It occurs to me that I haven't fully discussed
The Big Question that I previously talked about. That question is "
why are we here?" and, as I said before, I believe it is the fundamental question that we are all trying to answer. The problem with my previous view is that I failed to discuss the two ends of this question:
- The first way of looking at this question is, essentially, historically and ask the question "how did we get here?" In other words, we can look at the processes that the universe went thru to get where we are now.
- The second way of looking at this question is, essentially, futuristically and ask the question "where are we going from here?" In other words, we can look at what the universe may progress to in the (potentially far) future.
In the first way of looking at
The Big Question, I see only two possible answers to the question of "
how did we get here?":
- The universe came about due to some random noise that led to the creation of all that there is. This solution posits that something was created from nothing and, therefore, there was no creator needed. Physicists like Stephen Hawking have supposedly worked out the mathematics that would show this to be a possibility, but this is way above my knowledge. However, I am willing to accept this hypothesis.
- The universe came about due to the influence of some outside force. That force might be a creator (as in GOD) or just some other force outside this universe as yet undiscovered. I, however, see nothing to suggest that a god or gods is influencing the direction of this universe now that it has been created. Everything that happens within this universe still seems explainable by scientific means.
In both cases, once the universe was created, an evolutionary process took over. That process coalesced the dust of the early universe into stars thru gravitation, brought the stars together into galaxies, coalesced planets around the stars, populated some of those planets with the chemistry of life, kicked off life, grew intelligence, and so on. This process is leading us into a (speculative) answer for the second part of
The Big Question. That is that evolution is more than a process that applies only to life -- it applies to the entire universe itself! Looked at this way, you might justifiably consider the entire universe to be a living entity in its own right that is going thru an evolutionary process in much the same way that we have gone thru evolution from mere amoebas to the human beings we are today. The question is what might the universe be evolving toward in some future billions of years from now?
Might the answer be, as I postulated previously, that we are evolving toward becoming
GOD!
