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We Are Improbable, But Here We Are

Michie

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If someone places their trust in science, then they must also accept at least one miracle. That miracle is the moment when everything began. According to current cosmological understanding, the entire universe—space, time, matter, and energy—originated from a singularity approximately 13.8 billion years ago. There was no physical cause, no preceding event, and no natural mechanism. Everything emerged from what appears to be nothing.

This is not a theological claim. It is the standard model of physics. The moment we call the big bang marks a boundary. The laws of nature, including time, space, matter, and causality, began at that moment. There is no “before,” because time itself did not exist. The question of what caused the big bang is not merely unanswered. It may be fundamentally unanswerable. Any cause would have to operate outside our physical universe, beyond time and space, and possibly under laws and principles entirely different from those we know. As such, the origin of everything may lie beyond not only our instruments but our cognition itself. The limits are not only technological. They are structural. What lies beyond that first instant might remain, by definition, outside the reach of human understanding.

This foundational mystery is often overlooked. The more we learn about the universe, the more it appears not only vast and elegant but also extraordinarily improbable. Scientific progress has not erased wonder. It has deepened it.

The universe operates under a set of physical constants—measurable quantities that determine the strength of forces, the behavior of particles, and the expansion of space. These constants are not determined by theory. They are inputs, discovered through observation, and their precision is staggering.

Continued below.