What we don't know

Sometime ago, on a nice summer afternoon, I was walking my little dog along the river when I ran into a group of four young people. They asked permission to pet the dog, a cute, black-and-white cocker spaniel and a proven chick magnet. She loves everyone and rewards attention with sloppy nose licks, given the chance.

They told me they were members of a religious youth group in Texas, in town to help with volunteer work. Clearly their goal was to preach the gospel and make converts where possible, so not surprisingly I was almost immediately questioned about my church affiliation.

I tried to end the discussion with a non-committal answer, that I wasn't much of a churchgoer and did not belong to any congregations. That did not put them off and next they wanted to know what religion I believed in.

I could have told them it was none of their business and left it at that. But they were really nice and sincere, not pushy at all, and it was a nice afternoon with nothing better to do. So I told them I was an atheist.

That got their attention, especially of the three younger ones, a teen-aged boy and two girls. The third girl seemed slightly older and must have been a councilor or such. After the shock had settled, the obvious next question was, how did I explain the existence of everything in the universe?

My answer was that I didn't know and that I was certainly incapable of knowing. I added that no human will ever be able to know and understand the universe, no matter how much more we may learn in years to come, simply because our brains are not equipped for that knowledge. And to claim the existence of a God who creates everything but who otherwise can not be understood is just rephrasing our ignorance. Believing that such a super being is interested in us at all is ridiculous, let alone expecting that prayer can influence who will win a basketball game.

I pointed at Bonnie, the dog, and explained that she had a brain and that there were lots of things she knew, such as cats are evil and squirrels must be chased. She and I also communicate on a simple level.  But in most other respects I'll never be able to teach or explain to her what I know of the world because her brain just isn't capable of understanding.

The human brain has undergone a unique evolution in the animal kingdom  to make it superior to the brains of all the other animals we know of. This allows us to create abstract thoughts, imagine invisible things such as electric fields or black holes, imaginary numbers and, yes, religions. It has made it possible for us to become aware of many aspects of the universe that have surprised us, such as quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, black holes, evolution-driven genetics, the wave nature of matter, the 4-dimensional universe, and so on. The list keeps growing as we learn what dark matter and dark energy are all about, generate a Higg's Boson - the "God Particle," and more. But with all that increased awareness we still haven't come close to understanding how the Universe came about, and I doubt that we ever will.

Are there advanced creatures somewhere in the Universe who can help us understand? They'll face the same problem we have in trying to explain electricity to the dog - it can't be done. Maybe some day in the far future a brain will evolve that operates in a totally different fashion from ours, in ways we can't even imagine. Those brains may be able to understand aspects of existence that we can't - who knows.

We ended the conversation where it started, without either one of us converting the other. In parting, the councilor called me a nice man and promised to pray for me. I appreciated the thought, and in return maybe I managed to plant a seed of doubt in some of those nice youngsters' minds.