Thursday, January 07, 2010

The Sun, the Earth, the Stars.

Contemplating the sun today.  I don't have time to shave most of the time, but found time for this somehow.

Anyway.


The sun is so ferociously brilliant that its light permeates into most dwellings and shallow caves.  In fact extreme measures must be taken to shut out all sunlight as most blinds or curtains aren't successful in blocking it completely, and even if we are, we can still feel its warmth.


And thinking about this extreme presence of the sun, I'm reminded of the seasons.  The size and tilt of the earth is so precise that creature-life can be supported on nearly every surface.  The rotation is the exact speed it needs to be to create the length of day necessary to make the climate as it is, coupled with the revolution around the sun to make the seasons exactly as we experience them.  Any difference in this trifecta of planteary size, placement and rotational perfection and life would not be able to exist.


But it does exist.  And we humans exist. And when I think of how we exist, with all of the art, and culture, beauty, and love and war and passion that exist with it, I become convinced of something.

Now, while this scant evidence is enough to convince me, it may not be enough to convince another and I understand that.  I'm speaking only of my own experience and conviction and don't expect anyone else to feel this way just because I do.

When I think about the vastness of the charted universe, and the fact that life has never been found anywhere else, something else occurs to me that I could take  in one of two ways:  Either I could realize that our earth's perfect placement, rotation and revolution are pure chance, luck against astronomical (literally) odds, or I could decide that the odds are just too astronomical to believe that it all happened on its own.

Anyway.


I am less baffled by the idea of a god's existence than I am by the idea that this earth could be made without one.

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