Our milky way galaxy alone has 400 BILLION stars. Each with their own solar system and planets. You can't even comprehend how many other "earths" there may be. Look up at the night sky and you see these little white specks, we know these specks are actually incomprehensibly large. Just inconceivably enormous. But our minds can never really grasp it. When we do actually GET IT, the size it humbles us. As Carl Sagan once said Astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. Just imagine how many other planets orbit around these mega giants, all the billions upon billions of planets, some which may be just the right size and distance away from an average star to produce life similar to our own. Look up at the sky and imagine the possibilities. Once you really understand it, what room is there for any God found in any religious text written on this pale blue speck?
phil86562011-11-29T21:37:47Z
Favorite Answer
I wonder if god messes with the beings on other planets like he has here.
Hence Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex which he says is the most horrible torture device ever imagined.
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
Is this really so terrifying that one answer here says, "i think of how small we are compared to the universe and the fact that God loves ME, so much that he died for me, makes me unbelievably grateful" which betrays an unparalleled arrogance. Of course the creator of the entire vast universe loves YOU! How absurd.
Myself, I'm not intimidated by my relative insignificance. On the contrary, I relish it. I get it like you get it and wonder how presumptuous you have to be to assume a bunch of bronze age goat herders happened to have the entire universe figured out when they couldn't tell a quark from a flea. I'm insignificant... mere atoms with ego.. but I'm small enough to not collapse under my own weight (literally and figuratively) so I can exist as I am without fear of quantum fluctuation.
One doesn't even have to look to the stars to get a sense of perspective. We are but one of millions of species that live on this planet in delicate balance to form a stable ecosystem. Yet how we run roughshod over it all while we convert the world's biomass to human biomass while causing a period of mass extinction at a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs.
When I was young I was bit by a mosquito and I realized I was food. That lesson alone shattered an entire worldview based on human exceptionalism propped up by these gods who love us. Pshaw to that.
I think religion speaks to a childish "look at me" impulse in all of us. The very idea that a God who supposedly created the entire known universe would then turn around and be entranced by a bunch of selfish, violent simians on just one speck of a planet in all of that is the epitome of ignorant arrogance.
Aaayyyy the Mega Galaxy is certainly brilliant, as is this pale blue speck we find ourselves on , considering this pale blue speck is supporting such a complexity and design, its compatible for our life sustenance, and its exactly perfect for us, and the other inhabitants of this pale blue speck. No room for God you say, Well I don't know about that, I think the reality would more likely be that there's no room for that comment. But, you're entitled to your opinion.
Very compelling evidence that our tribal god stories are simply myths developed by primitive men to explain phenomena that they could not comprehend. Hence the focus on earth alone and not the universe beyond.