It’s something that we all struggle with, at one point in time or another: the question of the meaning of life. Why are we here? Where did we come from, and where will we go after our bodies are wormfood or soot?

This is the source of religion, of philosophy, of a lot of science (entertainment for the weekend: toss a representative from each of those groups into a closet, and listen to the screams). And each group (and a bunch of sub-groups inside) have their own answers to the question(s): evolution, Big Bang, Genesis, Intelligent Design, brains in vats.

My problem with each of these answers is that they are stopgap — if there’s a god, who made him? If we are brains in vats, or someone else’s dream, who made them?

If you can imagine the boundaries of the universe, you’re a stronger person than I. What lies outside those boundaries? Nothing? What is nothing? It can’t be space — that’s not nothing. But then, neither is non-space….

The opposite of the intelligent design theory — does god worry about these questions when he gets bored, too? — is the happenstance theory. No intelligence at all behind it. But frighteningly easy to grasp — no worse than the infinite monkeys with infinite time and infinite typewriters idea. Sooner or later, given infinity, one of those monkeys is going to crank out ROMEO AND JULIET — that’s the beauty of infinity.

Take all probabilities, and each of them will happen at least once, eventually. Actually, they’ll all happen over and over and over, thanks ot inifinity… But so it goes.

The odds of life spontaneously generating, given primordial soup and chemical reactions and whatnot, is ridiculously small. The odds of an amoeba evolving into a cat — much less a human being — even smaller. The odds of all the factors in the universe being weighted just so to support reality as we know it — magnetic and gravitational fields, our bodies processing elements to support more processing, our ridiculously complex brains — is microscopic. Therefore, there MUST be a god, right?

Unless you’ve got infinity, infinite time, infinite space. More than plenty of chance for everything in possibility to happen once.

Of course no one wants to think about this. Sure, it’s an easy answer — and it answers a lot of smaller questions, about coincidences and confluence, and whatever. But goddamn, it’s a scary notion, because it utterly wipes out the idea of destiny, of fate, of kismet, of hope for some sort of meaning behind it all.

We’re all a cosmic accident, and we’re just here to putter around until another cosmic accident wipes us all out.

Human beings — and dogs, and horses, and finches, and beetles, for that matter — are a random cancer of the universe.

Fuck, that’s depressing. Not any moreso than ID, in my opinion — that road just leads to us being ants, instead of random chance mutations — but pretty depressing nonetheless.