The Saharan desert is a vast, desolate place of little more than dunes of varying sizes and shapes, stretching for tens of thousands of square miles. Imagine an ant scurrying over grains of this desert. We’ll call him Adam Ant.
Adam and his community of ants do what comes naturally to all species: they work to survive and thrive. They find food; they procreate; they defend their territory; they play an occasional game of cards.
What if Adam were to believe that the whole of his dune and even all the dunes existed solely as a stage upon which he and his kind play out the drama of their lives? If Mr. Ant thought that the entire desert, including the sand, the sky, the sparse vegetation, the mice, the beetles, the side-winder snakes — all of it — were mere scenery and props for his ant-like passion play, we would likely conclude that little Adam was afflicted with delusions of grandeur.
But can you blame him? Who doesn’t want to be the center of the universe?
Our planet is no more than a single grain of sand in the vast Sahara of the cosmos. Yet, as believers will tell us, our great Galaxy of galaxies exists as a theater. And we humans are the reason for the season. The trees, the mountains, the moon, Mars and Jupiter, the Milky Way, comets, the innumerable stars — these are Stage One for a species of clever apes.
With what we’ve learned about “our” incomprehensibly immense universe, about the history of the Earth and the evolution and extinction of whole legions of species, how is it possible to continue to cling to the idea that we are the center of creation?
Why would a god go to the extreme of creating many trillions of stars and — as has been verified only in our lifetime — innumerable planets if, in the end, all he really cares about are the crawling little upright things on a single, watery sphere? How could this amazing and immense universe be all about a particular batch of entwined DNA strands and the bodies it moves around in?
If you’re stumped, I have an answer. It goes something like this: “Once upon a delusion of grandeur . . .”
Self-importance is limited only by the size of one’s imagination.
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[photo is of an ant and its shadow in the Chihuahuan desert, NM]
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