The Frosty Atheist
By Ross Meisner
Allow me to switch gears entirely. Last month in my first column referencing Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, I concluded that our existence on a mote of dust in the infinite cosmos is, unfortunately but unavoidably, insignificant. The universe just doesn’t care that we are here.
Today I’m delighted to inform you that I am entirely wrong about this. Even though I was, in fact, right. How can this be, you ask?
As atheists, we try understand reality with unadorned clarity and objective detachment. We do not subscribe to pleasant fictions that might reassure us against our natural fear of death and the unknown. We know what we are, recognize our innate humanity and morality, and accept that our lives are finite. We are, indeed, just part of the natural universe.
And yet we must also admit that we are incredibly, fantastically, outrageously special. Against unfathomably astronomical odds, I am sitting here writing these words, and you are sitting there reading them. The odds of life occurring on earth? Perhaps common. The odds of intelligent life evolving? Perhaps very rare. The odds of 117 billion homo sapiens having ever existed? Almost impossible. And the odds that we’re one of them, alive now, boggles the mind.
In the sense of statistics, incredibly rare things are, well, incredibly rare. But incredibly rare things DO happen. We’re one of them. It’s almost enough to make a person religious. Almost.
What it does make me is humble, and awe-inspired, and appreciative of the rare gift I’ve been given to experience life. Somehow, we get to be intelligent, self-aware, emotional beings. For a limited time. This is insanely special.
And what are we, really? We’re essentially just bags of water, mixed with carbon and other elements, that happens to be alive with thoughts and feelings. (I have a silly term I use, AIBEW, for Astronomically Improbable Bags of Emotional Water.) The entirety of existence comes to us through the sense organs attached to this bag. Everything we think, everything we feel, everything we do, is entirely wrapped up in this bag. In the end, nothing else really matters to us except our own little AIBEW.
It’s the most mind-bending paradox. We are Nothing — insignificant in the universe. And, We are Everything — the one and only way to experience the universe. In a real sense, the entire universe exists only because I am alive to know it. When I die, so, effectively, does the universe (as far as I’m concerned). Just by being alive and aware: We are Everything.
