By Ira Katz
April 3, 2024
Here I present two fantastic stories. By fantastic I mean beyond any human experience.
In the first fantastic story an explosion occurred in the void. 13.787±0.020 billion years ago. As the infinite high temperature and pressure started to recede after 10 -33 to 10 -32 seconds, subatomic particles formed. These particles eventually coalesced into atoms, then into gas. The randomly dense gas cloud then formed into stars, and then into galaxies. Of course, it follows that in a purely random fashion other elements formed and were smashed together by gravity into planets. Now, unlike other explosions, as all of the stuff in the universe continued to expand to fill the universe, they didn't slow down; they accelerated due to dark energy. With a gifted evolutionary imagination one can envision random carbon based materials clumping together on one or more isolated planets into living organisms with their own DNA. From there the randomness obviously inherent in the universe acted on these clumps of living things to eventually come to create you, dear reader. Thus, this single event is the sole source of everything; every material object living and dead, every sight, every smell, every thought. As all things that are apparent to you came into being by random processes following the original explosion, you now realize that the concepts of truth, beauty, and love are not real, they are only the random interactions of wave functions of the subatomic particles that have randomly coalesced to create neurons in your brain. Thus, any moral concepts that might restrict your wants are meaningless, as your wants themselves are meaningless. And it follows that the same moral void existed for those serious men with funny mustaches who were so prominent in the last century. The only real thing is the universal wave function composed of the wave functions of every particle that makes up every other thing.
In the second fantastic story there exists a Summum bonum, the highest or ultimate good, the source of truth, beauty and love; that in our futile search for language to describe something indescribable, we call God. Or as he once called himself to a hesitant leader of an obscure dessert tribe, "I am that I am." In the beginning he spoke into creation light, the firmament separated into the seas and land, plants in the sea and on the land, everything in the heavens, creatures in the seas and on the land, and finally man, created in his image. God saw every thing that He had made, and said it was good. With his creation God's law came into existence. God's law was not like the restrictions of a government bureaucracy to rule over men, but the guide to men to lead them to himself; truth, beauty and love. But from the first humans unto the present, we humans who were given the gift of free will, lost the path prescribed by God's law and fell into falsity, ugliness and hate. Out of his infinite love for his creations, God came into the world as a human being. He lived, died, and was resurrected from the dead as an example to reorient his creations back unto his path.
I would not care to know which of these fantastic stories you might believe is true, perhaps neither one. But of much more significance is which one you wished to be true.