indeed may exist, is a potentially very liberating input into modern thought, scientific or philosophical. If all things exist then, in fact, one is postulating that there are no constraints and if there are no constraints there are no laws. The world of universes becomes an immense melting pot of chance encounters that generate the various realities. The causal laws we experience in our own universe are merely chance events that evolved over time. They are unique to our universe and would not necessarily apply in any other universe. Inductive scepticism may have been right after all but was just applied to the wrong domain - it should be applied to the domain of all worlds not our world where our causal laws actually are reliable.
Wild speculations like this are necessary for mankind to loosen the grip in which the classical approach to science and philosophy have imprisoned us. They may lack coherence but they have the benefit of forcing us to drop our accepted paradigm and think outside not just the box but outside our world. It is like the abstract artist who lets his brush mark the canvas in freeflow even though he has not a definite idea of what he wants to paint but he lets the experience of handling the medium and his explorations of subject freeflow over the surface. Sometimes the result is meaningless and worthless. Sometimes by chance he creates a wonderful work of art that transcends all his conventional efforts.
As my eyes get used to the darkness I see that it is not total. There are faint specks where light from distant stars or galaxies has made its long journey over millions of years to finally enter my eyes and spark on my retina. Miracles like this happen every instant of our existence and yet we are not in awe of the world. The chances for a photon to travel over millions of years and enter my eye at this precise point in spacetime are infinitesimally small. Yet it has happened. All events are such long odds events. Our entire experience is one long good luck run of events. We are very lucky to exist at all.
The stars are now quite distinct and the familiar patterns of the night sky emerge. The celestial sphere is the greatest light show on earth yet few of us even bother to look up. We take its beauty for granted. We are contemptuous of what it is telling us about our world. It is a constant reminder of how small and insignificant we are in the overall scale of things. Out window on the universe is less than the tiniest speck of light in the celestial sphere. We are observers moving in a unremarkable galaxy located at non-special point in spacetime. All our ideas that we are special stem from being inward looking and seeing the world from our human perspective. Yet the constant reminder of our triviality appears to us each night and we are blind to it. We see the spectacle but we ignore the scale. We ignore the deep darkness of the vastness of our cosmos.
I marvel that the light of those distant points in spacetime can reach me at all. The photons must travel through so much space unimpeded by real or dark matter. They travel from the infinite reaches of our spacetime to reach us. I think of Olber and his paradox. Surely the night sky should be lit up as one glorious sea of light. If the universe is infinite in extent and if I could travel out from this point of spacetime, here on the cliff top near an ocean on the planet earth, then surely I would encounter some sun on my path over the infinity of time. Light from this sun likewise should meet me eventually. The same can be said for any point in the sky and as Olber postulated, the sky should be bright with light all over. That it is not, is direct evidence of the Big Bang. The huge expansion directly following the Big Bang led to matter being dispersed thinly across an incredible space. The flash of the initial big bang still fans out across spacetime but is so red-shifted as to be invisible. It exists as the cold cosmic background radiation picked up by radio receivers here on earth. It, as Olber would have expected, exists in every region of the sky. If it had colour and we could see it, the whole sky would be painted that colour, even at night.
I stare at the stars as they communicate to me from the vast past aeons of time. I shiver as I try to sense that cold background radiation that tries to talk to me, right from the very moment of creation of our universe. It reminds me of the cold end for our universe unless it stops expanding. I think I can feel the soft solar breeze on my cheeks, the stronger galactic wind in my hair, the almost gale force expansion of the universe brings tears to my eyes. All this motion and yet I am still here - locked in my inertial prison. The prison has no windows to let me see the past flying backwards behind me. I cannot even find a door that will eventually open to perfect enlightenment. I can only wonder if, outside, there is a prison warden who eventually may release me.
But maybe the universe will not keep expanding - maybe it will start to slow down and eventually stop. Then it must contract and as it does so it will turn on itself and meet itself going forward from the past. This very scenario was one that the ancient Greeks thought might happen. Zeno, in the fourth century BC, believed that originally there was only fire. All the other elements gradually emerged but sooner or later there would be a cosmic conflagration and all would again become fire. There is a remarkable similarity to the closed model of Big Bang theory. But even more remarkably, this conflagration was not a final consummation but just the end of the cycle - the whole process would repeat endlessly. The confluence with modern ideas on cosmic evolution is startling. Everything that has happened will happen again, endlessly.
I can see why Zeno's ideas would not catch on in the ancient world with its barbarity and poverty. To feel that the same woes and hardship would have to be endured endlessly, was not a good news story to the masses. It is not surprising that the heavenly afterlife of Christianity had better reception.
The eastern horizon is beginning to show the faintest signs of emerging light as the dawn of a new day begins. I stare at the spot where the night sky has almost imperceptibly brightened. I feel the strong emotion of our ancestors who, witnessing this same wondrous event every morning, would be driven to worship and adoration. The greatest spectacle in the natural world was about to unfold before my eyes. The life giver, life sustainer, the very origin of our earthly existence was about to appear from the dark in splendid and brilliant form. I waited with my heart pumping. What if Hume was right after all and it failed to appear? I could even now be in the last eight minutes of my life and the life of all the planet. Intelligence snuffed out in a relative cosmic time moment. The trials and tribulations, the feats and defeats of all humanity, would be as naught with the onset of oblivion. The detritus of our existence would be the signals that we had generated in the last hundred years or so, by radio and other communication signals. They would travel out from our galaxy into the vast reaches of the cosmos unlikely to be ever intercepted by another planet, least of all another intelligent life form. The whole affair of life seems so pointless on the cosmic scale, all the more so if it doesn't survive. Survival may be its greatest driver just as it is for biolife on Earth. Is it possible that the teleology of life is survival, not just at the planetary level, but over the aeons of time, at the cosmic level?
Life seems to be a very unstable phenomenon. It is constantly threatened, as though it is contrary to the laws of nature. It battles for survival and rarely wins. There are thousands of species that have flourished for a period and then disappear. The sixty five million years of dinosaur reign on the lands and seas, has all but vanished from the fossil record. A chance meteorite impact can wipe out most of life in a relative instant. Changes in the biosphere can be equally as devastating. Global warming may have unforeseen impacts over the coming centuries. By then most of the non-human species of life will have been destroyed for want of habitat. The threat of nuclear annihilation will once more raise its fearsome prospect as the technology cannot be controlled amongst irrationalist ideological states or groups. Even if these major Armageddon's don't come to pass, life on earth will be challenged by the demands of an exponentially increasing population, fighting for ever decreasing water, food and energy. The threats to life seem endless.
I feel despair and let my eyes close to the world of pain. I want to shut out the tragic scenarios
that seem to be our fate. I search for the hope that drives us on, amidst the mourning and weeping. I hear all the religious laugh at my predicament. They see the world in the light of the hope of the glory of a personal god, who looks after them and will comfort them for all eternity. This simple naive irrational belief washes away the seeming despair that is the lot of the atheist. It answers all the questions by the supposition of a unique human-like god who seems to have a special interest in our minute corner of the cosmos and more particularly in the vain and imperfect creatures that inhabit it.
Am I jealous? At times I would love the calm that the certainty of simple good beliefs offers. I still have that feeling of total calm when I enter a quiet church and just sit and think. I almost said pray. Thinking and prayer are alike in that thoughts are posed to an internal presence, and that for religious people is their personal god. So I, in effect, pray in these quiet moments just as in a way I am praying now, with my eyes closed, awaiting with Humean trepidation for the sun to rise. I am using