Progress.
As I was driving home from work today, I had the hadron supercollider on my mind. I know, crazy. You’d be surprised at what keeps me awake at night. Most people might be nervous about daily stresses, family, relationships. Me? Particle colliders. It’s been on my mind for a while now, but particularly today since they began to fire it up, doing tests for about the next month before their first collisions. On my mind today were certain consequences of the tests, including the end of the world. As I’m driving along on I70, I have this little dialogue playing through my mind:
Me: Why is this so important that you’re willing to risk everyone’s life to do it?
Cern Physicist: It will help us understand the big bang, and give us a clearer picture of the particles we study.
M: Sure, but at the risk of all those lives?
CP: Well, there’s a one in 45 billion chance it could happen, that’s virtually impossible.
M: Right, but lives. You’re willing to kill people for knowledge?
CP: You’re not? This could bring us so much more knowledge about our past and give us new research for where we’re going!
And it’s that point in my internal dialogue that brought me to progress. (well, about that area, the actual dialogue was longer… sad, I know.) I began to think of the value of progress, and what cost could offset that kind of knowledge, and then began to wonder what the whole point was at all. If we understand time as an infinite line, going on forever, then what is the point of progress? Do we need to spend billions (roughly 10) and risk the entire planet for the sake of progress? If we all die, and naturalists are correct, then it may never matter. Time could go on into eternity, and one foolish decision could not only remove us from that eternity but would have pointlessly killed every last person. Foolishness at best. The odds may be good, but if we’re casting a set of dice that could bring us new knowledge or kill us, it seems that we have to at least consider the reason for doing this.
Coming to that point, I began to wonder what the point of progress itself was. Supposing we continue on our current determined path of progress into eternity, it will have never made a difference. New video games? Pointless. Better physics? Pointless. Heated car seats? Pointless. Now, I’ve chosen those three to reveal my hypocrisy, so if you feel indicted then know that I am as well. All three of those things, while wonderful, are ultimately not very practical in eternity. Rather than solving world problems and attempting to find some semblance of peace (I would personally refer to this as the Kingdom of God) we keep pushing for bigger and better. Today I have questioned why, and my only answer is an unshakeable confusion.
