Some thoughts on origins…..

I leached the following from another of my rather lame websites……I plagiarize myself………….

When I was a child of elementary-school age, my thoughts were, I believe, sometimes different from those of my peers. I remember thinking about nothingness; I tried to wrap my weird little mind around this abstraction, but could not quite get the cerebral ‘fingers’ of my left and right brain to reach far enough around this curious concept to touch. I attempted to imagine a ‘universeless reality’, a void with no time, space, matter, or energy. Reality, or more appropriately the lack of, would then be less than black and empty. I think that I should now conclude reminiscing over my prepubescent mental gymnastics.

Where this train of thought leads, in the final analysis, is to the question of why there is something here rather than nothing. The options are thus: The universe either created itself, or is infinite in age, or was bought into existence by some Entity greater than the universe. Drilling down a bit further, the question becomes, “Is there a God?”

I make no claims to being an academic; I assert, however, that a thoughtful layperson can reach reasonable conclusions to profound questions that, while they may counter the status quo, are defensible without having to resort to blind leaps of faith. Thus begins the journey. Our initial vehicle for this journey is science. Because science `requires’ a naturalistic explanation for natural phenomena, there exists an `a priori’ bias towards materialism, and this is as it should be.

Science, however, can only take us so far in our journey. In fact, science, in regards to `first things,’ does not take us to the beginning. Science is methodology. Science is hypothesis, experimentation and repetition of experimentation, observation of phenomena. Science insists that a theory be falsifiable. To speculate on historical, non-repeatable events such as the origin of life, or the origin of matter and energy, whether it be by Devine Fiat or by natural processes, is an exercise in metaphysics. Creation and evolution are not repeatable events; they were not observed by humanity. To declare evolution or creationism as fact betrays a misunderstanding of the scientific process or is an attempt to intimidate those who dissent and dare question the orthodoxy.

Hearkening back to the initial premise, I must state that I find it hard to separate, in my mind, the quest for God from the quest for the origins of life.