Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe" it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants.
The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence. Why had anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to this question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know.
Tag: religion spirituality cosmology
There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity's original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements formed in supernovas. We know that life on this planet originated about 4 billion years ago, and we are all descendants of that original replicating molecule. Thanks to Darwin we know that natural selection is the only workable explanation for the design and variety of all life on this planet. Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have reconstructed much of the human tree of life. We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are the most successful and last surviving African hominid. Every single person on this Earth, all 7 billion of us, arose 50,000 years ago from small bands of African hunter-gatherers, a total population of somewhere between 600 and 2,000 individuals.
J. Anderson ThomsonTag: science biology atheism atheist cosmology charles-darwin darwin anthropology secular primitive origins guessing
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Carl SaganTag: space cosmology cosmos radio-telescopes
The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.
John K. BrownTag: life paradox afterlife cosmology metaphysics spirtuality
The type of nothing from which something can arise is truly something.
John K. BrownTag: god spirituality cosmology metaphysics ontology big-bang nothingness
In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Martin J. ReesTag: cosmology quantum-mechanics
There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe—or that they were applicable to every time in its history.
Michael BrooksTag: history universe cosmology physics astronomy laws-of-physics
For Man to tell how human life began is hard; for who himself beginning knew?
John MiltonTag: evolution cosmology origins
Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed.
Sean CarrollTag: science reality atheism atheist cosmology materialism science-and-religion
Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.
John Archibald WheelerTag: cosmology physics laws-of-nature quantum-mechanics big-bang nobel-laureate quantum-fluctuations acausal origin-of-the-universe origin-of-universe physical-law quantum-cosmology
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