Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 501
A GAME OF CHESS OR A GAME OF CHANCE! |O CUT A LONG STORY SHORT, we request the reader to realize that even if the creation of the universe and. T the subsequent evolution of life had actually started a trillion multiplied by a trillion years ago, it would still be mathematically impossible for evolution to reach the stage of man. . This simply means that both the author of this treatise and the reader who is holding this book in his hand, are neither here nor there. The pen shall never be created nor the hand which holds it. The eye that reads it and the mind that struggles to grasp what the pen has drawn have not even been conceived by the blind creator chance. Who am I, O reader, and who are you? What is the quarrel about? Let us slump into a restful slumber until that remote time when mindless, sightless chance would have consummated the plan of evolution that it never conceived. . For each chance step that it will take in the right direction, it will have to blunder into millions upon millions of steps in the wrong direction. But by that time, alas, entropy would have left nothing of the universe to evolve into anything, nor of the blind creator itself. Chance will cease to play any role whatsoever in the inert state of an allpervading death. The figure 10 248 is most certainly larger than the time needed for entropy to finish off everything. . Evidently it takes a very determined person who is otherwise sane to believe in such insanity. Yet many sane, highly intellectual scientists do believe in it. Their case is like that of a religious fanatic, who in ordinary affairs of life appears quite normal, but when it comes to matters of faith and belief, shuts himself off completely from the light of rationality and common sense into a cocoon of mindless prejudice. It is amazing how the human mind is capable of withdrawing itself into a midsummer night's dream in broad daylight. Perhaps it is more realistic to say that he 476