What do you believe?

"Beyond our own galaxy lies a vast expanse of galaxies. The deeper we see into space, the more galaxies we discover. There are billions of galaxies, the most distant of which are so far away that the light arriving from them on Earth today set out from the galaxies billions of years ago. So we see them not as they are today, but as they looked long before there was any life on Earth.” www.nasa.gov

Are we experiments in a cosmic Truman Show? A version of the matrix? A creation by an omnipotent God? A single moment in an infinite possibility field? Galaxies emit light that will not be received by the earth for millions of years. We are literally not able to know what is happening around us.

Despite this absolute uncertainty, we are surrounded by messages every day from people telling us who we are, how the world is, what we need. Dr Martin Hilbert and his team at the University of Southern California, reported in the journal Science, that there was now 295 exabytes of data floating around the world – that's 29,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces of information,  315 times the number of grains of sand on Earth.

However Dr Hilbert points out it is less than one per cent of the information that is stored in the DNA of a single human being and far less than the amount of information contended with in the natural world.

Hilbert says, "Compared to nature, we are but humble apprentices. If we tried to store the name of every star in the Universe we could only file one per cent."

We know incredibly little about ourselves and our place in the vastness of space. In the face of the magnitude around us and the enormity of what we do not know, how can we be certain of anything? Why would we ever settle on a belief or a view of the world that disadvantaged us in some way during the blink of a cosmic eye that we are on the earth.  Why waste a fraction of a second believing we are anything less than complete and perfect exactly as we are. In the face of this swirling enormity of space and time and the vastness of everything that we do not know and don’t even know we don’t know, why not just pick the belief that serves us best? That this moment is perfect? That we have everything we need?