Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Putting it Mildly Quote

"...If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful - and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding - than any creation or "end of days" story.

If you read Hawking on the "event horizon," that theoretical lip of the "black hole" over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough "time"), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive "burning bush."
If you examine the beauty and symmetry of the double helix, and then go on to have your own genome sequence fully analyzed, you will be at once impressed that such a near-perfect phenomenon is at the core of your being, and reassured (I hope) that you have so much in common with other tribes of the human species - "race" having gone, along with "creation" into the ashcan - and further fascinated to learn how much you are a part of the animal kingdom as well.
 

Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your maker, which turns out not to be a "who," but a process of mutation with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish. This is more than enough mystery and marvel for any mammal to be getting along with: the most educated person in the world now has to admit - I shall not say confess - that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more..."

- Quote from Christopher Hitchen's Putting it Mildly: Part 3



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