I have this remix by John Boswell stuck in my head for the last few weeks. It’s made from quotes of from Sagan and Hawkins.
“A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way”
…who needs fairies in the gardens when this is the real world?
I’m not keen on the term “creation” either-- it implies agency and purpose.
Particles did not come out of the blue. They may be residues of exploding stars or whatever experts say.
(Here is the hen or egg dilemma again).
I like Douglas Adams’ quotes about Space and the size thereof;
[QUOTE=Douglas Adams]
Space is big, really big, You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The Universe; Some information to help you live in it…
Area: infinite.
Imports: none.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things from.
See Imports.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough - see point one.
Well, in fact there is an awful lot of this, largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks, art, or anything else that might keep all the nonexistent people of the Universe occupied.
[/quote]
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, Douglas, you are missed 
Reminds me of Carl Sagan’s quote, which I love,
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself”
I never even heard of that quote until I heard the song “Symphony of Science”.
And I never heard that song until I learned of it here on the dope. So, another reason why I loves me some Doper nerds.
Sorry to double post, but I missed the edit window. I just want to point out that in hiding has already quoted ‘Symphony or Science’.
These are fun. Thanks, all.
In case anyone is counting, I’m another who would prefer a word other than “creation”. Sure, things get “created” all of the time, but I doubt that is the main definition that would occur to a majority of folk. Kinda like capital C “Creation” as opposed to lower case “creation”…
Another beautiful Feynman quote about the wonders of science:
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.”
Cute, but I’m more impressed with the nihilists who simlpy don’t give a crap. They may not be hapier, but they are more honest in their athiesm.
Not necessarily. “The tilt of the Earth’s axis creates the seasons.” “Lightning creates thunder.” “Bad weather created high seas on Wednesday, making it difficult for ships to dock.” The words create and creation don’t reference a conscious agent as explicitly as you might think.
Just a thought.
I like the end of Dawkins’ “Unweaving the Rainbow”:
“A Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, might hear the galaxies sing.”
Suck on that, Walt Whitman.