In The Beginning!

I grew up surrounded by religion, although the members of my own nuclear family were not regular church people. In fact, in my personal search for truth, I was more involved in the local Presbyterian Church than either my parents or my five brothers and sisters. Later, as a student at the University of Cape Town, I flirted with the Students Christian Association although I admit the attraction was enhanced by a number of attractive girls who attended regularly. All the while I struggled with the usual great questions of cosmology and theology:

v Where did it all begin?

v What are we doing here? And

v What or who made it happen?

The third of those unanswerable questions turned out to be the easiest for me. I very soon accepted that god, or whatever the local deity was called was the embodiment of the limit to human understanding. As far down the road we can take out thinking in any direction upon these imponderables we get to a line in the proverbial sand where our knowledge and imagination can take us no further. Just across that line is god! He takes over and performs/creates the inexplicable. So for me at least the subject of a super-being was a non-issue.

The problem is that, having come to this conclusion, answering the first two questions is made even more difficult. I don’t think we are going to answer the first question any time soon, even though I do have my own thoughts on this subject and it has nothing to do with quarks and big bangs, but it is the second question that has prompted me to write this blog.

What I have concluded is that evolution, or history or circumstance, call it what you will, has dictated a purpose in all life including human life. That purpose is the noble task of the preservation of our future on this planet, and in this universe. And right now as the human race, we are not doing a great job.