We are surrounded by a sea of Galaxies, in this vast world humans seem to have no special importance, we have appeared and we will, with all likelihood, disappear, after we play our role in the cosmic dance. Regarding our importance we are no different than many other species who have spread throughout the planet. We are pioneers in the sense that we have discovered a new strategy, not multicellularity , photosynthesis, skeletons, warm bodies, etc, but symbolic language. Like many species before us, armed with a new discovery, we have populated and changed the face of the planet. All this success has, nonetheless, ruined our clarity regarding our role in nature. In the peak of our strength we have devised a megalomaniac perspective in which all the universe was created to harbor human beings and its sole purpose is to test the morality of our individual actions according to our particular social creeds (not to eat meat, not to have sex, make sacrifices, etc). In our imagination God himself, the Creator of the Universe, is human!
All these illusions are little more than laughable, although understandable. Nevertheless, things do exist, our inner world exists, there is exquisite order and complexity in the universe... how did this all came to be, and why?
My answer is simple: I really don't know, which is actually a quite expectable answer coming from a hairless monkey born on a grain of dust of our galaxy. But monkeys like me like to speculate so here it goes:
The first thing to notice is that the notion of a creator does not answer the question: "well, and who created that creator?", so, to explain the origin of the world through the notion of a creator we would then have the question of what gave origin to the creator. Moreover, how could the creator know he wasn't itself created by something or someone else? How could he know that all that He was living was not an illusion, a matrix, a simulation?
Seen through this light it seems that we gain nothing in adding a creator to creation, for all the mysteries of "why is there something instead of nothing", and "how do I know that this is real", would remain equally elusive.
However, there is an argument which is actually quite convincing to me, which is not about God as a person, it might be a law of physics or not even that, something even more abstract.
The argument is called "the ontological argument" and it states that the most perfect thing cannot not exist, for, if it did not exist, it would not be entirely perfect. This argument applies only to something absolutely perfect, perfectly perfect. And people like Anselm of Canterbury and Descartes have uphold it as a good argument.
Now, it seems to me that no physical thing, in itself, could be considered as completely perfect, because a perfect round thing is not a perfect square thing. To be something in particular is obviously not to be many other things, so a perfect spider is not a perfect bat, is not a perfect sun, is not a perfect leaf, etc. Even the totality of the universe at one particular point in time would deny the other possibilities, and even the entire history of the universe would deny other possible history lines. So, if absolute perfection must be something that includes all forms of perfection, we should regard it as more alike the sum of all possibilities of existence. Not so much an entity but more akin to a "logical space" where something may exist. Obviously, a logical space is only part of reality, and this thing, being perfect, would encompass everything that is, including our inner world, and the outer universe,logic and mathematics, and all the rest really. So "logical space" is not really a good way to express absolute perfection, it must be include all possibilities and actualities, and past and present, and every level of reality that we know of, including feelings, fictions, paradoxes, and so on. But we see these things as parts, unrelated to this whole, while, in reality, they are just fragments, fleeting aspects, of this absolute perfection, that is, they are fleeting aspects of Reality.
The idea that something absolutely perfect must necessarily exist eliminates the problem of a creator. We might take it as a definition of what it means to "exist", not in the imperfect sense of "passing through existence" (as is our case - a fleeting glimpse), but of real existence. In that sense existence and absolute perfection would be two expressions for the same thing. To exist would be to be absolutely perfect. One can only exist in the true sense if and only if one is absolutely perfect (no, we do not exist in this sense, that is why we were born and will die).
Such absolute perfection was not created, will not die, and, strangely, it is not clear if it can "evolve" or change. (If something is already perfect can it evolve, can it change? On the other hand, being perfect, can it be deprived of change, of evolution?)
But why would such perfection give rise to a world, and a changing world, full of attractions and repulsions, and feelings of lacking and plenitude, fear, love and desire?
This leads me to the "receiver"... why should there be a receiver at all? Well, my speculation continues: the only reason I can imagine right now for the existence of a receiver is if creation ex nihilo is possible, that is, if something can come out of nothing given the right conditions. We know that this creation out of nothing occurs everywhere at the quantum scale. In very short timings pairs of particles and antiparticles are created and destroyed everywhere. There is no empty space if we look at emptiness at the right time scale, in that case, everything will be full of events. So, does that happen at other levels too? For instance, in the psychological level, can we actually create a soul, can we actually come into being as spiritual creatures, if we are given enough time and appropriate stimuli?
As you can see this is dangerously approaching the megalomania I was just criticizing previously. The idea that the receiver is important, that the creator somehow cares for the receiver. But my reader must concede the fact that it would be strange for something to be created through perfection if the created thing, the creature, was irrelevant.
So the upshot of this primate's speculation is the most megalomaniac thought imaginable: that everything, not just humans and their actions, but absolutely everything, including every animal, plant, mineral, molecule, rock, every drop of water from a splashing wave of water, counts and is "cared" for (if care is an appropriate notion for a perfect being - of which we cannot even be sure if it can change). And that applies to every molecule in Jupiter's atmosphere, to every atom of every exploding star, to everything, anywhere, that existed or will ever come into existence in the sea of Galaxies we can see, and in everything else that we cannot see but exists anyway.
Talking like this is like talking of the googolplex or hypercubes, we can speak about it, but of course we cannot truly visualize what it means.
So, in a nutshell, my speculation is this: the only thing that truly exists is absolute perfection (it cannot not exist, because it would cease to be absolutely perfect), from this absolute perfection the universe we see comes forth, I don't know why, but I speculate further it is because is better for this changing universe to exist than not. Why? Well, perhaps because something good can come out of it, because something might grow out of it, that would not exist otherwise. In this imagined picture of the universe and ourselves, we are the receivers, the end part, of a perfect message that we can only imperfectly understand (through our mind and senses). As the song says:
marcha um homem
sobre o chão
leva no coração
uma ferida acesa
dono do sim e do não
diante da visão
da infinita beleza...
Caetano Veloso: "Luz do Sol"