Saturday, November 23, 2013

How can anyone be certain of anything?

I'm serious.  If one were to view theology and religion as faith-based subsets of cosmology, and looking at cosmology through the lens of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, just how could anyone claim to know the answer to any of the BIG QUESTIONS of human existence?

Take the existence or non-existence of deities.  Given that deities may not exist now, who's to say they won't someday exist?  If they are brought into existence in the future, might they immediately become transfinite and exist in all time frames, past, present, and future?  This idea of creating gods is something I've been exploring in my In the Realm of the Gods series.  What might not exist now might exist in the future.  If it is properly configured, once it begins to exist in the future, it will then exist now.

You think that's weird?  We know about relativity.  It's been tested in astronomical observations and in particle accelerators.  This is something we understand, so we KNOW that, if one stood in a certain location in this galaxy - there are actually several of them - that person would effectively live forever.

That's a known phenomenon.  Humanity currently does not have a clue about what makes up the bulk of the universe.  We know dark matter exists, we can see its gravitational effects, but what is it?  Fairy dust?  Who knows?  Same with dark energy.  We can see that the expansion of the universe is slowly accelerating. Why?  Who knows?

We can't even be certain of how many dimensions the universe contains, four, eight, eleven, fourteen?

The small bits of the reality are constructed in a way that precludes certain knowledge about where particles are, how fast they might be going, or even if they currently exist.  It gets even worse when we think about electron tunneling or quantum entanglement.

How about time?  Just why does time go in only one direction?  Is this an illusion?

Too many questions, not enough answers.  What's wrong with embracing that instead of certainty?