We all know the five miraculous human senses:
Sight
Hearing
Taste
Touch
Smell
Otherwise the human body is just a physical being but those miraculous senses make it a very unusual and special being. Only those who lose one or more senses come to appreciate it more and the rest of us take it for granted. Or as time goes by the senses become weak and people start losing sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell then people start appreciating it more. Imagine if one loses the sense of touch or feeling no pain also known as congenital insensitivity. Such people can hurt themselves without knowing it has happened.
I am always bewildered by this and by the miracle of life. I don’t know how life started. If it started from a single cell is it possible that there is an experimenter who started it all? It cannot be all a pure accident of a big bang explosion and then everything fell into place. Is it possible there is something more to it and more meaningful?
Anyway a time does come that all these senses disappear and the human body, or for that matter bodies of all living beings, become just a body or heap of material or as the saying goes "...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
Life always mystifies me.
I don't really think our senses make us either unique or special. Most animal life - mammals, fish, reptiles, insects - have all or most of these senses.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as I can tell no one is suggesting we went from Big Bang to 21st century Canada in one quick pop. That is, however, pretty close to the creationist belief.
The rest of us think it's taken billions of years for the planet to evolve into a life-supporting biosphere in which, over the turbulent span of hundreds of millions of years, life evolved from the simplest of organisms into what we have reached today.
Don't forget that life on earth has experienced up to five major extinctions.
As for life forms of advanced intelligence, particularly in other parts of the universe, one theory holds that there may well have been plenty of advanced life forms and civilizations elsewhere but that almost all of them could be expected to have fallen extinct over the billions of years since the Big Bang. Indeed we may be on the verge of rendering our own planet physically inhospitable to life.
Maybe I should have said "any living being"; I used human beings as an example. I don't mean to say that the big bang happened 6,000 years ago or that life didn't start billions of years ago.
ReplyDeleteI mean to say that the nature of life is so extraordinary - now or billions of years ago, on this planet or other planets - that there is indeed something extraordinary about it.
All I'm saying, is it possible that there is an experimenter behind it all?