Except, they were not stars, they were galaxies. A poster of a small portion of the sky full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each looking like a dot, as small as a star looks in the night sky, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars...
Something snapped in my brain that day and I went on from being somewhat religious/agnostic to a full blown atheist.
BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind, e.g. ten commandments, seven days of creation. Even the supposed large numbers such as 144,000 never come close to what you need to describe nature such as the number of stars in our galaxy (around 10^11) or the number of atoms in a human body (order of 10^27). See physics constants for even better examples. Also, religions often describe reality using numbers that look suspiciously memorable in decimal notation. OTOH, nature never gives us round decimal-friendly numbers for constants. I think this also makes religion feel manmade and science authentic.
I have the opposite experience you described. Contemplating the infinitude of reality draws me toward religion via logic. Through contemplation it seems to follow that there's something important happening with meaning beyond our comprehension.
I take offense with this description. Take Christianity and Islam and you've got half the world's populations. Are those 3.5 billion people all stupid westerners?
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
Or, indeed, any religions.
Buddhism and perhaps other Indian religions have some really large numbers, e.g. http://allergrootste.com/big/book/ch1/ch1_7.html
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology#:~:text=Every%....
That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies[1]
Almost every atheist will reject religion, given what religion typically is and which is captured pretty well in the definition above.
Two completely different concepts, one word. So it's a bit confusing. But for someone discussing the second type of religion, saying it's "man-made" is definitely a knockout punch.
I don't think there's anything wrong with religions that acknowledge (and even embrace) the man-made aspect.
TLDR: Importance does not equate to size, just as space does not equate to mass nor mass to value (value being the particular distribution of elements within a mass).
you can generalize that statement very far; religion is one of the key "technologies" which allows communities to scale past 5K people. Think "city".
Thus religion has a very different purpose than physics. It is about psychological health on a community and individual level.
The stories of physics, on the other hand, "eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable,..." don't really tell you much about how to handle things when your neighbor's barking dog is frustrating you.
(insert snarky comment about engineering a force field to solve the problem)
Even assuming that the bible is the literal word of deity, it is inconsistent to believe that the creation stories of genesis are descriptions of actual physical processes. because that is not why deity put those stories there. because deity was talking using a language which is 1.5-3K years old (let's agree to not argue dates, I'll accept the date you prefer), and words like "world" and "universe" meant something very very different back then than they do today. So if it is deity's literal word, then it must literally mean what it meant in the context of that earlier culture.
Personally for me it is basically like this, that the Universe is so infinitely huge, somehow just calling it huge doesn't do it justice, wherein the concept of God or Gods as is defined by most Earth religions seems too tiny to describe an entity or a race of entities that could be the real God or Gods.
Moreover, even if the above mentioned entity or race of entities does exist, which created the Universe, I'm so infinitesimally tiny that they don't care about me, and certainly don't care about whether or not I pray to them.
In other words, the human concept of God or Gods is just one level above the humans. And, then if you add the fact that this one-level-above is also just a matter of faith and there is no evidence even of that, then the whole thing crumbles.
In other words, whether or not there is a God or Gods, has no bearing on me and my life and me and my life's decisions are not going to be bound by that.
Whether that is atheism, or being agnostic, or something else can be left undefined. It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.
BTW, the Hindu cosmology [0] does delve into such philosophical things, and perhaps my Hindu upbringing has something to do with my beliefs wherein asking such questions and pondering over them is allowed.
And yet here you are, spending your time and energy making the decision to post on an internet forum about whether you believe God does or does not exist. Seems like you have been influenced and you do care.
If you truly didn't care (roughly the same level of care someone puts into their thoughts on unicorns and leprechauns), you'd spend exactly zero energy talking about the subject. Keep searching and testing for the truth my friend, it is out there.
It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.
[0] certainly those who grew up in Abrahamic religions, I'm not familiar enough with other schools of thought to comment
A counterpoint is this idea:
Imagine how much awe you feel on realising that the awesome scale of the universe is nothing to the even awesomer scale of God who can give personal attention to everyone's tiny lives throughout the entire universe!
It would imply that God has limitations, which goes against the usual view (at least in abrahamic religions) of god being unlimited by definition. It would also invite the question of where those limitations come from. If that's not a practical enough implication, there would also be: dont rely on God for personal attention.
But if I'm an atheist and I learn that there's a God that cares about me or my behavior then I will likely have to change my lifestyle. Maybe I'll have to start praying, or giving charity, or stop stealing, or start dancing around a fire now and then so that the rain comes, or marry in a certain way, etc.
It's no surprise to me that the popular versions of God-belief out there describe a God that's very involved in Earthly affairs. Because otherwise, what's the point?
I've had a vaguely similar experience, but over a longer period, not a single "moment", and not entirely to do with the physical sciences.
They way I look at it is this: To ants, we are gods. We can provide an unimaginable bounty to them by simply dropping the remains of a sandwich. We can destroy their entire world with callous indifference. A step in the wrong place is all it takes to crush an anthill.
But do we care about an individual ant's good behaviour? No. Not in the slightest. I don't meet out punishment on one particular worker ant because it failed to respect the queen, or move enough seeds one day.
Simply put, we are so far removed from ants, so far above them, so much greater, that there can be no meaningful interaction of this type. The UN general assembly does not give a flying fuck about the misdeeds of a particular ant in some particular ant-mound in some particular forest, in some national park, in some country far away. Conversely, an ant can have no concept of the latest UN resolution's effects on international tourism and its side-effects, such as the likelihood of an increased number of dropped sandwiches in national parks. There is no though that an ant can possibly have that can encompass even a fraction of such concepts. They're simply too abstract, too advanced for such tiny brains.
Any God that could possibly have made a Universe as vast and complex as ours would be similarly far removed from us. We would be ants to such a God. Personal, individual communication of any type would be hopeless. A "relationship", as Christians like to say, would be absurd in the extreme. Ants don't have relationships with senators, or kings, or generals. It's simply unthinkable.
Science could study such a God, if it existed, but it wouldn't be entirely clear if it would be possible to actually gain a truly meaningful understanding. A superficial, surface knowledge, perhaps, but that is all. Prayer would certainly be an utter waste of time. Holy books could not have possibly be written or inspired by such a God. Rituals would be meaningless. Rites and celebrations would also be embarrassingly pointless.
Also, for folks who are drawn to religion primarily due to "spiritual" experiences they've had with the religion -- where they experience a loss of self, a one-ness and connected-ness with others, and a distinct sense of clarity -- it may be that having a very similar experience in a non-religious context may lead to new beliefs about what that experience is or means.
For a lot of people, Reason One just isn't enough. They need a story to go along with their revelation. They need to look at a picture of a galaxy, or watch their religious grandmother die slowly, or read about pedophilic priests, or whatever.
People are irrational.
“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”
Personally I have no reason to trust or believe what clergy say (they're as human as the rest of us and make lots of unverifiable claims), so all I have to go one is what we collectively discover about our universe.
It's an interesting factoid that blackhole mass isn't related to their volume but their surface area, so by adding mass they grow a lot faster than you'd expect and density goes down fast. Larger black holes are barely denser than water.
Sagittarius A*, the closest black hole, is 4.1 million solar masses, so its Schwarzchild radius is 12.1 million km, so its density is 0.25 kg/m^3, which is about 1/5 as dense as air at sea level--much less than water.
A black hole made from Jupiter would have a Schwarzchild radius of 2.8 meters, so its density would be... denser than a neutron star.
If you look into holographic theory (which I prefer personally) then the entire mass of a black hole is represented as information on the surface of the black hole, explaining the relation between mass and surface not mass and volume. This solves some problems with the information theorem (no information can be lost) by presenting all information contained within a black hole on it's surface where it can be read, atleast theoretically. (Here information and mass would be considered equivalent)
To some extend, it still holds true if you just consider the mass of a black hole to be it's singularity and it's volume the volume that fills the event horizon.
edit: Also consider; if you placed an equivalent amount of mass in space that occupies less volume than the event horizon would, it would automatically be a black hole (and note; the schwarzschild radius is not necessarily the event horizon, the event horizon can be tighter if the black hole rotates)
If it grew more than linearly with mass, we wold see the same reducing density, just faster.
Spoiler: gurl ner abg whfg fvzvyne, gurer ner gurbergvpny erfhygf gung gurl unir gb or rdhny. Hasbeghangryl gur cncre vgfrys nffhzrq jnl zber culfvpf xabjyrqtr guna V unir. Ohg, guvf znxrf bhe havirefr pbafvfgrag jvgu gur fvzcyr qrsvavgvba bs oynpx ubyr ("n znff ragveryl jvguva vgf Fpujnemfpuvyq enqvhf").
Then I used the formula given in [1]: r = (2 G M) / (c^2).
You have: (2 * G * 1.5 * 10^56 grams ) / (c^2)
You want: lightyears
* 2.3548373e+10
If we account for not just ordinary matter but dark matter (a ratio of 4.9% to 26.8%) the picture is different:
You have: (2 * G * (1.5 * 10^56 grams + (1.5/4.9*26.8) * 10^56 grams) ) / (c^2)
You want: lightyears
* 1.5234355e+11
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
(The scientific calculator I used, which is awesome every day is "units" btw: https://linux.die.net/man/1/units)
In any case, it's important to note the Schwarzchild model is a spherically symmetrical ball. Mass in our Universe seems more or less uniformly dispersed (with some anisotropy). Without a center for mass to collapse, I suspect the black hole dynamics don't apply.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
Jokes aside, atheism is a religion (as in fundamentalist belief system), and not a nice one either. Being agnostic probably keeps your mind more flexible [citation needed].
―Edgar Mitchell
Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s 1985 UN speech also resonates here: https://youtu.be/qcga8ATBNh0
Firstly, contrary to Benatar, our lives are not "meaningless", even from a cosmic perspective. Our personal problems, concerns, relationships, and feelings are in no way less significant merely in the virtue of the size of the (multi)verse. Your feeling of pain is still pain, whether the universe contains billions of galaxies, or is just 10 light-years across. Same with joy, same with health, everything.
Secondly, our lives are certainly not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The whole future of the Sun depends on whether humanity's descendants exist long enough to develop the technology to stop it from going nova and gather its energy. If Earth is indeed the only planet in the observable universe to contain life, then our lives are of tremendous significance. Either we live and hopefully, build grand Kardashev IV-utopia among the stars changing the universe completely, or we go extinct.
There’s no denying that the heat death of the universe is a pretty depressing idea.
Somehow preventing our sun to swell into a red giant is also only a short term and meaningless problem in the grand scheme of things. You would have to prevent the heat death of the universe if you want human mankind to exist forever or accept that things will eventually come to an end.
(And in terms of boredom, because I'm guessing that's what you allude to by invoking Q: you can always decide to end your existence after you get bored with eternal life.)
Can you imagine a day in which you feel so fulfilled, so bored, that you say to yourself, "it's enough"; a day in which you wouldn't be interested in what tomorrow will bring? I can't. Hence, by induction, I'd prefer immortality.
I'm probably not going to change your mind, just sharing the elvish perspective.
And, to nitpick: the sun will never go nova.
I've been recently doing a project to photograph a lot of these massive interstellar objects in the perspective of landscapes to show how visually big they are. For example, here's a picture I took of the Rosette Nebula rising over Mt. Shasta. The nebula is visually bigger than a full moon, you just can't see it easily with the naked eye: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCO0CmnnVkA/
First the only thing you will eperience is your own life. The only things that should "matter" by definition is the thing you can have influence on and will be important for your life. Why something you can't have influence on (space) should matter in how I make decisions ?
I agree with the general, bigger line to not get too much stress about random stuff, but in that case I prefer the line of thinking that short term problem are usually meaning less compared to the duration of of your life, than trying to justify it by the fact that "a universe exists".
Sorry for the use of "bullshit" if you're the kind to be offended by that
Whatever it takes to get there, as long as you can get there.
Not even the closest star changes or affects life on Earth in time scales relevant to us. For all intents and purposes we are an isolated microcosmos, save maybe some astronomic catastrophes unlikely to happen within humanity's span of existence (which isn't even a single million years yet).