Beauty and Hope

I often hear people claim that science offers a melancholy outlook on life. They say that they would rather not know the truth because it depresses them. Science claims that life is purposeless, and that people are essentially selfish. The demystification of nature diminishes its beauty.

I disagree. The truth is not as somber as some people make it out to be. Nature does not demand it, but incidentally there is beauty, hope and inspiration in the plain and simple truth. Perhaps not as much as you may find in your holy book, but in this case it is not derived out of mythology and superstition, it is derived from the blatant truth to the best of our understanding. I wish to give a few examples of some of these encouraging qualities inherent in nature.

I challenge you to go outside tonight and spend some time looking at the stars. Don't simply gaze at them. Think about what those seemingly insignificant tiny white dots are. You are gazing into the distant past. Where would we be without the stars? In the shadows of each of those stars there may be a multitude of planets. Some of these may be unimaginable to us. Some of them may be far more beautiful than our own. Just think about this for a second. It's so humbling. Each of those thousands of glowing stars may have a mind-boggling significance. Who knows what that tiny dot you are looking at is concealing.

But their significance does not end their. Think about yourself. Think about what you are. You are a sentient being capable of pondering the vastness of the universe. You are an entangled network of perfectly concordant symbiotes united by a common DNA, the will to spread that DNA, and the will to survive. Yet everything you are made of, everything I am made of was created by something just like one of those tiny white dots that you occasionally ever-so-casually glance at. The tiny white dot that you were created by exploded in a brilliant display and eventually created you and virtually everything you see around you. Mull over that for a while. Is that not so much more beautiful than the idea of being created from dirt? I think it is.

Let us switch subjects, now.

Have you ever felt worthless? Depressed? Ugly? These are all common feelings, but I can assure you that you are neither worthless nor ugly (in somebody's perspective) and if you critically examined the truth for a while, you may find that you don't have a real need to be depressed either. Aside from being everything that I described above, you are the product of billions of years of evolution guided by natural selection which weeds out the bad and keeps the good. You are the outcome of a process which has assiduously succeeded and improved upon itself for billions of years. There is at least something about you which nature has deemed beneficial, many somethings, in fact. If you get nothing else from this, you should at least get consolation from this fact.

Finally, people invariably fear death. But a wise grenosiris once said "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." Surprisingly, this is not horribly far from the truth from a certain point of view. When we die, true, our bodies will rot. Memories people have of us will fade. But we will be recycled, reused throughout the earth. What we are made of will never die. Once the earth is swallowed by the sun, the matter that we are made of will persist. Forever. Either in the form of energy or in the form of matter, but what is important to realize here is that what we are made of will persist. From this perspective we have already achieved immortality. We don't need to seek it. Sure, this does not provide us much comfort now, but if we were raised from childhood to find solace in this fact I think we would be comforted.

In my opinion, science offers a lot of beauty and hope to the world, though even sometimes scientists deny it. We just have to look for it. These are just a few examples of what I have seen.

I didn't read the whole thing, but in regard to what you said in the first bit, I would hope people would prefer beauty that is rooted in truth and facts rather than beauty that is pulled from fiction.

Unfortunately, most people prefer beauty rooted in fiction.

To quote John Keats:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'