I’m not a religious person. I’m not a full blown God-hating atheist, I’m more of an agnostic with atheistic tendencies. Or rather… I’m a scientist, and due to the lack of any kind of scientific proof of God’s existence, I tend not to subscribe to any religious beliefs. But I digress. And how can I digress before I even started making my point…
Anywho…
There are several mysteries of the Universe that people often attribute to God, and based on your belief system, you may lean more one way or the other. Some of those beliefs are creation vs. evolution, the creation of the earth and the heavens (I’m talking of outer space, not the other kind of Heaven), what happened before the big bang, and where did life come from…
This is the question that causes me to think a bit. There are really two parts to this question, and because I’m not religious, I’ll only be referring to the scientific aspects of it. But what was that magical happenstance that created life in the first place? I understand that after life started, came evolution, which in my opinion makes perfect sense and easily explains how we got to where we (as life on this planet) are now from where life started. The question is, where did that first being come from? There have been scientists that have been trying to figure that out for a while now. Some theories are pretty good, and some… not so much.–The “not so much” theory was one that, if left alone to it’s own devices, a bit of burlap cloth, some wheat, and a few other ingredients in a container of some sort would grow full grown mice after a few days. Well… duh. My house grew mice, it doesn’t mean my house created life, just means my house was not as sealed as I had hoped it was.–Some of the better experiments include putting all the basic elements in a container with water, mixing it and zapping it a few times (simulated lightning) and after a while, you end up with amino acids, and other basic building blocks of life. But not life. It’s not a huge leap, that given time (lots and lots of time, which we had back then), this could become a simple life form (and on to evolution, and on to us), but there are just too many holes right now.
The other question that really makes me wonder… Is where does that spark start in each of us? The brain is an electrochemical processing center. It runs on chemicals and electricity to power you, your thoughts, your dreams, everything about you in a mass of tiny electrical currents in your head. Tiny little amazing sparks. The question is, where did that spark come from?
Electricity doesn’t just “happen”. And each thought in your head must have a beginning, and (and I’m totally making this up, so don’t quote me on this) it makes sense that each individual thought must stem from other thoughts (a spark hits one neuron, which causes that neuron to send out a couple more sparks in different directions, and on and on ad mortem). But where did that first spark come from? While my little girl was in the womb, there was a mass of cells that grew and formed different parts of her body, such as her heart, her hands, her feet, and her brain. Her brain may have had the spark while it was being created, as I’m sure her heart did, because I heard it beating, saw it beating. But what started it? What gave her heart and her brain that initial spark of life, of motion, of being?
If it was always there, even before her brain was created, then it must have begun during her zygote stage. If it didn’t start there, then it must have come from either mine or Chelsea’s cells that we donated to her to give her life. If it didn’t start there, then we must have always had it in us, in all of us, as life on this planet, since time immemorial (I think I just wanted to use a bunch of big words today). Which takes us back to the first question in this post.
This little train just led me to a thought that the circle of life is not really a circle in that it comes back to where it started, but more like a wheel rolling around, always moving, so that it never comes back to where it was, but everything is similar to what came before it.
And that’s what I was thinking about as I was rocking the berry to sleep at 4:00 this morning.