The advantage of being an agnostic is that I can admit to not being certain about much of anything. This is not to say that I don't have beliefs and opinions about things that are based on factual knowledge as we know it today, but facts are not immutable. Facts are prone to change as new facts are established about our world, ourselves, and the universe we inhabit. There is much that we humans have opinions about and believe that have no basis in fact apart from us having them. Unfortunately, these are the types of opinions and beliefs that are often treated as concrete, absolute truths, which only serve to divert us from seeking the factual.
Being at the debatable top of the food chain on the speck of cosmic dust we call our planet home has led us to become rather arrogant and self-possessed about our place in the universe. After all, as far as we can tell we humans are the only life form that we actually and factually know to be cognitively aware of ourselves and our surroundings. We are intellectually capable of creating diverse cultures and keeping a historical record of our activities unlike any other life forms on this planet (or so we believe at the moment). At presents, we can only speculate that if we exist there is a good chance that there are other intelligent life forms we share the universe with.
That we humans are conscious beings is as much of a mystery as our existing at all. Consciousness is a mystery to brain scientists and neurobiologist. Where consciousness comes from remains unknown. It's not traceable in the brain even though the brain is obviously involved. It is not a sense like the other senses which can be traced to their geographic locations in the brain. It is a phenomenon that simply is.
I speculate that consciousness is foundational to the "I" capabilities all life forms possess: Instinct, Intuition, and Intelligence. I have no doubt that some readers will argue that plants and some animals do not possess any of these capabilities; that only higher forms of animal life may possess them. While these particular "I" capabilities are unique to Homo sapiens, other life forms have similar or like capabilities unique to them.
Plants behave in conscious ways. They possess an awareness of their surroundings even though they are largely immobile and having nothing that represents a central nervous system, yet they are capable of responding to their environment and sending messages to members of their species when endangered. Even single cell life-form is reactive to its environment and behaves in conscious ways via the impulsive nature of DNA. If that were not the case, evolution could not have occurred and I wouldn't be writing this post.
What does this say about the universe we live in?
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Before answering that question, it is best to spend some time examining us human beings. Perhaps the most conscious and cognizant creatures on our planet (at least in our collective opinions), the mystery that is us conscious beings points to the greater mystery of a conscious universe. This simple correlation is based on the fact that we have evolved from the universe itself; that there is something about and within the universe that gives rise to consciousness and suggests that the universe is conscious in a way completely unknown to us.
The universe appears to have an awareness of itself as demonstrated by the laws by which it operates and can be deciphered by conscious beings like us. We know things about the universe because it is knowable and because the universe is a reactive entity imbued with the knowable which it emits to conscious receptors like us who seek to understand it. You might ask how the universe communicates as sense of consciousness.
The observable universe communicates through chemical means, light, and colors. It pulsates and emits sounds that can be heard. It has a gravitational pull on us both literally and figuratively. We sentient creatures must remember we do not stand above or below nature; we are merely part of it. Our purpose may simply consist in our being the sensors that makes the Universe conscious. We could be part of an extensive neural (organic transmitting) system made up of other sentient and conscious beings that are located throughout its vast expanse. Within the scope of the universe, we are no more than a spark of a consciousness transmitter by which a possible eternal universe experiences itself.
Everything in the universe is derived from the constancy of its mass and energy, including us. That the universe expands or contracts neither adds or subtracts from this constancy. In other words, we consist of recycled atoms that are likewise an eternal factor that comprises the universe. No matter how much we make or destroy on this speck of dust, it has no effect on the weight of universe's mass and energy. The only thing new about us or about anything in the universe is the particular arrangement of its atoms and their particles that currently take our form.
Interestingly enough, this reality was intuited by writer of the Ecclesiastes 1:9, who said, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." That is certainly true at the atomic level of existence. In this sense, reincarnation seems a bit more likely than resurrection, but one must keep an open mind about this because the universe likely has its own methods when it comes to such processes.
What seems to be factual is that the sum of our parts consists of recycled particles rearranged as us. The you and me that exist now may be a one time life form that will never exist again, in the dimensional sense we exist now. What we leave behind in the macrocosm is our atomic particles that may or may not be used with other atomic particles found in the universe to create newer life forms sometime in the distant future.
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Early on in my posts I mentioned that I did not like to use the word mystery. My reticence in using that word within a theistic context was that mystery serves as a locked door to keep questioning minds out; as in, "It's a mystery. You can't understand it. Just believe it." In the realm of science, however, mysteries are the things that stimulate a need to seek an explanation, to explore and to establish facts and theories that deepen our understanding. In the scientific world mysteries abound regarding the universe and life on our planet home. There is a great deal that we do not know but that does not mean we won't increasingly discover the universe's secrets and solve its mysteries.
Norm
