“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.”
— Immanuel Kant
Sometimes I wonder as most people might have at some point or the other that why the universe is the way it is. It amazes me how my mind can ramble over the same question on several occasions, pondering to different depths and directions, not figuring out the true answer but always returning satisfied. I am firm believer in science and strongly opine to the fact that most of the anomalies and ramifications in the universe can be justified by pure reason. I conform to the idea that most observable facts can be explained lucidly with science, but the questions that pops in my mind is why are the facts the way they are? Now, this might seem preposterous so here is an example, we know for a fact that the gravitational force between two bodies follows the inverse square law, Newton derived this on the basis of brilliant observations that he had made. I don’t disagree with any of this ; I only ask why does it have to be the inverse square law? It could have been the inverse cube law or something else maybe. The implication being that the dependent quantities and observations would have been different and by different I mean a lot different, but that anyway is not the case in point.
So why are the laws of physics so damn perfect.( For instance, if the electrostatic force, which is inversely proportional to distance squared, instead were inversely proportional to distance to the power 2.00001, electrons would fly off into space and atoms would never form ). It seems as though the laws of physics were tailor-made for life to exist. You may argue that it is just a coincidence and it was all chance, but leaving something as big as this to chance is just being ignorant. To delve in deeper we will have to go right to the fundamentals, right to where it all began right to the formation of the universe.
From the evidence that astronomers and scientists have observed it is quite safe to say that the universe had a beginning and that the universe did not exist infinitely, contrary to the views of “Materialism”. The most popular theory that explains the formation of the universe and which gained wide acceptance in the scientific world due to the clear-cut evidence for it is the “Big Bang theory”. The “Big Bang Theory” is one of the many models that can explain the observations.
Even though the “Big Bang Theory” is most accepted theory it is highly flawed and contradicts many well established scientific laws. It also does not solve the central problems of the origin of time and the need for infinite energy to cause the Big Bang. The definition of science as quoted from dictionary.com is as follows “The systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation”. Explaining systematically how the universe formed using the facts that are observable and the scientific laws that have been well justified just seems impossible, which begs the question of the existence of the supernatural being.
Okay lets leave “Big Bang” aside for a moment and assume that life sprung up “somehow”, so to reach what we are today, from tiny single-celled water dwelling organisms what naturalists after careful observation filled in between was the theory of “Evolution”. Evolution explains how the earth got to the state it is in; the fossil evidences support this theory. But here is where it gets even messier; the theory of Evolution like the “Big Bang” seems to be stained. Evolutionary theory claims that there once existed a whole series of successive forms of the various organisms alive today. These supposedly changed by infinitesimal amounts with each generation as they evolved into the present varieties. The fossil record shows the sudden emergence of new species out of nowhere, fully complete with all their characteristics and not changing over time. It is almost entirely devoid of forms that can plausibly be identified as intermediates between older and newer ones. This is popularly known as the "missing link" problem, and it is massively systematic across different species and time periods.
So what of all this, well from all this I certainly have come a conclusion, I personally believe in the existence of a supernatural being or in other words “god”, (at least at present unless I am convinced otherwise) as the formation of the universe and the formation of planets, creation of life, evolution, and everything else in between that got us to what we are now just seems too far fetched to just happen probabilistically. It seems to me as though there is someone up there who is rolling the dice, someone out there pulling the strings, of which we are just oblivious. This is what I finally answered myself after the numerous times I have asked myself how we ended up here from absolute nothingness. I may be wrong but for now I believe, I believe in “god”.
Science is continually metamorphosing, and perhaps one day the “Big Bang Theory” will join the flat Earth and the geocentric universe in the dustbin of history and and may be replaced by a more robust theory. But until it is, belief in god should not be dismissed as mere superstition.
"I want to know how God created the universe. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."
— Albert Einstein
Guys I really hope to see your comments here, so please feel free to leave your comments.
