Extremes in Space and Time

As human beings, we are oriented to a certain range of space and time that is the most conducive to our survival as organisms. With space, we interpret the real world around us according to events and things that are on a relatively narrow spatial scale, from the very smallest things we can see with the unaided eye to the most distant things visible on the edge of the horizon. Things beyond that, such as the sun, moon, planet, and stars, are intuitively out of our grasp, which goes a long way toward explaining why they have been given supernatural or mythological status in the past. Speaking temporally, we tend to understand events transpiring from the duration of a second all the way through the span of a lifetime. Once again, this may go a ways toward explaining the tendency of some to worship their ancestors (who lived beyond their range of intuitive understanding) as well as that of many to give special status to ancient writings as being of a supernaturally-inspired origin. For many centuries, of course, these ranges have been greatly expanded through the recorded and shared collective experiences of people to give those who have been “educated” a wider sense of what the real “world” is like, even as it conflicts with their intuitive grasps of things. But nowadays, with our electron microscopes, Hubble and radio telescopes, atomic clocks, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and radiocarbon and isotope-dating systems, the ranges of space and time have been stretched so far that even for the “educated”, there no longer remains a sense of connection between the extremes of time and space and their own day-to-day existence, which for the most part is within the same space/time range as always. And when considering the extremely short distances, the extremely far distances, the extremely short durations in time, or the extremely long durations in time, the processes that we can relate to on our human level become distorted or even seem to be transformed into something altogether different and alien.

With this in mind, I sympathize (but only up to a point) with those who cannot fathom the concept of evolution and who instead attribute their human existence literally to the account given in the first chapters of Genesis. But I don’t agree with that viewpoint. Rather, the way I see it, people who insist on oversimplified explanations like this for the mysteries of the universe (and they usually involve the “extremes” of space and time) are basically stating that if they themselves cannot understand something, then their God cannot either. Doesn’t that seem a bit insulting and limiting to God, who is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent? Before microbes were relatively recently (historically speaking) discovered and determined to be the cause of many diseases, people commonly attributed outbreaks and epidemics to either God's wrath or to demonic forces instead of just admitting ignorance. That was another example of something outside of people's intuitive grasp (the extremely small).The Bible itself makes repeated points about the mysteries of God, but some people apparently don’t seem to dig those sections. Why can’t these people just have the honesty to say that they don’t know everything and that they have difficulty, like most everyone else, understanding on a deep level the sometimes bizarre world of the extremes in space and time, along with the processes occurring therein?!