Overwhelming Uncertainty Micah Stefan Dagaerag Thoughts in Transit Consider consciousness.

Have you ever asked yourself how it would feel like to lose consciousness? I have been under general anesthesia for a major operation a few tears ago, and I know how it is to be unconscious. But imagine being like that for all eternity? Or even imagine never having been born and becoming conscious at all. What would it feel like never having come into being at all? Consider exclusive consciousness. Have you ever asked yourself why your consciousness is limited only to your particular identity? Why can I not experience your particular kind of consciousness and you experience mine? Could it not have been possible to have a world where I could enter into someones consciousness as well? Why the exclusivity? Consider existence. Take a look around you. Take a breath. Blink. The world exists. You exist. But could it have been possible to have no world that existed? Could it have been possible to have no you that existed? But you do. And there is something rather than nothing. Why? Consider meaning. What does it mean to mean something? We communicate using words and symbols that mean something. Could it have been possible to have a world devoid of meaningful communication? And yet why do we have such a world? How did the universe know that communication would be an important component of life? Consider dignity. We fight for human rights and we are outraged whenever a child is raped, sold into slavery and/or beaten mercilessly in the hands of unscrupulous people. Why? If you told a serial murderer and child molester that human beings have inherent dignity, how would you convince him that it was so? Where do we get dignity in the first place?

Consider knowledge. How do we know that we know something? Could it have been possible for the world to come to be without having to need knowledge? What are thoughts in the first place? Consider space and time. Where does the universe end? And if it doesnt end, can such a place truly exist? But if the universe has an end, what lies beyond it? Did the universe have a beginning? If so, what was there before then? And was there time before the universe came to be? All these I have pondered since I was in kindergarten. I even remember asking my nursery mates some of them. Although I realize that maybe part of the reason they did not understand me was that I hadnt matured enough to be able to articulate them clear enough. At a young age, my mind already felt oppressed by the questions I had posed upon myself. And for the longest time I would have nightmares and sickness in my gut because of the overwhelming uncertainty that set into my soul as I realized that I had no definitive answers to these questions at all. All this until I realized with the Psalmist that, when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end (Psalm 73:17-18). If the entire universe was the result of some random occurrence, devoid of purpose and design by a certain Maker, how could consciousness come to be? If there was nothing in the universe when time began, how could an eternally inert nothing beget something? If we are simply evolved versions of atoms in motion, why should we care what happens to a child is the victim of unconscionable and irreversible abuse? With an eternal, all-powerful, uncreated, dignified, loving, omniscient, just and good Maker, the mystery ends and the puzzle is solved. With the Biblical God, all existentially disturbing questions find their peaceful conclusions.