Summary


 
There is a purely naturalistic story for the origins of our existence.  It goes something like this:
 
The universe arose as a fluctuation out of absolute nothingness (which can occur because the universe itself is ultimately nothing).  Our universe is one of a potentially infinite number of causally disconnected universes. Ours happens to have precisely tuned laws, physical constants, and initial conditions that enabled a long-lived universe and produced conditions in which life was possible.   The matter that was formed at the birth of the universe collected into stars which eventually burned up and exploded.  This process, repeated over and over, generated the distribution of elements that exist today.  Life arose on earth either by a highly improbable accident or by laws yet to be discovered.  The process of random variation and natural selection generated coded information to produce and regulate intricate molecular machines and the amazing biochemistry of the cell.  Continuation of this process produced many varieties of cells as well as complex programs that regulate the production of the animal body plans that exist in the fossil record or in the animal world today.    You are nuclei forged in stars, interstellar dust intricately organized by biology, the universe contemplating itself, absolute nothingness contemplating itself.


How much of this story is science and how much is faith or philosophy?
 
 

 What Brings a World into Being?

 A Meaningless or Meaning-full Universe?