By the grace of the universe

Do you think that there’s nothing after death? Nothing at all? A lot of people do.

Essentially, that means that you’re a blob of organic material that has somehow coalesced in to an intricate human being so that you can live a life and then return the organic material back to the soil. All your memories dissipate into nothingness. The end of you is with the end of the organic blob.

If that’s true, then it is, in itself, rather magical. Like a miracle. All these molecules of organic material precisely organising themselves so that you can live a life of love, amazement, sadness, affection and experiences, and allowing you to choose between what feels like good and bad.

To believe there is nothing after death requires faith that this random organic material can organise itself in such a way. What a great job!

Yet, we can take a wider view.

We are only here because we had parents, and they had parents, onwards ad infinitum. We can only live because we are on this Earth and it has an atmosphere with oxygen. The Earth can only exist because of the sun and the solar system. In fact, our existence depends on the existence of the whole universe.

We think our bodies are special, these blobs of well organised organic material. But think about the universe. Wow. How much more complicated and magical is the universe? It’s virtually unbelievable. It makes our bodies appear like an insignificant sideshow.

We should be able to see that we (each individual human) is actually part of something much bigger than ourselves. We’re a tiny part of this unbelievable universe.

We were formed out of the universe. Our life depends on the universe. When we die, we go back to the universe. The universe goes on.

So now, the really big question. Do we believe there must be some sort of grand design behind the universe? It’s easy to expect that there must be a design element behind the universe at some point, because a bunch of matter just floating about in space (a space that has rules to follow like gravity and the speed of light) that can simply self-organise itself in such a magical way that can lead to human beings, seems highly improbable. To believe this takes just as much faith as to believe in design.

So where do you want to put your faith? In incredible random luck, or in a grand design?

If the grand design is provided by an all powerful force, then surely the best thing we can do is seek out that force and be aligned with it. That makes life a bit different to a random collection of organic matter merrily acting as a human being for a while.

Whatever way we look at it, and wherever we place our faith, it is certainly true that we are only here by the grace of the universe, one way or another.