then attribute that higher power with all the attributes the religious do, i.e. all-knowing, all-powerful, loving, intervening in human affairs, etc. The funny thing is that the things the religious have claimed in the past have slowly been explained by science.

Occam’s razor states that when presented with two competing explanations, the one containing the fewest superfluous entities is to be preferred. The naturalist explanation always has the fewest superfluous entities, and better yet is demonstrate-able. From these observations we can learn about how the universe we live in actually works, and then take that knowledge and apply it to better the human condition.

What about the rest of god’s creation?

Sitting in my comparative religions class, we were covering the early history of the jewish people. God is constantly intervening on their behalf, or punishing them, or telling them to massacre a specific group of people. But this made me wonder, while god is busy taking an extreme personal interest in the lives and fortunes of his little creation, what else is going on in the universe? I mean, the entire bible is focused just on events on earth.

The entire “world” of the bible is restricted to earth and the stars that happen to be visible to the naked eye given our location in the galaxy. But this is only a meer fraction of existence! The galaxy is so incredibly vast, more so than primitive people could ever possibly imagine.

Did you ever stop to wonder why the bible and god seems to be restricted to this small space? That it might be because that small space is all that was know to the people who invented god and wrote the bible? When god is commanding Isaac to kill his son, what’s happening in the Andromeda galaxy? Or the Spindle Galaxy? Here’s a list of other galaxies out there. Entire galaxies!!!! And these are just the ones we know about. What was god doing then? Why aren’t any of these mentioned in the bible?