A touch of Religeon.

To begin, let me start by making my view on religion reasonably clear: I think religion is mostly nonsense, the church exponentially so…  I however think the core ideals of the religion known as Christianity are well worth upholding, and modern Christianity has the ideal of being a predominantly private choice (which in my mind makes it a prime contender for the mantle of "the one true religion").  And I do believe that the intelligent design philosophy is at least plausible.  With that in mind, on with the story…

A little debate recently happened in one little corner of my family, a new round of a recurring debate on the evolution vs creation issue.  I've heard it a few times, the argument that the chances of a species like us evolving being so very unlikely, that it must have been intentional.  But is it?  Really?

Is it really just 1 chance in whatever sized space?  In an infinite universe, even if just one in every nearly infinite number of possibilities is us, there's still an infinite number of possibilities we will exist, within an infinite space of possibilities — infinities are weird that way, and I often hear it said, and agree, humans just really are rather crappy at correctly judging extreme quantities; really small numbers like 1 in infinity, or really big ones, like that infinity itself.

And why should we be the only possibility.  While it's true we're the only us, so far as we know, would a different version of us also not think, "we're the only us"?  I think it is, perhaps, a little egotistical to think we're THAT special.  Unique, sure, but what makes us so special?  Did we achieve universal peace quicker?  Have we figured out our purpose for existing yet?  We're a million years old, on a planet several billions of years old.  What have we done to make ourselves as special as we think we are, among all the species that may or may not exist out there.

Then, even if we are indeed alone in all the knowable universe (and I kind of hope we're not, personally), there's still a fair bit more of it out there.  There is the suggestion the solution to the Fermi Paradox, is that the universe itself has an age-wise Goldilocks Zone for the creation of life, so we may just be one of the earlier species to appear in this region of the universe, and there may well be the radio bubble of another species screaming it's way towards us right now, just as ours does towards them.  And speaking of which, there may well be more us's that we'll never in the lifetime of the universe have a chance to meet, and we'll never know because the expansion of the universe is taking even their radio signals away from us too fast to reach us in time.  (And even assuming future FTL travel, that simply moves the bar, it still doesn't actually remove it.)  Assuming the universe is as big as scientists seem to believe, there's still a distance beyond which we will never be able to observe, and a far more populated region of our universe could begin just the other side of that line, and neither us nor them will ever know.

Now, does any of that make creationism impossible?  Well, before the universe existed, what was there?  If some entity was responsible for our existence, perhaps they simply chose a beginning that they knew would lead to the end they wanted.  Perhaps without even knowing how, and they're looking down thinking, "wow, look at these weird little creatures I made".  Or perhaps they did choose the one that will have us in it, with all that we are, and all that we will be.  But no matter how much you play statistician, that question, along with whether in fact an external entity was responsible for any of this at all, is for the time being still the provenance of religion, and we have only our faith (or lack thereof) for answering the question of whether religion is even real at all, or just a creation of our own making intended to make us feel a little better, and/or behave a little better too.

All I know for sure, is that if God — in any of the forms imagined by mankind — is real, and He's aware that I exist, I hope He isn't too disappointed in me.