The universe is a thoroughly stupefying place. Two nights ago, a friend and I took time off from our regularly scheduled nothingness in exchange for a more elevated form of nothingness. She and I escaped the urban sprawl, lied down amidst the shadowy blanket that surrounding brush provided, and looked up at the night sky. For the first time in almost a decade, sky-watchers that night were able to see all five naked-eye planets together. That is, the classical naked-eye planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - would be appearing together during a single night; a phenomenon that hadn't occurred since 2004. As Geza Gyuk, an astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago describes, "it's a bit like looking at an astronomy class in a nutshell."
It was both a humbling and elating experience. To think our ancient ancestors had looked up in wonder at the same sparkle laden quilt and since then have derived everything from stories of both grandeur and superstition, to Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference, to the models to explain the approach and reproach of the ocean's tides (yes, you CAN explain that), to the Galilean grand revelation of Heliocentrism - all from the acknowledgement of celestial bodies. And to think that with the same evolutionarily derived pair of eyes, homosapiens of yestercenturies saw the same sights, but thought very different, very untrue things. That perhaps the moon was some heavenly godly beacon, or perhaps, akin to the Greek's Selene, a godly entity in itself. That the darkness all around us that night was due to Ra's defeat by the atramentous Set. Perhaps they thought that our own lives up to and including that night were simply a soul's dream, a passing test by some indifferent 'greater-than-us,' and not, as much neuroscience now shows, a very real and beautiful corporeal reality, and one that we had both felt and shared in, not because of any calling or binding destinies, but just because we could.
Our ancestors, in their first clumsy attempts to describe the truth of nature, created stories to (erringly) explain away the mysteries. They were wonderful stories, but only that. And when others searched and found with greater precision more approximate truths, instead of accepting or rejecting them based on the merit of evidence, we xenophobically shut them up. And why wouldn't we have? It is something of great fear and apprehension to have your whole planet destroyed. Every time a new theory enters into the aggregate social mind and an old one is thrown out, the Earth is reinvented. And humanity, in its macroscopic infancy, reacted with all the harshness, confusion and trepidation that a child would when told Santa Claus didn't exist... and I shudder at the thought of what this scorned child has done with armies at its disposal. What a display of ego and ignorance is the presumption that "I know everything." What an ugly, yet necessary, stage of growth it was to believe in things without any substantiation.
In the 18th century, a period called the age of enlightenment occurred, one that accompanied the scientific revolution. It was characterized by the intellectual movement that advocated and encouraged reason rather than blind faith. Philosophers such as Nietzsche felt that the relatively new scientific method explained natural phenomena without supernatural intervention, thereby denying the need for a god. In one of his later works, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' the titular character in the fable proclaims almost psychotically, "God is dead, and it is we who have killed him." With the admittedly relieving but ultimately limiting psychological distortion of 'faith' poetically downed, a new resolve began to emerge - one that still fearlessly searched for answers but did so with an honest gait; with a love for truth. In the words of John Locke, "one mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." In this way, humanity had begun to shed its childlike phobia and ego, and instead had vulnerably accepted its ignorance. And though undoubtedly with some uneasiness and dissonance, had begun the long path to maturity and actualization of potential.
Still, embers of bronze-age barbarism and cowardice are left to be snuffed out. Today, just as the belief of Iraqi nuclear weapons prompted the United States to go to war, the belief in a god (perhaps fear of such a being) is the sole reason many people do many things (at best unnecessary and at worst fatal). Like current pop culture icons, the Christian god and his all time best seller have been the fuel for an entire multi-billion dollar industry (for centuries). The rich, poor, and the marginally insane all benefit by catering to the faithful legions. Hollywood churns out a ceaseless series of biblical “reenactments”. All of them are instant box office hits that fatten the already obese wallets of the wealthy. In the troubled corners of the world, millions of statuettes are fashioned from mud, then painted by feeble hands in the likeness of a virgin mother and her son. They are then sold off to rich tourists by many poor laborers of the third-world. Some people just sell grilled cheese Jesus sandwiches for $ 28,000 on eBay, to help other people feel like they are in touch with the eternal one. Not to mention the so-called "pro-life" activists bombing doctors' clinics, and countless deaths over essentially variations of the argument of who's deity is more peaceful.
When my friend and I looked up at the stars two nights ago, I saw them not as heavenly personages imbuing cosmic "luck" depending on the arbitrary day of my birth, but rather as the light remnants of gravity-held luminous, tremendous spheres of plasma, originally lightyears away, and thousands of years gone... probably. I posit that it is only in that great admission that "we do not know for sure" that relevant answers will be found, and I revel in our slowly emerging admitted collective ignorance.
As the night progressed and we watched on, I wondered what star gazers in a thousand years time would be thinking of as they watch those twinkling specks that, both poetically and technically, maybe existed only yesterday.
