Origin, Destiny, and Purpose

There are three primal truths or beliefs that are bases of a trimal for our universe: origin, destiny, and purpose.

The origin is where the universe began, but in a sense, we can believe that the universe began when we awoke this morning. Science begins its universe with the big bang of spacetime, but where the big bang came from is an inexplicable belief that is beyond human understanding and our universe and ultimately our lives evolved from that unfounded belief.

Usually we are comfortable with the belief that we were born of parents and that our parents were likewise born of their parents and so on. With many such generations, it is very rare to have much more than a belief in such heritage, and so either science or religion can found many different origin beliefs.

Destiny is where the universe will end but also where we go when we die as well as at the end of the day, where we will sleep. The science of spacetime believes in a cold death for our universe as all matter expands into an accelerating oblivion. This destiny is beyond understanding and will occur many billions of years into the future. 

Religions have a variety of different destinies that usually involve immortal human souls, including destinies that recycle or reincarnate those human souls. Spacetime science seems to deny any kind of destiny for human souls after death. 

Most people are just happy to have a place to sleep at the end of the day and whatever the destiny of your belief determines the course of your life.

Purpose is a belief that all life shares in the discovery of how the universe works and in order to survive, we must discover how various parts of the universe work. Mainstream science seems to believe that all purpose and meaning is due to the action of physical laws and that there are no supernatural or transcendent influences for action. However, science also concedes that all action in the universe is still subject to a fundamental uncertainty in that for every moment there are still a large number of equally possible futures.

From these many possible futures, only one future becomes our past and every subsequent action still results in a similar superposition of many possible futures without any certain future. Only when a possible future becomes reality do all of the other possibilities decay away and our reality immediately affects all other possibilities within the same time moment from an action. 

Religions believe that there are supernatural or transcendental influences for action. In particular, religions argue that human choice is most certainly influenced by various supernatural agents. 

Science believes that human choice is simply the result of the processing of the neural impulses of our sensation. Science defines an uncertainty associated with each neural impulse and therefore with each human choice as well and so even for science, the future is never certain even with the perfect knowledge of its initial states.

Okay, religion continues, the predictions of science come from a number of possibilities but only one becomes reality as a past. Although it is impossible to predict exactly which of a set of futures our feeling will select, it is possible to predict which futures we are more likely. We select a particular future, though, based on neural recursion which involves our perception of objects and our feeling.

Religions predict the same number of possibilities as science, but religions argue that there are supernatural influences in our choice and in our feeling. Therefore it is not possible to predict exactly which future becomes reality, but it is possible to predict which futures are more likely. For both religion and science, then, sensation, contemplative thought, past experience, and action all form the bases of much of our feeling and for predicting a likely future. And it is with our feeling that we select futures and choose actions.

What is the difference in action between science and religion? Both science and religion ultimately depend on feeling and both acknowledge the underlying uncertainty and complexity of that feeling. 

A religion petitions for divine guidance, imagines futures based on past experience, selects a future based on feeling, and is grateful to a divine metaphor for the gifts of living. 

Science contemplates actions based on an initial state, imagines futures based on physical laws, predicts a likely future based on feeling, and is grateful for the gifts of living.

Since human feeling is at the root of choice for both science and religion, the real difference between science and religion is simply in the oral and written stories that science and religion recite. The collective wisdom of these stories resonates with the feelings of those who listen and therefore affects their feelings and the choices that they make for their futures. This recursion is what determines our reality.