I was reading a thread on a forum the other day, a guy had commented on the new “Ardipithecus ramidus” fossil find and said “so much for creationism” or words to that effect. The results were quite predictable, and as boring as usual, everyone jumped in and a blazing great argument started.
I have to admit to being something of an agnostic on all of this, I take the view that there is much we don’t know and will possibly never know. As much as many would like to cling to a holy book and proclaim that this is certainty, it isn’t and I’ll refer the reader to my essays for more on that. In many ways I can make a similar observation of the scientific orthodoxy, science seems to get a revolution every so often and is quite defined by the unknown. I’m also not the first to observe that science seems to be gaining it’s share of fundamentalists, and I feel that a fundamentalist attitude does science no justice at all.
I’ll also step aside from the row surrounding the much misunderstood and misrepresented theory of Evolution, other than to observe that it seems to be producing the goods in a very practical sense across a number of fields and that its opponents have produced no science of their own that I’ve seen and seem to do nothing but throw mud.
So I’ll move towards the whole question of a creator prior to the beginning of the universe. Now this, of course, assumes that there was a discrete beginning and that the whole thing doesn’t move in some kind of cyclical way that would make for a very interesting line of investigation.
Now, for what I can see of it everything we have regarding events prior to the big bang is pure conjecture, nobody really knows. It seems to me that every debate I’ve seen boils down to a “yes it was / no it wasn’t” with nobody willing to budge an inch. Now, this sort of thing is one of the questions that the Buddha described as being a net, I can see why, all it does it cause upset and you can never really settle the argument no matter which side you’re on.
But it makes me realise, that many people are shouting certainty from a position of not really knowing. My sense of things is that true liberation and real courage is to openly admit that you don’t know and possibly never will. Then get on with something more relevant.
I agree with you. When it comes to most of the basic and fundamental questions of life, existence and the universe, the best answer is that we don’t know and will most likely never know.