Opinion: Reality & Authorship
We’ve invented creation myths. What happens when we discover creation facts?
Atheists annoy me. There’s nothing more unnecessarily boorish than listening to an atheist’s lukewarm take on existence and how it’s all meaningless. Because, they say, there is no evidence of god, god doesn’t exist, which automatically means all religions are pointless — and if you disagree, the atheist says, you’re a fool. What fun.
I see evidence of god everywhere. The sum of this evidence is called science. To me, physics is the study of god and with every new discovery, we inch closer and closer to the truth about life, the universe, and everything else. It’s our destiny.
We think. Therefore, we are.
Don’t believe me? What’s the one unifying behavioral characteristic all human civilizations have in common? Discovery. Humans discover things. We examine and learn. It’s our strongest feature. We didn’t discover one Covid-19 vaccine in a matter of months. We discovered five. As difficult as things are right now, that’s fucking incredible.
In April 2019, scientists captured the first ever image of a black hole. Unassailable science today, it’s hard to believe Albert Einstein predicted the existence of black holes for the first time 80 years prior using only math.
When explorers set foot on the Americas for the first time, their technology overwhelmed the indigenous people who regarded them first as gods. Then, for better or worse, they got to know us. I think this way about the god atheists say doesn’t exist. In my mind, god is nothing like a person, though. It’s a psychological stand-in for the sum of knowledge we humans don’t (yet) possess. If our defining characteristic is discovery, discovering god is our apotheosis.
Elon Musk’s favorite theory, about how we are “almost certainly living in a simulation,” entertains the hell out of me. It’s the most biblical thing I’ve ever heard, because whoever’s running that simulation is, just like a Spanish explorer, a god to us. If an intelligent being controls our weather that, by any definition, is a god, full stop. And, if true, our unstoppable quest for discovery will eventually lead us to the man behind that curtain. Alternatively, if we are in fact living in “base reality,” then, we’ll eventually become the man behind that curtain.
Either way, it’s our destiny (as long as we don’t kill ourselves on the way).
