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Thursday, April 9, 2009
Facts tell us that this image, enhanced by scientists at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, is simply a lucky incredibility; a 17,000 year-old X-ray show put on by a dying pulsar pulling ionized gases through a powerful magnetic field, and no matter what anyone dreams this can't possibly be the Hand of God. Superstitious mindless godbotherers must be told only the facts.
Vanderleun at American Digest points out some interesting fact bites...
It's a funny thing about 'fact.' We've spun so far off center we've actually used fact to replace truth. Indeed, there are whole industries dedicated to expunging truth with facts. This isn't really what the Enlightenment was hoping for when it set out to enlarge the edifice of fact in the search for truth, but facts are funny that way. Pile up enough into a "great complexity" and they can bury simple truths. Not that facts aren't an element of truth. They are. But they're not, as they say, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If you wish to see lies built of facts, you have only to look about you.Read the rest of that essay. And next time someone tells you, 'well, these are the facts', you can respond 'yes, but having does having just the facts bring us any closer to the truth ..?'
...After all the facts are filed, here I am and there you are. We're spinning about an immense ball of thermonuclear fire on the third stone out from the Sun. We're the end product, as of today, of a great chain of being stretching backwards in time for billions of years to a primordial spark that we do not know or understand. That spark created life here and began the long process to us. It began life that is -- as far as we know today for a fact -- the only life anywhere in the billions of light years we can see. (Yes, I know it is unlikely we are alone, but until we know differently for a fact, that's the fact.) We do not know the why of it all even though the persistence of the miracle whispers there must be a why. At the same time, it is highly likely that beings as limited as we obviously are will never know the why. The why is pretty much outside of science, barely within metaphysics, and above our evolution grade.
What we do know is that, because of how we are made and what we have become, through suffering, striving, effort and, yes, grace, that there are some six billion of us that can look at this strange image of gas and stars and somehow understand it as a hand. And that, at will, we can move our hands to write words such as these to reach across space and time and make others like us understand that although it looks like a hand it cannot possibly be one; that such a thing is utterly impossible.
If you don't think that's a miracle that surpasses all understanding, you simply don't have all the facts.
But do enjoy the image. Fact is, you're lucky to be alive at this moment in time to, you know, take notice.
h/t Gagdad Bob
