How things came to be this way. Share your story of the universe.
  • 0 thru 9
    1.5k
    Picture yourself by a campfire on a fine summer evening. You are relaxing with the people you feel most comfortable with. The discussion turns toward the philosophical and spiritual. The question comes up, "how did the world/universe/life get to be the way it is?" After some responses, you find that you have the floor, and everyone is eagerly awaiting your input. What do you say?

    Feel free of course to combine history, the hard sciences, anthropology, philosophy, mythology, religion, literature, etc. with some creative story telling of your own to bring your ideas together (that hopefully won't lull your audience to sleep.) They await your insights.

    Of course for a question like this, some generalizing is to be expected. To try to prove every statement might prove unwieldy. However, it is your story. Tell it how you think best.

    (Points deducted for those who post merely to debate/deconstruct another's story without first offering a story of their own! :D )
    0 thru 9 Options
  • Barry Etheridge
    349
    "how did the world/universe/life get to be the way it is?" — 0 thru 9

    Once upon a time.
    Barry Etheridge Options
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    "how did the world/universe/life get to be the way it is?" — 0 thru 9

    It dynamically "blossomed" from every property of every particular in a long causal chain (properties themselves being particulars on my view), as well as quite possibly some acausal events. How it first got started, if it first got started, no one knows, and both options there--that there was a start and that there wasn't, are counterintuitive.
    Terrapin Station Options
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    None of us have the time, patience or audacity for such a feat.
    Nils Loc Options
  • aletheist
    1.5k
    As I posted in another thread: The hierarchy of Being involves an infinite continuum (Thirdness) of indefinite possibilities (Firstness), only some of which are actualized as determinate individuals (Secondness). The sequence of events in each case consists of spontaneity (Firstness) followed by reaction (Secondness) and then habit-taking (Thirdness). The evolution of states is from complete chaos (Firstness) in the infinite past, through this very process (Thirdness) at any assignable time, to complete regularity (Secondness) in the infinite future.
    aletheist Options
  • BC
    13.6k
    There was a big bang and then the beginning. Later we showed up. Now we're spinning yarns about how we got here. Most of the evidence is hearsay, for practical purposes, whether it's the Logos or the cosmic microwave background. When did I come to believe? When Professor T. M. Beyer lectured about the two competing theories, the steady state or the big bang, in Geology. I took his word for the big bango, and I've read and heard more accounts, and I take it as gospel if it leaves out God and things resting on the backs of giant turtles.
    BC Options
  • 0 thru 9
    1.5k
    Lol! Funny responses are better than none at all. :D It is a little unusual thread topic, for sure. I was just reading many of the other threads and thought it would be interesting to hear people's ideas of the big picture, what the general situation is now and how we got here. And maybe where we are going, if anywhere. Still trying to get my ideas on that topic straight.
    0 thru 9 Options
  • jorndoe
    3.7k
    There was never really a time when there wasn't anything. (Well, otherwise there would have been time at least, if that makes any sense.) OK, once upon every time there was something, it would seem.

    Uhh, anyway ...

    Once upon a time there were things and change and stuff, and it really moved in all it's glory, or at least that's how my imagination imagines it. And then there was life, sprawling from stardust and blazing light and such, which, in some obscure corner of it all, invented the Internet. Then one day, in this little pocket, this post came about, in all it's ordinariness.

    You'll have to wait for the rest of the story.
    jorndoe Options
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