A creed for the 21st century

But if Astronomer Royal Martin Rees' hunch is the real thing, then there are an infinite number of universes out there right now. The word "infinite" means without limit. It means having no beginning and no end. It just is.

So, on the great stage of immense space and immense time, there has been the required number of misses for the jackpot to become a certainty somewhere in the cosmos. The 'impossible' is made actual by so many preceding events that the concept of number itself becomes meaningless.

Then there is the question: How is it that there is something rather than nothing? There is not the space here to go into that - except to say that the theoreticians are making impressive progress towards describing the mechanism (see A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss). However, our notion of "nothing" needs to be reconsidered.

When this final chapter is written , then, from the time energy first appeared out of a 'nothing' that we will ever be able to detect, through when the first bacteria evolved from self-replicating chemical structures to the eventually appearance of the human mind, life's astonishing journey on this planet will have been described completely.

But no one will ever be able to reveal what initiated the mechanism at time zero because our physical probes cannot go where there is no energy to feed back to them.

A question not permitted to be asked

In preparation for my communion, I recited the Catechism of the Catholic Church from cover to cover. This was the book of absolute truth. It was not to be questioned. Cosmology, also, has a question which is not allowed to be asked. It is: Why are we here?

My little green book was composed of a series of questions and answers. One question was: "Why did God make the world?" And, the answer: "God made the world so that we could love and adore Him". As a seven-year old, it did not occur to me that the great

creating intelligence was being described as an ego-centric male.

Later I learned that this planet was in existence for 4500 million years before the first mind appeared capable of the concept of a god. I learned that the mass of our planet relative to the mass of the known universe is comparable to the mass of one single grain of sand to a pile of sand of mass one billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion tonnes.

Would an intelligent designer have designed all this just for an animal to appear over 13 billion years later on a speck of nothing in the cosmos so as to love and adore that intelligent designer? The only explanation for the scale of the waste in both time and matter is that the creation of our planet and everything on it has been unintentional. We and the universe have no purpose. We and it are simply here.

That is a difficult concept to accept when in our experience every effect has a cause. But, it does not automatically follow that there has to be an explanation for absolutely everything. My catechism even got that principle right when it stated: "God had no beginning and has no end. He always was and always will be."

In other words, both for the religious and the cosmologist, there ultimately has to be one causative influence that can never have an explanation.

With the Large Hadron Collider now filling in the story of the first second of this universe's existence, will cosmology be everyman's creed a century hence? It will be for millions more than it is now. However, in the year 2113, there will still be many who will be believing that a particular pattern of stars has some bearing on their luck in love.