Meditation 683
We don't know the origin
by: Jasmine Taylor
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I am frustrated. Lately I've been having a lot of intellectual discussions with my friends about the universe, religion, politics etc. Mainly because of the impending switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC as it is called). The LHC is something I look upon with glee and terror, for the obvious fact that we aren't exactly sure what will happen when hadrons are collided after speeding up around a 27 kilometre circular path. The physicists involved have some idea of what may happen, but due to the nature of sub-atomic particles, the reality is anything could happen. Anyway, after friends and I talk about things like this the conversation usually ends with suppositions and opinions on the insurmountable "where did it all come from?" proposition.
As an apathetic agnost when it comes to god, I often find it hard to distinguish between 'god' and 'origins of the universe', and often say when asked that I don't know, and that I don't particularly care. What I have found rather shocking and disappointing is that a number of my friends have of late said that they find that point of view ignorant. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I am ignorant about the origins of the universe; we all are. Even if M-theory or Super String Theory is all well and good, it doesn't really explain everything, and I am happy not knowing. My life isn't going to change if I know how the entire universe and all matter and energy came about. It is pretty irrelevant in my life.
So how can my friends say my point of view is ignorant? I think it’s somewhat ignorant to think that we will ever find out with certainty the origins of the universe, even though we may come vanishingly close to identifying what happened in the fractional seconds after the origin. But overall I don’t know, and I don’t care. I know that our motto is supposed to be in reference to the issue of god(s), but for me it is broader than that. There are a lot of things I don’t know. That’s OK.