I accept that you see the beauty in mountains, trees, rivers, stars etc. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The real question is do you see the physics in all those things? For example, stars are not simply dots of light forming pretty patterns in the sky. They are mindbogglingly immense nuclear fusion reactors held together by their own gravity; with the obvious exception of our own familiar Sun, exactly 100% of them are so far away from our world that, barring some technological paradigm shift, they are forever beyond our reach. What's more, there are 100,000,000,000 of them in our Galaxy alone - and there are literally trillions of other galaxies out there in the Universe, with more being discovered all the time. And all of this is to give us something beautiful to look at at night?
We can indeed look at trees and other similar biological entities in the natural environment and remark on how pretty they are. What we fail to appreciate by so doing is the continuous battle for survival these things represent. "Nature red in tooth and claw" isn't just a poetic turn of phrase. An idyllic woodland scene straight off a Hallmark birthday card is Nature's equivalent of the trenches of the Somme.
My whole point is that none of these things exist simply for our aesthetic sensibilities. If the natural world suggests a god to you because you think they do, that it's all for our purposes, you're missing the bigger picture. It's like playing a piano with eighty-seven missing keys. To quote a famous philosopher, "That is why you fail."
We can indeed look at trees and other similar biological entities in the natural environment and remark on how pretty they are. What we fail to appreciate by so doing is the continuous battle for survival these things represent. "Nature red in tooth and claw" isn't just a poetic turn of phrase. An idyllic woodland scene straight off a Hallmark birthday card is Nature's equivalent of the trenches of the Somme.
My whole point is that none of these things exist simply for our aesthetic sensibilities. If the natural world suggests a god to you because you think they do, that it's all for our purposes, you're missing the bigger picture. It's like playing a piano with eighty-seven missing keys. To quote a famous philosopher, "That is why you fail."
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
