NORTHERN PLANNER

The ever-wise Scamp hosted a great conversation about Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion recently. There’s some interesting stuff, but I just wanted to add something here which takes it somewhere else.

For the record, while I think he brilliantly argues for the improbability of a creator that made everything just for us, and the detail he goes into on Darwinism torpedoes ‘Grand Design’, there is a weakness in his central argument of there being little chance of any form of creation at all. And it’s all to do with his brilliant final chapter and how small our frame of reference is.

This final section is one of the most inspiring reads I’ve had in a while. He deals with how science can replace the way religion can provide comfort and inspiration.

We all have a narrow point of view thanks to evolution. We are not equipped to see the very small or the very large. Surface tension on water is irrelevant to us, but massive for a pond skating insect. All matter is mostly empty space, but you cannot see it until you live at the atomic level. A gnat can dodge raindrops with ease, much in the same way as we can dodge cars when we cross the road. We can’t.

But science is opening up our bandwidth. It’s giving us new possibilities…… and new questions.

Using light other than ultraviolet allows us to see amazing patterns on flowers, we can see long dead stars too. We’re puzzling with the fact that most matter in the universe is invisible and un-detectable.

The world becomes strange and bent when you travel near to the speed of light, time itself alters from your perspective. Hard to get your head around.

Most strangely, when we study the very small, we have to use quantum mechanics, which suggests that the only way we can think of very small things is to assume they are in lots of different places at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to us at all, our minds are not equipped to deal with it……..yet. But it throws up the possibility of multiple universes where every possible event has happened and will happen. Very, very weird.

There is so much we’re not evolved to understand. So much possibility. How life affirming is that? You don’t need to make up God that made you specially, but doesn’t our lack of comprehension suggest that we can’t even be sure we’re not existing in piece of dust on someone’s mobile phone?

There’s so much to discover, so much we don’t know and so much we WON’T until our minds evolve to get a new frame of reference. That’s so beautiful, the thought of all those amazing possibilities. Makes me feel faint.

BUT if our frame of reference is that narrow, if we don’t understand the very small, and we cannot even see, or locate, most of the matter in the universe, how can we claim to have proved logically, or statistically that something hasn’t made it all? We have no concept of scale apart from our own.

Like I said, this isn’t an argument for and against religion. It’s a someone dazzled by the amazing things we’ve yet to even begin to comprehend.