Well and truly said. The other thing that oft amazes me these days is the smallness of the constituent pieces of our universe: atoms and molecules and quarks. I think what gets me is the complexity (if only in number) of the interactions, energies and structures necessary at that level to build up anything macroscopic. Like the human body! Or a twig, or a sprig of grass. I love skiing partly for these very reasons. Being up in the mountains you get a little bit of the feeling of smallness you describe so well, and also a feel for the complexity involved–just look at a snowflake or a tree! Once again, well said Tim.

Here’s a thought…

I think you’ve hit upon something missing in some popular trends in religious/spiritual conceptualization. What I mean is this: the universe’s immensity is part of our overall experience of what I will term “authoritative” truths. An “authoritative” truth is something that every human will experience regardless or preference, belief, or decision. For instance, gravity is authoritative truth because our actions will always be affected by it. Even if you make an anti-gravity device and live in that, you would still be under the authoritative truth of gravity because your action of building and living in and anti-gravity device was made necessary by the presence of gravity.

Anyways, experiencing things that are “authoritative,” experiences of principles that are not subject to human decision but only human response, ought (I think) to lead us to the general conclusion that we cannot self-define. As you bring up, Tim, we cannot define our relative size to the rest of the universe. We may find technologies or work with established physical principles to change that relationship, but we cannot define or decide those principles in the first place.

I feel that since we observe this trend in the physical world, we ought to consider the likelihood of the same situation in the spiritual realm (for those of us who consider a spiritual realm to be a relevant possibility). Just as we cannot self-define our physical relationship to our environment, I think it ought to be obvious that there is a high chance that we also cannot self-define spirituality.

I make this point because I think the current trend is that spirituality / religion is like consumer goods. We pick out religion like we pick out clothes in Target, based on what we like and/or prefer. But I think that our mainstream culture is wrong in lumping spirituality with the small category of things that are subject to human definition. Artwork, for example, is subject to human definition, and this correlates with the unspoken premise that spirituality is created by humans. Perhaps as Christians we need to be more distinct about exactly what we’re presupposing when we suggest that God exists. Because undoubtedly there are many people who do create an ideology of God in order to satisfy their emotional needs or something, but that is clearly not what we’re proposing when we say “there is a God.” We’re saying, “We propose that God exists, and that His existence cannot be self-defined by any individual, but rather we as individuals live subject to this analagously to our relationship with our physical environment.”