The Search for Divinity

   I can tell you what I think.  I can not tell you what I believe. That would be against my religion.  Faith is an intensely personal thing only to be experienced and not shared except thru sincere good works.  We all fall short as examples to even ourselves.

    The question has been posed:  How did we get here?  Is there some purpose, rhyme or reason?  Are we alone in the universe as the Bible says?

    We seem to think not.  Most instruments to find other intelligent life are pointed away from Earth and haven't yielded much. Of course, the few instruments pointed toward earth in search of intelligent life haven't yielded much either.  When you consider the universe is expanding and is 13.77 billion years old it should be alive with radio signals if there were developing sentient, civilizations.  The argument that time limits our ability to receive signals presupposes the entire universe reached the ability to create radio waves at about the same time. That doesn't seem reasonable to me. However, it does support the idea of a "first cause".  It also brings up the idea that our notions on the age and size of the universe are limited by our powers of observation.

    It certainly could be a case of the old Chinese proverb that a fool can ask enough questions to confound a thousand wise men but the logic does seem to follow.  Why would we be the first in the vast universe to be able to create and receive radio waves?  I dunno.

    There is the idea mankind is a kind of pilot project by God to see if it's worthwhile or even possible to populate His creation.  That seems like a lot of responsibility to me. A responsibility placed on rather frail shoulders.  Why would an omnipotent being need a pilot project?  These are unanswerable questions that dissolve on the concept that faith is the belief in things unseen.

    OK, there's the faith-based arguments or at least some of them.  There are totally secular arguments.  They can be sort of summed up by the statement that life is one of the more amusing properties of carbon.  Sentient life is the operation of random chance in an infinite universe. To suppose we are alone is a conceit.  Maybe so.  Maybe Lorenzo Snow had it right.  "As man now is, God once was.  As God now is, man may be."  Maybe man doesn't just create the Godhead, maybe he is evolving into it.
    There is a theory that sentient life is no more than an unintended infestation of the operation of simple physics.  In the end, we are no more than pond scum or mold or rust.  That leaves us on our own to develop concepts of morality, right and wrong and so forth that only apply in our unintended universe.  A universe small and meaningless dwarfed by a "creation" we have no hope of understanding.
    I don't think that belittles our hopes, aspirations or values in the slightest.  Those things are ours to perfect and employ within limits we have no hope of understanding. They are ours to keep. I don't think it reduces divinity or simple decency one iota. They just become more our own to craft.   It only increases their importance that we must perfect them in relation to each other.
    Man IS the measure!

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