I finished the book… Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt… without an answer! Like a spam advertisement that tempt you to look, even though you know there’s really nothing on the other side. Maybe that’s unfair, because there is the journey in thought to appreciate.
The quote at the end, I like: “Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary”
Well some roads are paved and some are a pretty dirt path decorated with flowers. But then some are rocky with intermittent trolls threatening the path.
The journey can be interesting, and requires no equipment. Just our mind wandering a path illuminated by one’s thought, history, and the storied words of other thinkers. Faith plays a role, if you like, with supporting thought or not.
A game of thrones of the mind of competing ideas and theories, could it be quantum coincidence we exist, multi-verse, God and the big bang, and much more.
And yet my mind aligns with a belief. A belief that there is a God, that creates a world that allows the development of consciousness. Consciousness is the knowledge of self… self-awareness.
I believe that the trillions to one odds that fortune not just our physical birth, but our conscious awakening, and that sense of self that develops as a result of evolved exposure of parenting, grandparenting, neighbors, siblings and chance occurrences, as well as the genetic dispositions randomly acquired from generations of breeding makes us an individual.
A sense of “I” that develops because of the physical constraints of our body and mind, and the name we or others give us… but over time we may start to realize that we are not I, rather we are “we”.
That we are part of a social fabric, and if we have the capacity to bring our minds to new heights, to really glimpse what we are a part of, then we have the perspective needed to consciously and with free will affect that fabric. And our “we” lives on long beyond our “I” in the form of those strands that we’ve woven and the others we’ve influenced.
The brilliance of our “God” is the creation of not just a universe, but also the allowance for conscience to develop. Allowing an opportunity for a piece of immortality for as long as we are weavers we are leaving a mark on others that carry that mark, that weave forward.
So why the world exists, instead of nothing, the answer that occupies the throne as I postulate is: because it was willed into existence in a way that may be mysterious to us, but it’s echo is there for us to see in the residue of the big-bang, and furthermore the residue of God’s second greatest creation is the existence of consciousness, the awareness of self, the awareness and joy of sharing that self in the form of “we” and “us” such that we are better for all positive weaves and threads in our world. A true miracle of life, love, and legacy.