Why We’re Not Special

We live on a tiny rock, in a small suburb of a fairly minor galaxy-the universe is destroying itself on massive scales, at random. And all of this was designed? Our own planet can only support life some of the time on some of its surface. Of all the species that have ever existed, 99% of them are now extinct. All species you see alive today are made up of that 1%. Think of the absolute uselessness of that if everything was made with us in mind.

Our own sun is due to swell up, burn us to a crisp, and then collapse before it explodes and takes Earth with it. As is the case with all stars, they all swell, condense, then explode, spewing chemicals and gases into the vast regions of space. Our sun will not be unique, it will follow that same path. Was the sun, which supports life on this planet, designed to explode, killing the planet along with itself? If it were so, it would seem a very cruel and savage thing to do. Why would a god go through all the trouble of creating life, only to set up the cosmos in a way which was doomed to destroy it? It also seems rather incompetent, does it not?

This galaxy is in fact directly on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. Both will eventually be tugged by gravity and melt together, causing even more massive destruction of the kind that we struggle to grasp. When this happens, one giant galaxy will take form, or the stars, colliding at random, will take no form and scatter into chaos. Was this supposed to happen, set up to happen, or is the result of an aimless, unguided universe that is exactly what you’d expect to see from random configuration? Other galaxies crash into eachother all the time, once again, there is nothing special about our place in the universe. And even more revealing, the Milky Way is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies we have (so far) discovered. The Hubble Telescope has been capturing images of galaxy clusters in which every point of light in the image is a galaxy, some twice the size of the Milky Way, and separated in space by billions of light years.

Humans are very curious by nature, we want to know what’s out there and what it all means. But, does it NEED to mean something? Just because we want it to doesn’t make the slightest move towards it being true. People want to think humans were specially designed, that we were intended to be here, but that is exactly the opposite way one should look at our species. Assuming intent leads to a brick wall of dogmatic belief; rather, we happen to be here, we were not supposed to be here. We have come out of an evolutionary process in which if the species couldn’t adapt it couldn’t remain. Bees aren’t designed to notice the colors of flowers, but the ones who can have survived.

People used to think the earth was flat, they used to think that this galaxy encompassed the entire universe, and that life was a miracle-we now have better and empirical explanations for those things. There have been over a thousand gods recorded in human history, and if you believe that only one god is true, then you have a less than 1% chance of being correct. Assuming a god gets you nowhere and only unnecessarily complicates further learning. We are advancing all the time, and clinging to ancient, outdated beliefs will leave you behind in the search for greater understanding.

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