The Ultimate Questions Deep Within Us

Why are we here? Where are we going? Do our lives have any meaning? For that matter, how did we get here in the first place?

THE EARTH teems with life. From the darkest depths of the sea to the tops of the highest mountains, life is there. From the frozen polar regions to the steamy tropical jungles, it flourishes. Life’s presence in the grasslands is rivaled by its abundance in the “pastures of the sea.” It survives in water hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit above boiling and in cold a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. It thrives in the thin air miles above earth as well as in the ocean’s seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench, where flat fish swim under a pressure of seven tons per square inch.a

Life also goes to extremes in size, ranging from an invisible bacterium to a blue whale a hundred feet long and a hundred tons in weight​—its tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant!b But what bacteria lack in size they make up for in numbers. In one teaspoonful of fertile topsoil, there may be five billion bacteria. It is bacteria by the billions inside the digestive tracts of termites and cows that enable them to digest the cellulose of wood and grass.

It has been estimated that more microbes live on and in one of us than there are people on earth. “The total mass of microbes on Earth,” one scientist says, “has recently been estimated to be a good 20 times greater than the mass of all earthly animals.” Truly, life on earth reaches into numbers beyond the counting.

Yet neither the bacteria nor the whales, nor any of the uncountable trillions of creatures in between, ask the ultimate questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? Do our lives have meaning? How did we get here?

But people do. They ask. Over and over again down through the centuries, they have been asking. Why? Because people are different. Their needs are different. There is an impassable gulf separating people from all other creatures on earth. The very fact that they alone ask the questions proves it. Peter Medawar in his book The Limits of Science says that the fact that science has a limit is “made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things​—questions such as ‘How did everything begin?’ ‘What are we all here for?’ ‘What is the point of living?’”

Yet these ultimate questions keep returning, they refuse to be silenced, they cry out for answers. We have a built-in hunger for answers. Scientists attempt to give the answers. Do they have the key to open the door to Medawar’s first ultimate question: How did everything begin?

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