Michael,

I wanted to reply to other posts, but your #50 is too juicy!

Your summation, I think, drives your reasoning and I don’t think that’s good. Over and over again, we see that mythologies are created out of fear: Fear of attack from the Winter’s wolves and, yes, always, the fear of death.

I think that it’s just as unlikely that one can create a viable philosophy of life from fear as a theology.

Now.

The current thought isn’t that the Universe will become a large black hole but rather that it will collapse into the impossibly small shape of the tiniest bit of energy mixed with a larger bit of matter; as it was at the beginning. Will there come another Big Bang? Who knows? No one. It’s impossible to even theorise what comes afterward.

I say that I’m a believer in science but I’m also a cynic, a skeptic: I believe that some sciences are collections of ‘maybes’ — with severely limited knowledge, maybe X is maybe at this time. But, again as a skeptic, it seems to me that we deal with probabilities based upon what we know now. Particle physics assures us, with almost 100% certainty, that the Higgs field exists and, with my limited knowledge, I accept that certainty (when explained by my particle physicist friends in children’s language).

The only thing that I’m 99.9% certain of is that there is no creator, no spirits or spirit worlds, and no ‘meaning’ of evolved human consciousness.

And that’s my story.