A reader responds to one woman's conversion to Catholicism:
It does not follow that because there is no God, that life has no meaning. Let's, for a second, exclude the question of God which is taken as so momentous and examine what we know about the Universe. It is massive in scale, in what we see and what we can't. There are galaxies cropping up constantly. There are infinite numbers of stars and in certain places, forests of true nothing. On our own planet, there are countless species of life from Zebras down to bacteria. The life of our planet itself, the rumble of its earthquakes, the sweeps and horrors of its tornadoes and hurricanes. Hold onto all that for a second and then think about the human experience. There are seven billion of us, and each has their own internal universe, their own understanding of history. We have the vastness of love and loneliness and especially friendship. Some of us get lucky enough to spend our lives actually exploring another person's universe which generally seems to us to range on the scale from bigger to the cosmos to as fundamentally tiny as a flea. And each of us has this.
We have a constant explosion of love and sadness through the enormous sweep of the cosmos and it makes us feel without meaning? If the Universe is anything, it is proof that meaning can be found in the smallest of existence, from atoms to neutrinos and down beneath it. It can be found in a virus if one has to look. The lesson of the Universe is not insignificance, the lesson of it is our mutual enormity. The Universe is loud with it.
But this is God. It is certainly what I understand as God. Nonbelievers need to let go of anthropocentric, grey-bearded beings in the sky for God itself, the highest consciousness of all, and the force that gives this staggering beauty, available to us all, love. Another reader:
I'm always frustrated by the common theistic argument that a life without a god is one without meaning. That our shared experiences are "reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it's all destined to be extinguished at death," completely misses the point. What magic, what joy that those "neurons firing" give us! That people can't see the epic, glorious beauty of the miniscule odds of our brief existence and instead must assign an imaginary father figure to give it meaning has always baffled me. Yes, I believe when we die we're gone, and that on a universal scale, we are indeed insignificant. Yes, I believe the universe is vast and uncaring, but that, to me at least, makes our lives even more special, even more meaningful and even more precious.
Will Wilkinson makes related points.
(Video: Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König, recut from footage shot by expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station from
August to October, 2011.)
The Dish 