Limiting our curious mind to a book is not how we should live as a human, it is a way how a slave lives.



🕒 : 6 minutes read

Welcome back, we have spent the last 2 months to discuss about human behaviour from A to Z: how we think, how we feel, and how we shape the society. Feel free to go back : Click here to read the whole season.


To freshen things up, this season we will discuss something quite different-but not so far apart from humanity: our belief in the higher power. I have teased you with this topic some times in the past, but apparently some of you requested a deeper observation on the history and how religion shaped our society. So here it is, for the next 10 episodes or so I will try to elaborate my ideas, concepts, understanding, and views of how our belief in God play a huge role in our daily life.

I will also include some arguments from the scientific community (which I am clearly standing on), but as someone raised in a catholic family, I will have my own take on this topic, and hopefully we all could read it with an opened mind. Disclaimer: I am not gonna discuss about a certain religion or belief or include religious doctrines as arguments, since they are not scientifically comparable to experimental results, that's why I am staying away from those things.

This is something that I have scratched on papers on the last month, but it is born from long-night thoughts and discussion with a lot of people. Since a lot of you like my conversation last time with a psychology student when we were discussing about emotion, I will also include a conversation with a theologist (yes, they do exist). Just wait, it is coming in a couple weeks. Without further ado, let's talk about the beginning of the universe.

Credit : iveybusinessjournal.com

Where Do We Come From?


The most classic question in the history of humanity. I personally think that this is a better question than "Why are we here?" A 'how' question is always a better one to ask rather than 'why'. Not everything need to have a reason, in a sense of a purpose, but we could try to answer how does it form. How does a mountain form? It could be answered. Why is there a mountain? Stupid question. The question "why are we here" seems like a deep philosophical question, but a deep philosophical question does not have much difference than an unsensible question.

If we are striving toward the latter question, we would make no progress in our understanding of the universe, but the former question helps us to get closer step-by-step toward our origin. As we currently know, the universe started from the big bang, that happened around 13.8 billions year ago. The spacetime expands so quickly, it was so dense and hot. Then it is getting colder, galaxies started to form, and so on until our earth formed circa 4.5 billions year ago. Life started to form from the ocean, evolution, *poof* here we are.

We tend to underestimate how short we have roamed around this planet. There is a beautiful analogy I found in Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos", which said that if the 1st January 00:00 is the big bang, the first primitive humans exist on 31st December, around 90 minutes before the new year. We are nothing compared to the evolution of the universe. If you want to read more about this, take a look in this following "cosmic calendar":

Source : wikipedia

Is Our Universe Eternal?

Credit: universetoday.com

No, but we thought so until the last century. The concept of a steady-state universe - the universe that has no beginning and no end - is well adopted even by the scientific community until Edwin Hubble in the 20th century found out that our universe is expanding, which means there has to be time when our universe is so small. Then we thought that our universe must be expanding but getting slower, like a ball thrown up will get decelerated by gravity, there has to be a time when it stops expanding. However, it is not the case, our universe is still expanding, and the rate of the expansion is getting faster. This remains as the biggest question in the cosmology right now, but I won't go further down in this post.

What does it have to do with our belief in a greater power? A steady-state universe was a concept opposed by some religion, especially three abrahamic religion: christianity, islam, and judaism. All three believe that there is indeed a creation, when the universe was "created". When the scientific community found out that there is the beginning of time, some religious leaders counted this as a victory, since they are "right." 

However, this is the difference about scientific and religious belief: it is okay to be wrong in science. Finding out what you believed is wrong shows a progress in our strive towards the better understanding of the universe. Scientific community was indeed shocked by Hubble's discovery, and there are not a few who opposed it, but after time they learned and realised that Hubble's discovery is correct, so they have to adjust and accept it.

This kind of behaviour will and can't be found anywhere in religion. There is no way a religion accepts that their faith is wrong, since it is based on "faith", something that could not be proved anyway. No matters what science says about a certain topic, the faith cannot be adjusted.

How About Humanity?


As I have stated before, we are nothing compared to our universe we are living in. We are just 7 billions living organism standing on the same blue planet, among other planets who revolve around our sun, a tiny part of the milky way, one of billions galaxy out there, and the problem: most people underestimate how small we are.

Humanity in its nature is not external, our body has a limit and we will be decomposed, fulfilling our circle of life. It is true that our life expectancy have doubled in the last 200 years, and it is predicted that  it will be doubled by the end of the next century, or it could be even faster, but it still means that we are not eternal - there is a limit to our existence. 

However, there is one interesting thing we need to observe from the current efforts for eternal life: new companies such as Neuralink approach eternality by using our minds-which means we are not physically eternal, only our "soul". This kind of approach actually shows that becoming eternal is a manifestation of our ego, to live and prosper without having to physically suffer from diseases.

We do not want to live forever just for the sake enjoying life, we want to live forever because we want to see what we could come up with in the next centuries, how our society develops, and maybe some science-fiction shits such as travel between the stars.

Which One Is More Beautiful, Religious Belief or Science?


I always wonder, why there are still some people believe that earth is the centre of the universe, and everything outside our solar system is not real. I wonder, why people still believe that humans are created out of soil and dirt, not a long evolution from where life first emerged from the ocean. I wonder, why people still believe day and night are created in the first day, then the earth, and so on. Our universe is much more grander than what it is written in the bible.

Big bang, evolution, quantum theory, if you don't believe them since they are not as beautiful as what it is written in the bible, I suggest you should learn more. What in those holy books written about how our universe works was written to suit our understanding in that time. We have developed so much, and what we know about our universe and our life right now is much more beautiful than written. Let me cite my favourite quote from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

Our universe always surprises us every time. Everyday we learned new things, and we science enthusiasts are looking at it with awe, could not believe these things are real. For us, this is kind of a religious experience, in every single law that govern our universe, we found unbelievable things. What more inspiring is that we, a little speck in the space-time, trying to learn about where do we come from and how do we exist. 

What Is Next?


Our dissatisfaction with our knowledge fuel us to learn more, and as an individual who only lives 0.23 seconds in our cosmic calendar, I do not know what can be more amazing. We just scratched the surface about my discussion in this season, and much more is coming. What I want to say here, there is one thing that I should point out: we are indeed nothing, but the fact that we are trying to understand about ourselves, even more than what is written in a certain book, is what makes us special.

Limiting our curious mind to a book is not how we should live as a human, it is a way how a slave lives. Be prepared, we are going for a ride. If you have some questions, please feel free to contact me personally in any social media, I will be really happy to respond. Until then, stay safe, and keep looking up.