We know that life on earth is--roughly speaking--almost as old as earth itself. Given a billion years, or so, to settle down, life appeared. All the evidence, and it is evidence, show that life has been on earth for at least three-and-a-half billion years.
As for other places in the universe, we do not yet know. Not for certain. It is quite likely, but it is a very large and old haystack we are noodling around in. Logic is waiting for evidence. We are the evidence on earth. The evidence is in the rocks. Bacteria is evidence. Trilobytes. Dinosaurs. Millions of years of human evidence.
The point is this: It is worse than ignorance to deny what we know to be true. It is perverse. It is laughable.
We also know that what we know is not something fixed in stone. The evidence in the rocks has to be understood: it does not get up each morning and sing. It is not a flaw of science that we learn as time goes by: it is its strength.
There is something wonderfully exciting in the human mind that wants to know. We want to know what those stains and shells and bones are about. We are curious to the point of excitement, so we put clues together and take things apart until they begin to make sense to us. And it never fails to happen that, sooner or later, we discover something else, and we have to modify what we thought we knew. Who would want to ignore what else we can learn?
What bothers some people is that they want an answer: the answer. Once and for all, they want to know. When I taught ethics, it became evident to me that some people simply cringe at the notion that there cannot be a simple, once-and-for-all answer. "Is it right or is it wrong?" "Is an ovum a person, or isn't it?" "Is a fertilized ovum a person?" "At what point, at what specific point, do we become persons?" "There must be a purpose for things!"
Typically or, at least, typically in our western kind of religious traditions, a kind of certainty is offered. "Right is right and wrong is wrong, and this is right and that is wrong!" Who says so? "God says so!" And that is that! If by definition, God is the answer, then all there is to do is to get in line.
In fact, most religions are just relics of a moment in time: Moses'
time, Jesus' time, Mohammad's time, L. Ron Hubbard's time. Don't eat pork or shellfish, males should be dominant, our god is the only legitimate god, the others are phonies, human beings are the center of the universe, and don't eat meat on Friday. We carry along the rules of our ancestors, and pretend they are something divine.
To pretend that everything we know was hand-crafted by a god, or a whole family of gods, a few hundred generations ago as a kind of experiment and testing ground for obedience, is outside of anything we know to be true. There was a universe billions of years before anyone invented gods, and nothing that we know to be true even suggests the handiwork of an all-knowing master craftsman. But, it is true, once people did understand things that way, and we still know some of the songs they sang, but singing them is a bit like saying that demons are the cause of epilepsy.
Any system of thought, whether we call it a religion or a philosophy or a vision, that asks us to deny what we ever so plainly know to be true is a violation of our integrity. It is a shameful demand.
The same can be said for what we find to be good, or beautiful. We find truth and goodness and beauty as we go. They are not a single thing, forever. What is true, or good, or beautiful, are partial things. They are not crystalline, like flawless diamonds.
We might be on a quest, but it is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that is important: it is the quest itself.
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