My Favorite Quotes - Entry #1

“Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves.”

Confessions, Augustine, 398 AD

          The quote above is from Augustine, who was a very famous Christian theologian who lived 354 – 430AD in the Roman Empire.  The early part of his book “Confessions” is definitely worth reading – it tells the story of his early life.  I’m sure that will show up in a book review somewhere in the future.

The quote is about the uniqueness of human beings and how we sometimes forget how unique we really are.  I’ve always had a strong interest in the uniqueness of human beings, particularly the uniqueness of the human mind, so this statement by Augustine really stood out to me.

I love looking at huge snow-covered mountains.  I used to ride my bicycle in the mountains in Oregon and there was one particular place along the road in the Cascade mountains that was the most spectacular.  It was a winding road with big trees on either side, going uphill.  On a bicycle you were going pretty slow.  You really couldn’t see anything that was ahead except the next bend in the road, and the tops of trees.  But around one particular bend the trees and hills kind of opened up and all of a sudden you could see a huge mountain right in front of you.  As you rode slowly around the bend in the road, you just kept looking up and up.  And then, there it was, this huge mountain, snow covered, and just majestic!  It was almost like it snuck up and jumped in front of you.

I like the ocean too.  I could sit on the rocky coast in Oregon and just stare at the waves for hours.  There is just something fascinating about them.  I always tried to figure out if you could predict when the biggest waves were coming in by how they swelled up further out, but I never could.

I was never that much into astronomy, but the pictures of faraway galaxies are quite fascinating.  Just to try to imagine how huge they are.  How big is the sun really?  How big is a galaxy?

What Augustine is pointing out is that there are a lot of cool things all around us.  He is not saying that we should not be amazed by everything around us – just that we shouldn’t forget to marvel at how unique we humans are.  The sun is powerful beyond anything we can imagine.  If we got too close to it we would vaporize.  Yet, the sun doesn’t know anything.  The sun doesn’t even know it exists.  The sun can’t learn anything.  The sun can’t have plans.  The sun can’t dream up new ideas.  But we can do all of those things.  We are no match for the sun when it comes to pure power and energy, but in the end, the sun is just a big dumb rock – although a really hot rock - just like all the other big dumb rocks in the universe.  As far as we know, we are the only creatures in the universe who can think and reason and even marvel at the universe.  The universe can’t marvel back at us.  It doesn’t know anything.  We might be puny creatures compared to the vastness of the universe, but we are the most unique and, in many ways, the most powerful. 

This will be the primary theme of my blog (though I will certainly stray from my main topic).  I just think that human beings are more than just bags of chemicals.  We are not just really really really complex rocks (i.e. computers).  I believe there is more to us than that, and I think that any honest unbiased assessment of human beings will come to the same conclusion.  But that’s just my honest highly-biased opinion!  The key difference that I single out in my own observations is that we human beings can make choices about things and then carry them out.  We can get up in the morning and decide to go left or go right…or go back to bed.  The sun can’t do that.  The oceans can’t do that.  Mountains can’t do that.  They are all slaves to the laws of physics.  But we make decisions all the time.  We can create things that didn’t exist before.  For example, we can come up with an idea that has never been thought of before, or a new work of art or music.  To me, that is the real marvel in this universe that we find ourselves in.  The capacity of human beings to think, create, and make choices is something that no one has been able to adequately explain (more to come on that!).

So, go create some new idea that the universe has never heard of before – and don’t forget to marvel today at your own uniqueness!