Destination Unknown

Tauheed;

Can there be any doubt that, barring some calamity, mankind has a destiny that lies beyond earth, beyond the planets, beyond the stars, beyond even the realm of three dimensional space in which it was born?

hmmm...let me throw a few spanners....er...doubts...before we venture into the beyond

a: cure for common cold
2: cure for cancer
c: palestine
4: what is that k word?

...t

good stuff ..short.

i think female apes realized that if they stand up, they are less likely to get ``jumped`` on by surprize, so its more likely that the female apes stood up first.

and so are you arguing for existance of god?

Nice n concise.
Well, maybe we are not unique in our wonderful existence. As Calvin says-
``The proof of intelligent life in the universe is that they have not tried to contact us.``

A throwback to those Ape days is the saying ``Hume banana hai..``

Temporal - naughty, naughty throwing in ``k`` words (well actually ``Koi Mil Gaya`` was about aliens).

Jang #2 Ha! ha! I agree that female apes probably found that to be another good reason to stand up straight.

What does all this mean for the existence of God? I suspect that even after (as I am sure it will) mankind has moved ``beyond the stars``, God will remain an elusive concept - after all, by definition (and I believe all religions are united on this core point) God exists beyond the pale of human knowledge, and will always remain so. As someone said, the greater our circle of knowledge expands, the larger the boundaries of the unknown become. The more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to learn.

btw, there is a book recently written on this subject of science and religion (I cant recall the name of the book or author, but will try to find it), that is getting a lot of interest from scientists as well as religious people. It seems to make a major break from past literature on the subject.

Mr t. #1 I thought poets flew flights of inspiration, and did not throw spanners in the works. ;-)

True we have a few little problems to deal with, the cure for cancer and the cold, political problems like palestine, and the dreaded k-word (what on earth is this word, btw??). However, the important thing, as I have tried to do in this article, is to provide a LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE: Thus, go back a little over 150 years or so, and the world would already become unrecognizable to anyone born in past few decades - there would be no airplanes in the sky, and no trains or cars at all!! Everyone walked, or rode a horse or some other animal. The sights and sounds and smells would be completely different. Surgery was conducted without anesthetics.

Indeed, if the life on earth had started just 24 hours ago, then that ape I refer to in the article would have stood up on two feet about ONE SECOND ago!! See things in this long term perspective, and you will see what I mean.

tahmed, I guess you like Fat Boy Slim too! ;-) Very nice writeup.

Hasn’t this been captured somewhere from planet of the apes to “above and Beyond” ? When shall we have MZHI Isphahani claiming this thread?
Now that Mr. Ahmed has committed blasphemy by tracing the human origin to Apes, I would suggest that we stone the damn thread!

“God exists beyond the pale of human knowledge”

Was this to redeem himself? This is a lame attempt Mr. Ahmed! You are doomed.

Let me add some here even though Temporal would throw a tantrum! My little one when she was five came to me and asked: “Daddy what is god?” I asked who mentioned this word to her in our household. Found out we have new Mormon neighbors and they talk of God incessantly. I told her god is sitting right in front of her and go tell this to your new friends. Since then she has not brought up this silly subject in our household.

Seriously, sometime we do need to question how legit our lasting thoughts are.
After putting a fine tale of “inhabitants steadily reduced to infinitesimal speck” together, Mr. Ahmed would like to, all of a sudden, take the issue of god beyond the pale of human knowledge. Why?
Why not attempt to reduce that to what it is just another idol held together by years of ignorance? Why make that an un-ask-able question?
Weren’t airplanes, cars and rocket were beyond the pale of human knowledge just 500 years ago.

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Azure #7 Thanks. I hadnt heard of fat boy slim, so educated myself by googling him. (My music tastes seem to have stopped evolving after the 1980`s).

Subroto #6 True. And that is of course also the time when mothers first started badgering their sons: ``Hamsayan kaa beta theko - apnay 2 paer pay kharra hai. Or too nalaik abhhi tak gaddhoN ki tara chaar tangoN per chalta hai``. :-)

rahul capri #3 I hadnt heard that one before (about intelligent life not contacting us, thus proving their intelligence), but certainly makes sense. :-) Another, somewhat terrifying, explanation of why we have not heard from ET is that once life gets too big for its boots - it self-destructs.

Given the odds (over a hundred billion galaxies in the known universe, with tens of billions of stars in each galaxy - or billions and billions as Carl Sagan would say), it would indeed be very surprising if we were the only known planet with life on it. And lately they have also been finding other evidence - planets on other stars (one of them very much like earth), an enormous galaxy sized cloud of organic chemicals that from the first step towards life as we know it on earth, that seem to make it quite likely.

what i mean is newtonian physics was making folks very comfortable an all, most of our physical reality was explanable and testable and complete. so the ape said cool, there is no god, i understand everything, just a matter of time before i perfect the next-gen stam engine. and then einstein opened yet another can of worms and brought out all the defeated theist out of the woodwork and got poor ape confused again. then there are those apes who are even confused by newtonian stuff and yearn for simpler times of 7-th century and earlier. i too kind of yearn for simplicity of old times when the female apes were more accepting..

HP:
Let me add some here even though Temporal would throw a tantrum!

--nahi bhai aap ko and everyone else too…has a right to peacefully hold any set of believes that leads one to be a better insaan...

Tahmed32:

Thanks for taking it in good humour]
kaun jeeta hay teri zoolf kay...

and you Subroto:

…my first and right instinct was to ignore you on the prodding at k word…don’t get me wrong…i could have given a dizzying k ride to you…could have said:

kabhi kabhi
kal ho ya na ho aaj to hay!
kabhi khushi kabhi ghum
kabhi hum kabhi tum
kabhi humari kabhi tumhari merzi
kabhi yahaaN kabhi wahaaN
kahaaN ka halwa kahaaN ki puri
kabhi idhar ki kabhi oodhar ki
kabhi yeh kabhi woh

but Khuda ki ka’ayenaat aur Khuda ki kudrat maiN abhi MBZ jaisay log bhi haiN…in #12 he has taken you on a k-ride that i cannot concoct in years of dreaming on the job…so there….you ozzie Malik e Nawab Khuda hee hafiz ho tumhara..

…t

HP #8 Actually, our ape-like origins are based on the solid science, not on that silly little movie ``planet of the apes``. After all, that movie is a mere fairy tale (and not a very imaginative one either, since it essentially takes european society from the middle ages, and replaces humans with apes). The science, though is another matter:

The science, as you obviously would know, is based on careful ``search for the truth`` based on patient search for evidence and analysis by thousands of dedicated people across the world (digging in places like remote areas of the african rift valley, chad, south africa, germany, china, the caucusus region, and so on) for more than the past couple of hundred years. All this work has resulted in providing us a reasonably certain picture of the story of man - thus, it now appears that perhaps 9 million years ago, our ape-like ancestors did indeed switch from four legs to two for walking (as I describe in the article in a lighthearted manner), and that this happened in our around the rift valley in africa.

What this implies for religion is of course an interesting question. There remain some ignoramuses in Pakistan (and even in advanced nations like the US) who refuse to accept even that man has walked on the moon. No doubt these ignoramuses in pakistan (as indeed in the US in places like Kansas and South Carolina) would also be appalled to think that anyone considers the ``ashraf-ul-makhlukaat`` to have evolved from four legged creatures that lived in holes in the ground. But when truth and ideology collide, truth must always prevail - otherwise we are merely fooling ourselves.

The fact that such concepts like evolution are so threatening to these individuals is because they understand religion as little as they understand science - after all, God does not need religion, man does. No one needs to prove or disprove the existence of God (for reasons I explained earlier) . But humans do need peace of mind: as the results of a medical research study that were made public only yesterday has shown, stress actually has a physical affect at the molecular level on our bodies by shortening the tips of the DNA called telomerase and thus hastening the aging process. So, by reducing stress, religious practices like prayer or yoga (in hinduism) do serve an important practical function. There are of course many other uses of religion to man (values e.g.) - but certainly learning more about the universe around us is NOT one of them. That is the job of mankind.

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