The Search for Boundary

The older I get, the more I don't understand the need of most of my fellow humans to understand where we came from and where we will end up. For one thing, it really has no affect on where any of us are here and now. Knowing how it all began will not put food on the table nor ensure my hair is combed in the proper direction. Far more importantly, it is something that is unknowable in that such knowledge is beyond the scope of human comprehension.

So why dwell on it? Why create all these schemes (religion, science or extraterrestrial influences) to attempt to explain what we each know going in can't adequately be explained? We sprung forth from whatever it was and we will end up wherever it is. There's nothing we can do to change this ultimate reality.

Of course, most people want explanations! But every one of our human-constructed explanations doesn't truly provide an answer but more questions.

Take religion, in general, and Judeo-Christianity, in specific. We're taught that "God" existed in the void and created life (in seven days no less!). But this always begs the question in inquiring minds: Where did God come from?

Religious sorts have a quick answer for this. God is eternal; he always was and always will be. It sounds like a semi-plausible explanation until we consider it within the realms of human experience.

To be human is to understand that everything has a beginning (birth) and an ending (death). We know that each of us was born and will one day die. We know that, in time, all things die -- trees, butterflies, rocks, automobiles, cake pans and civilizations. So, it's hard for us to wrap our heads around the idea of an eternal being and it begs the question: What caused the eternal being to be? There is no sufficient answer to the question.

Science will tell us that life began with the Big Bang or some other theory. Our reality began as particles, atoms, molecules, DNA or some other very small element. These teeny things came to here from distant planets and, through their inherent nature, began to interact with each other to form the basis of what we call life. This, of course, begs the obvious question: Where did all these elements initially come from? There is no sufficient answer to this question either.

Believers in extraterrestrial influences will inform us that humans and the various life forms on earth were seeded by an advanced civilization beyond our solar system. They visited this orb millions of years ago to plant a garden -- us. As with the previous two examples, this begs the question: But where did they ultimately come from? And there is no sufficient answer for this question.

So, if we can't provide an adequate answer to this ultimate question, why do we keep asking it? Each time we come up with a different way to pose the query, we're left with the same non-answer answer -- We don't really know.

And we never will.