It appears to us that we live in such a fixed world. Houses, rocks and streets are very solid objects. If we stumble and fall against something, it certainly hurts, testifying to its solidity. My furniture, dishes, plates and utensils are quite solid. They hold me up and hold up food quite well. Even though people move, they are quite real and touchable. The floors underneath keep us from falling for sometimes thousands of feet, if in an airplane. Hills, lakes and streams may change a little bit from one season to another, but they sure do exist. Books can be held, and my washer and dryer not only hold, but do good work on my clothes. My bed holds me up at night and the blankets over me keep me warm. The grass in the yard is real enough to require mowing, and trees bear very real fruit. Bee stings hurt, knives cut, ice numbs and fire burns. Run two cars together and you can certainly see how solid they were before the impact occurred. Ever hit your thumb with a hammer? That’s a real solid little hunk of iron. Our world, in which we live, consists of fixed, firm objects. It seems pretty absurd to think that any of it could be anything else.
Yet that is not what we are told about our world and about our universe. We are told that everything we experience is the result of force upon force, or mass/momentum against mass/momentum, occurring in a certain area of space/time, in which neither space or time are separate, but both part of the same thing. You cannot separate space and time. Nothing is ever the same at one spot in space, at one time, as it is a split second later. We see nothing going backward. Everything is going forward. We are told that not only is everything going forward, but our universe is expanding at a rate equivalent to an explosion, that explosion becoming constantly more rapid. Everything is flying apart, with no end of that explosion in sight. Not only that, but everything that we sense is our brains’ interpretation of whatever else is out there. The photons that enter our eyes are flipped over by our brains to produce an upright image of our surroundings, which is simply our brain’s interpretation of those surroundings and those other forces in our surroundings. Bats see with their ears, platypuses see with their snouts, and dolphins see with their radar bulbs. Sightless creatures living in caves see with their tentacles and their hairs. Not only that, but since everything is in constant momentum, you can’t stop anything to make an observation on it without changing its nature, so you never can know exactly the static nature of anything. Not only that, but since everything is whirling, tilting, rotating, and flying apart, the only certain thing about our lives is that they are uncertain. Nothing is fixed anywhere. Everything is relative to everything else, and none of it is constant. Not only that, but we are told that those parts of our universe that we can appreciate, namely the suns, planets, moons, asteroids, those things that exist on these bodies, and the billions of galaxies that we see, represent less than ten percent of the mass of the universe. We have no idea what comprises the other ninety percent of the universe. We are lost and drowning in a nebulous sea of undefined forces and uncertainty.
If everything is relative, everything uncertain and everything happening by chance, this certainly leaves little room for the beliefs that there is a certain Superpower who created this entire universe a few thousand years ago, created it just for us, created us to look like Him or Her, and has a definite plan for our future. There is, in this universe of chance, no room for the belief that any of us will, after death, live forever in pleasure, while those who do not share our particular myths will burn in Hell forever. There is, in this universe of uncertainty, no room for any human who believes that any other human who does not share their particular myths should be punished or killed. There is, in this universe of constant motion and relativity, no room for any human who does not understand that it is us, all of us humans, living together on this little cocoon planet, trying to survive in a universe which cares nothing for us. There is no room, in this universe of explosion and cataclysm, for any human that does not understand that we must do whatever we can to conserve and preserve our only home.
It’s all relative. We either learn to treat each other with compassion and learn to work together, learning to be judicious stewards of our earthly resources, or our random universe will wipe us out, in a flash – without remorse.