Friday, March 26, 2010

Pandeism vs Theism: Our Destiny is in the Stars!!

This video explains why it must be so, that our destiny is in the stars!!



As the dawn of the 2010 decade approached, science quietly delivered a message that will build in realization until it reverberates with a boom forever into the future. Mankind's ability to identify planets around distant stars has evolved to a new height, to the point of being able to identify Earth-sized orbs in orbits that would make them amenable to carrying liquid water -- thus imbuing them with the potential to develop life, or at the least to be made habitable for humans. This scientific find gives us hope that we may literally reach for the stars, but it brings profound and awesome religious implications as well.

There are those out there in certain faiths who eagerly await not the day of our expansion into new worlds, but the end of this world. End-timers exist in several religions; in the Abrahamic faiths they tend to believe that the world is around 6,000 years old and, at the same time, that a thousand years is like a day to their God -- all straight from their books. So, doesn't it seem odd that after billions of infinities waiting around and doing nothing, such a God would suddenly up and create the Universe, have the whole thing exist for an eyeblink in the great span of things -- and then just as suddenly have an Armageddon and go back to the humdrum of no Universe for billions of infinities (even if thereafter surrounded by fawning souls bereft of any desire but to fawn)? And yet, these end-timers have been insisting that the end is coming right up on us (although to be fair, they've been insisting that daily and twice on Sundays for thousands of years now)....

With our technological developments and the recent discovery of other possibly habitable worlds with water on them and everything, we're really just starting to get interesting. I mean, if I was the sort of person who believed in piecemeal-purposed creation, I'd have a hard time thinking that any God created habitable planets which, at least according to theoretical physics, we could very much reach and populate, and yet this same God intended to end our days before we did what those worlds are designed to have us do. If we were expected to fail before being able to reach those worlds, such a Creator would know that in advance, and wouldn't bother to create those other habitable worlds -- which we might otherwise get to in a few hundred, at most a few thousand years (another eyeblink to such a being). The whole idea of it is like someone spending a fortune to buy a bunch of toys, to give to their children as a reward for not eating from the plate of candy which was placed in front of them and left unattended.

Now, even if for the sake of argument the scriptural accounts hoisted by the end-timers were true accounts of Creation, it makes no sense that such a Creator would end things now, at a time that would for that being be moments after Creation. That would be like lining up world class marathon runners to run a fifty-millimeter dash. Since physics itself keeps telling us of a Universe that is billions rather than thousands of years old, shouldn't we be looking towards a future that is also billions of years to come, instead of ending in thousands of years, or hundreds, or next Tuesday?

So it must be. We are meant to reach those other habitable worlds out there, just now coming onto our horizon; and because of this, the next few thousand years of human development will be particularly interesting to observe and even be a part of. Even the end-timers should now, finally, acknowledge that those lights in the sky are not angels or lesser gods or holes in a great dome, but are instead stars orbited by (detectable!!) planets, which if deity-made Creation is true, we must be intended to occupy!!

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