These paragraphs following are the most insightful I’ve read in a long time. They’re taken from a book entitled “Undeniable” written by Douglas Axe, in which Axe states his case against the probability of an undesigned cosmos. Toward the conclusion of his argument, he speaks of the uniqueness of humanity among the creation. As Bill and Ted would say, “Whoah, dude, this is deep!”
Being the most remarkable component of the human body, [the human brain] is arguably the most outstanding physical invention ever to exist. Even more spectacularly, the brain is the one physical invention that serves as an interface between the physical and conceptual worlds.
Take a moment to let the significance of this send shivers down your spine. This universe has within its vast swirling wisps of scattered elements a fixed number of connecting points between the immense realm of things and the infinite realm of thoughts. You know this because one of these connecting points is humming with activity right now, inside your skull, enabling you to reconstruct thoughts from physical symbols on paper or on an electronic display.
In purely material terms, these connecting points are as nothing – vastly outnumbered, outweighed, and outpowered by the stars in our galaxy, which is only one of a hundred billion galaxies. But that assessment flips the moment we take all of reality into account. Significance isn’t measured in kilograms or light years because, like truth, it belongs to the realm of ideas.
Significance is therefore weighed only by those capable of weighing ideas. Once we recognize this, the profound importance of these special locations are the places – the only places – where the world of atoms and the world of ideas are made to shake hands. Poet meets muse. Sculptor touches stone. Melody finds strings. Ideas flow to paper. Thirst is quenched. Loneliness ended.
Absolutely everything of momentous importance in our universe is occurring at these special points, which is why we name and cherish the possessor of each one – why we celebrate their births and mourn their passing. If the galaxies out there were capable of grasping the meaning of the universe, their attention would be fixed on one little planet circling an ordinary star situated in a minor arm of an otherwise ordinary spiral galaxy. What is present on that one little planet makes this particular galaxy – the one named after milk – utterly extraordinary.
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