From the Point of View of 60-90 Years on a Spinning Rock

Suppose that there is indeed a creator God and suppose that there is no life outside of planet Earth, just an enormous universe that is indifferent to man and arouses indifference in man. For what reason would a creator God create such a universe?

Consider also the lifespan of a human being. Compared with the timeline of the universe a human being who manages to see his one hundredth year still does not rise to even a hair's width on that timeline. Even the timeline of human history makes any individual life seem hopelessly short. Supposing a creator God, why would the world be set up in this way?

Pausing to note that this question can not be answered in any satisfying way, I remind you that the question is asked to shed insight on a facet of life, not to actually try to discern the artistic sensibilities of an incomprehensible deity. That would require a blog post at least twice this length.

I take this arrangement of the universe and this arrangement of lifespans as creating a situation wherein one can not sensibly live while trying to view the world sub specie aeterni. We cannot make sense of our lives by looking at the universe - by trying to see the one fact. Our lives are hopelessly insignificant looked at from that vantage point, we would not be able to rise from our beds in the morning if we felt and valued as people who grasped the universe. Instead the only way to live is to every day see the world from our point of view: from the perspective of a chunk of rock spinning around a star and only about 60-90 years of that point of view to boot. Any other point of view makes life unlivable.

Does this mean that I think that objectively our lives are insignificant? My god, objectivity is not an option! But, no, I do not say that objectively our lives are either significant or insignificant. The significance arises when the world is seen from a certain perspective. If you adopt certain perspectives, the entire human condition becomes a sickly mistake; adopt other perspectives and there is nothing more important than a human life. That is, objectively human life is absurd given certain contexts, and objectively human life is epic given other contexts.

And if there is a God, I think that this arrangement of the universe was a method by which he choked off certain kinds of perspectives.