Abandon hope

This is why I find it impossible to believe that God sent down his only son to pay for my sins.

I am an ape. A type of African ape, fairly closely related to the other types. Not only was I descended from monkeys, I am a monkey. I look at people on the bus sometimes, and I think, you know, fool yourself all you will, but we do look a lot like chimps.

So as a being I am nothing special.

I live in a city, which is nothing more than an accretion of the burrows of those apes, on a smallish, rocky planet with a thin gas covering, spinning round a small fireball on the outer edges of a smallish galaxy.

It is 93 million miles to that fireball. That's quite a long way. It takes 13-14 hours to drive to Sydney from here, and that's only about 700 miles. You'd need a lot of gas to get to Mars, let alone the Sun.

It's another four light years to the nearest star. That doesn't sound like very far.

Only four! Yes, but turn it into miles and it's 5,880,000,000,000. That's nearly as many miles as America owes the world in dollars! It's more than 63,000 times as far away from Earth as the Sun is.

I can see, when I look up into the night sky, stars that are a *billion* times further away than that (give or take a bit).

This is a commonplace, that we are so insignificant against the backdrop of a truly enormous universe. But here's the thing.

Life is a billion billion to one chance, or some such odds (forget what it actually is, it's not important). But there are trillions, quadrillions, pentillions, bazillions of stars (okay, I admit it, I'm lost after four, but how many things do you count that you need *that many* zeroes) and an almost equally large number of planets.

If something is a million to one chance, there need only be a million chances for it to be a certainty. That's what probability is.

Are you willing to claim that a certain type of ape is special enough that the chances against it are greater than the number of planets in the entire universe?

If you are, you know nothing about probability and you are doubtless the kind of person credulous enough to believe in a personal god in the first place.

We would never know. There would be no way to find out. No message from them to us or us to them will ever make its target -- the chances are the universe will run out of steam long before then (I'm using steam entirely metaphorically -- the universe will continue to power us or our descendants, in the broadest sense (which means descendants of whoever's left standing on our planet, if anyone, billions of years from now; it's pure vanity to think that our twig will still be flourishing on the tree of life), long after it is so cold that getting the energy into one place to create steam would take so much effort as to be impossible (yes, that day will come; that's what heat death will be like)). But they are there, you can be fairly certain.

So this is the thing. A universe on a scale that was utterly inconceivable to Bronze Age nomads sitting in their tents, clinging fiercely to their piece of land, their identity, with at times nothing but their god to keep them going, which uses almost all its energy on things not much to do with us (although everything, in a tiny way, and that's a tininess equally inconceivable to us, let alone them, does have something to do with everything), in which our specialness is a construct of our own fear and has not a whit of evidence for it (but much, much evidence for the universe's callous indifference to us, which it is liable to display by sending an asteroid towards us, as it has in the past, which will destroy not just us but everything else that lives on this planet, as it may well have done in the past, leaving us to have to evolve all over again, as... well, we didn't, but life might well have done).

And this is the thing. Yes, a god might have created all that. Yes, he might have had some idea that there would be a universe spring from the nothingness. He might even have been able to do what the laws of physics say he could not, and read the future (although it's hard to believe that even a god can ignore the uncertainty principle because it is not a law in the sense of the laws we have against murder or theft, but is written into the universe, part of *how it is*) and he may have known that there would be on this planet (and on many others) apes that would walk, talk, send him messages (not powered by steam but by prayer, which even on the last day of a universe that has died, we will still be using, I daresay, although what we will pray to I don't know) and perhaps even sing at him once a week.

But while I can believe that Allah made us, I can believe that Jehovah wanted a universe to adorn him (can but don't, if you know what I mean), while I can believe that Brahma has this wonderful plaything, that he turned the key, I cannot believe that he would care, with this enormous toy that he would care whether an ape like me is a naughty boy.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:15 pm