How old is the universe? The latest data suggests approximately 15 billion years. Or at least that is the amount of time science says has elapsed since the so called ‘big bang’, when an infinitesimally minute point of singularity exploded into a 10 billion degrees hot fireball and gave birth to the universe. But how did this point of singularity come into being? How long did it exist before it exploded? And what caused it to explode?

We will probably never know the answers to such questions. For not only is all information and memory of any pre big bang era lost, time as defined by modern physics begins with the big bang. So to even ask what came before it really makes no scientific sense.

This is the trouble with science. It boggles our minds with talk of phantom particles, wiggly string membranes vibrating in 10 dimensions, multiple parallel universes, continuous curved time-space, black holes, anti-matter, imaginary time, and countless other speculations about the physical nature of the universe. Yet it dismisses as irrelevant the questions we really want answers to. Why for instance is there something rather than nothing? Why does anything at all exist?

The truth is that nothing in the scientific universe suggests any purpose for humanity. Scientific knowledge may one day teach us how we came to have the values we have, and will doubtless continue to improve our ability to get the physical things we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. No mathematical equation can prove that we should love our neighbours as ourselves.

The real problem is that the human desire to know is greater than our capacity to understand. We are simply not capable of answering all the questions we can ask. The mathematician Karl Godel proved as much in his incompleteness theorem, showing that every logical system contains more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own set of rules. This makes ultimate mathematical certitude impossible and perhaps dooms the scientific ideal of devising a set of axioms that explains all phenomena of the external world. It also means that none of us can entirely understand ourselves. For like all closed systems, the mind can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself.

But most of mankind doesn’t need mathematical proofs to realize that the universe is too vast and existence too complicated to be ever comprehended by our puny brains. Hence the great popularity of religion. For whatever their differences, all religions believe in some greater power than man and the existence of a universal mind.

How many materialists really accept in their hearts their own vision of the universe as a spontaneous accident and life as a meaningless cycle of birth and death, all fated to dissolve into empty nothingness? Even the avowed atheist Stephen Hawking says that “One has to live on the basis that life will continue”. Is such a completely unscientific confession of faith in the future not an admission that purely secular thought leads inevitably to nihilism?

And civilization on any sort would be impossible without a similar kind of irrational belief in moral principles that go beyond mere self-interest. Charity has no place in a universe that consists of nothing but matter. As Dostoyevsky wrote “Now assume there is no God or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds if I am to die entirely on earth? Without immortality, all I have to worry about is how to last out until the day when my time is up and, after that, to let everything go up in flames. And if that is so, why shouldn’t I (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught by the law) cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal...?”

Imagination and not reason rules men. And true or not, purely materialistic science insists on the pointlessness of all desire and offers only the eventual annihilation of the universe and everything within it. False or not, religion at least tells us we matter and gives the hope of lasting happiness.

Deep within all men know themselves to be more than beasts whose chief good is but to eat and sleep. And we all feel in our souls the ability and desire to rise above our mere animal appetites. Neither food, sex, drugs, music, poetry, art nor any other diversion can free us for long from the questions that torment our conscious selves when alone – where did we come from, where are we going, why are we here?

Not even unimaginably advanced technology giving us 1,000 year long lifespans and completely satisfying every physical desire could eradicate our profound longing to be part of something greater than ourselves. In Thomas Carlyle’s words “Man's unhappiness…  comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.”

Countless crimes have been committed in the name of God. But dismal as the world’s history has been with religion, how much more dismal must it have been without it. For as Francis Bacon said “Those that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he is not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.” And no beasts have inflicted such remorseless suffering as those like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot who acknowledge no higher power than their own desires. Nothing on earth is so horrible as the rule of tyrants who cry like Kirilov in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils “If there is no God, then I am God!”

Belief may not guarantee happiness, but the most contented persons I know are deeply religious. And where is such genuine exuberance to be found as in a congregation making a joyful noise unto the Lord? There is probably no happier place on earth than Jamaica on a Sunday morning.

If there is a supreme being unknowableness must be part of its nature, so no religion can wholly possess truth. But all major creeds entreat us to humble ourselves before the universal mind, and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And as the Christian world celebrates the birth of its founder, even those who cannot bring themselves to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ will surely agree with Dostoyevsky that “there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ.” changkob@hotmail.com