| Riffing off of Robert Wright's book Non-Zero [1]: * Consider the apparent self-assembling of the universe over the last 13.8 billion years. * Consider the seeming overall long-term trend (certainly not a monotonic one) of "improvement" in life. Adapting Gregg Easterbrook's thought experiment [2]: Would you permanently trade places with a random person who lived 1,000 years ago? How about 10,000 years ago? Would anyone, at any time, do so? It's a defensible proposition that, as theologian Philip Hefner put it, we are created co-creators [3]. To what end? Who knows. But if past performance is any indication, it'll be pretty neat. From this perspective, conducting one's life in accordance with (a weak version of) Pascal's Wager [4] seems like a reasonable course of action. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-The-Logic-Human-Destiny/dp/067... (not an affiliate link) [2] http://www.amazon.com/Beside-Still-Waters-Searching-Meaning/... (ditto) [3] http://currentsjournal.org/new_currents_ed_06_01.html [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager |