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Day 23,664

-- -- Guest Post by Metaguest1

Well, day 23,664 of my life has gone by, one in which . . .

  • I found purpose in collaborating with work colleagues providing gas detection instruments that protect workers,
  • I found purpose and love in providing and caring for my family, connected with friends via Zoom, acted morally, enjoyed music, and was awed at the fresh air and beauty of the flowers and trees outside, all without once thinking about or needing a god.
  • The sun came up and I knew where it had been at night;
  • I could follow the moon as it arced across the sky eating dinner outside and I thought of Newton’s tools we use to predict its path.  I honed in on it through my binoculars, and our scientific understanding of its color patterns only added to my wonderment at its beauty.

And many other amazing things happened:

  • Our refrigerator was working proving again, day in and day out, that the Carnot cycle works.
  • The car started, proving again that the science behind combustion engines and battery technologies are correct.
  • Water came out of our tap, certified to be clean and safe by the chemists who purified it, proving once again the science behind coagulation, filtration and disinfection.
  • My iPhone and GPS worked flawlessly, proving again that electrochemical, relativity and (I believe) quantum mechanical theories are correct, practical and reproducible billions of times per day.
  • We saw the geese at the local pond with their cute little goslings and understood their biological life cycle.
  • I was awed again how science and technology has so improved our lives over the past few hundred years that billions have been raised out of poverty, the fewest people ever are dying in conflicts, and
  • I was reminded at the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of children’s lives have been saved that used to be lost before age 5 to diseases, before scientific medical advances provided rational women’s reproductive health care.

All of this was done by humans helping humans, with no supernatural help detectable. Billions and trillions of times per day we re-confirm science without any evidence for the existence of gods.  Religions still contribute to the important purpose of human bonding, but this contribution has not changed for hundreds of years, while technology has left it in the dust of human advancement.  Moreover, I repeatedly hear of religious groups defying stay-at-home orders to congregate, ignoring science and claiming that prayer will protect them, only to result in hot-spots of COVID-19 outbreaks and the death of church leaders.

And the far reaches of science, philosophy and religion that speculate on how the universe was formed do not matter to me in any practical way; I am OK with not knowing, but sure that science, which re-proves itself trillions of times per day, is more likely to get us the answers someday, than religious speculation.

It’s only logical to assume that day 23665 will continue in the same way.