Falling Down On The Job Again

Yes, it's been a few days since I've posted anything, and I don't know how you feel about that, but I'm not pleased.

I realize that there is more than one way of looking at this: while it's nice to keep my readers posted on any and all developments in Larryland (Livermoreland? Liverland?), it could be argued that it's better to wait until something of general interest happens. Otherwise, this thing becomes little more than a glorified LiveJournal (and I don't even know how glorified it could claim to be).

On the other hand, it could also be argued that if I have any pretensions or presumptions about being a *writer*, I should be able to turn the most mundane events or non-events into fascinating reading, even for people who don't have the slightest knowledge of or interest in who I am.

And as usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Speaking of which, I got some people over on the PPMB riled up when I claimed that by trying to explain away the origins of the universe with the Big Bang theory, scientists were merely offering their own version of "Let there be light" to compete with the many religious creation stories/legends/myths, take your pick that have been kicking around for as long as human beings have wondered how and why we got here.

I was being outrageously stupid, I was told; scientists have to measure and quantify and test and prove every theory, whereas the religious and the philosophically inclined can simply speculate and make leaps of blind faith when the numbers and/or the syllogisms don't add up.

And no matter how many times I pointed out that science was perfectly good at explaining and analyzing the workings of the universe after it came into being, it had not been able to offer a shred of insight into how the universe came into being. There was a Big Bang, they say, as if that answers everything. But if there was a Bang, there had to be something to go bang, and that something had to come from somewhere. Or else it materialized out of nothing, which would be an even more amazing and unexplainable phenomenon.

What I found interesting was how mad some partisans of science got when in fact I hadn't said anything at all against science apart from pointing out that there were certain questions it couldn't answer. "Idiot," I was told, "The Big Bang theory isn't meant to explain the origin of the universe." Okay, fine, I understand that. Now, instead of calling me names, why not simply answer the question of how the universe did originate?

Or else admit that you have no idea, something I'm perfectly willing to admit myself. But at that point, you'd be dangerously close to acknowledging my original point: that this is where science and religion meet up the same blind alley. And when I say "blind alley," I don't mean to disparage either science or religion, because I have a high regard for both, merely to note that even when we're able to trace existence back to within nanoseconds of the original Big Bang (or Creation, which to an outside observer might have looked very much like a Big Bang), we'll still have no insight whatsoever into what if anything went before it.

That's of course where the religiously inclined would offer up God as the all-purpose explanation, and the religiously disinclined scientists will come up with their own deus ex machina involving multiple dimensions and infinity turned in upon itself and similar stuff that you may have first seen explored in old issues of Superman comics.

Upshot: none of us know or are likely to know, at least not as long as we are confined to a human, earthly existence. But some of us are willing to admit we don't know, while others insist on constantly changing the subject.