This is a work in progress. After decades working as a journalist on daily newspapers – primarily editing – and years working as a corporate speech writer, I decided to collect my thoughts and do a little investigative journalism of my own to find out who we are and what it’s all about. This is proving to be fascinating, enlightening and a little scary.

I have learned that the gulf between what is known selectively and what is known collectively is filled with bullshit.

The most prominent and enduring example of this is the conflict between science and religion. This is essentially a clash between facts and beliefs, between awareness and delusions.

As scientists continue in their quest for knowledge, they constantly find themselves coming into conflict with the accepted beliefs of the community. Beliefs that many in the community cling to like Linus to his blanket. They can be very unforgiving when their beliefs are threatened – witness Bruno, Galileo, Darwin and Spinosa.

However, in today’s world of mass communications with complex scientific endeavor heading off to new horizons of knowledge in multitudes of disciplines, we in the community are lagging decades behind in our awareness.

It takes generations for the implications of major scientific discoveries to trickle down to the point that they are understood by the average citizen, affect public policy and appear in our school text books.

So while science continues to make the most game-changing, truly astonishing discoveries – discoveries that have profound implications for society in areas such as health, relationships, energy and justice – our political debates, our media and our general conversations are dominated by obsolete bullshit.

Just look at all the column inches and airtime devoted to issues around the sanctity of life. The abortion debate, euthanasia, medical research, contraception – deeply emotional theological and ethical arguments hung up on defining when life actually begins and when life ends.

Yet it was back in the ‘50s when scientists, most notably Watson and Crick, defined the molecular structure of DNA, proving once and for all that there is no such thing as “life”.

Life is essentially a subjective value judgment.

It turns out that Shakespeare was right when he wrote that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

But science did not stop in the ‘50s. Like any scientific breakthrough, the Watson and Crick discovery sparked an acceleration in research leading to yet another game-changing breakthrough – the mapping of the human genome. This in turn has led to a subsequent explosion in research projects.

In the past decade, as theologians, clerics and writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens go head to head over whether or not there is a God, and if there is, what he or she represents, scientists, particularly neuroscientists, have discovered the answer. It turns out we are God.

Siamo Dio.

I started this project in 2004 and I continue to add to it today, when I can find the time. I am posting the first 12 chapters on the Internet in the hope of hearing what you think. I hope to add more soon.

Chapter 1

The Origins of Language

When I was still wetting the bed, my education and spiritual guidance was in the loving hands of Mother Mary McKillop's Sisters of St Joseph. The institution was Immaculate Conception Primary School in the seaside town of Hastings, Victoria.

When I think of it as "my school" I get an image of myself standing shoulder to shoulder with my cherubic friends in front of the urinals in the boys' toilet. We would aim up beyond the solid, brown terracotta urinals in an attempt to get our stream as high up the red brick wall as possible.

By pissing up the wall, my fellow pupils and I were measuring our place in the world. This was all part of our early search for self – trying to define who we are.

Who am I? I’m one who can get a couple of feet above the urinals, one of the pack, about average. Donald was our hero, he could almost reach the roof. Poor Frankie had trouble getting over the terracotta.

Now let’s go to Athens in 1999. It’s the World Athletics Championships. A gunshot echoes through the stadium sparking an explosion of fierce determination as a line of men charge down the straight. The crowd roars as the men summon up all the knowledge, technique and sheer muscle power they have been building up and nurturing for months, even years, into this climactic outburst of energy.

Around 9.79 seconds later Maurice Greene bursts across the line making him the Fastest Man on Earth. Or, to be more precise, the fastest measured man on earth. For all we know there could be some guy who ran faster chasing goats on some distant African plain 3000 years ago. But if he wasn’t measured and timed he doesn’t exist as far as we are concerned.

We can only recognise what we have measured. — Maurice Greene, 100 metres, 9.79 seconds from gunshot to tape, Athens, 1999. We measured the distance, we measured the time, we measured the wind-speed to make sure he wasn’t wind assisted, and we probably measured his urine to make sure he wasn’t drug assisted. Now we know who he is – he knows who he is – he’s the Fastest Man on Earth in that moment in time.

Donald, almost up to the roof.

This is how we humans make sense of our universe – we measure it. Time and place, colour and smell, loud or soft, fast or slow, bright or dull, sad or happy, smart or dumb, beautiful or ugly, friend or foe, here or there – they are all measures by which we make sense of the objects, the people, the places and the events that make up our world.

If I say “strawberry”, you know what I mean because “strawberry” is an agreed measure. A strawberry is an object that fits into a set of parameters – size, colour, shape, smell, taste – that you and I agree on. If I said the blue strawberry was too big to fit into the boot of the car, you would be confused. Clearly the object I am taking about does not fit into our agreed parameters for a strawberry. It does not belong in the pigeonhole – or measure – we have in our memories for strawberry.

We have a fascination for the exceptional – the tallest building, the fastest car, the highest price ever achieved for a Van Gogh, and Donald who could almost reach the roof. When farmer Joe Bloggs grows what appears to be the biggest pumpkin ever seen, it makes it into the pages of the newspaper. It may even be recorded in the Guinness Book of Records. This is news because the measure we have all agreed was “a pumpkin”, has changed – pumpkins can be bigger than we believed possible.

Now imagine you have never seen a lemon and I have to explain to you what a lemon is. I would say it’s like an orange, only a little smaller, it’s more egg shaped than round, it’s yellow in colour rather than orange and it tastes very bitter and acidic rather than sweet and acidic. It’s similar to an orange, but not identical. There are a few adjustments to the measures – shape, size, colour, taste.

As I’m telling you this, you call up a picture from your memory of an orange and then make the necessary adjustments to form a picture of what you assume a lemon looks like. Then when you actually go to the market and see lemons on sale, you would be able to recognise them.

I used the orange as an analogue for the lemon. Analogues make our communications so much easier. Imagine the complexity of trying to explain a lemon without using an orange or some other analogue.

Now let’s imagine communicating without a common language at all.

We are back in time at the origins of our species. We have just returned from an extremely exciting and successful hunting trip. Along with the others in our group we managed to kill a mammoth – a bloody huge, roaring, charging mammoth! As you can imagine we are still extremely charged with emotions – exhilaration. Adrenaline is pumping through our bodies. We are constantly looking into each others eyes and sharing the moment with howls of delight, dancing with joy, high-fives or whatever we do to display mutual, empathetic excitement.

Fast forward to a few weeks later. We are sitting around in our cave. You are agitated, excited. I can’t understand why. Then you pick up a piece of chalky rock and scrawl a picture of a mammoth on the cave wall. Mammoth! I get it! You are thinking of our mammoth hunt. Soon we are again looking into each others’ eyes and reliving the excitement, the emotions of that amazing hunt.

As social creatures we humans love to share emotions. We gather around the watercooler at work and discuss the weekend’s big game, or film or TV program, or social event, or life event. Remember that scene in Seinfeld where Elaine throws George’s wig out the window? We both laugh. Didn’t he look stupid with a wig? As we share the moment we look at each other – we empathise.

Back in the cave we are reliving that mammoth hunt again. Each time you or I point at the mammoth drawing – remember we don’t have TV – we make mammoth noises and look each other in the face. Soon we can also relive the event when we are away from the cave just by making those same mammoth noises.

The mammoth noises – language – and the chalk on the cave are analogues, not so much for the mammoth, but for that particularly event involving a mammoth. They encompass all the emotions, the excitement, the exhilaration, the joy, the sense of achievement that went with that event.

However, your recollections and mine will be different. They may even be vastly different. Your excitement might be prompted by memories of the exhilaration, whereas mine may be prompted by the fear. I might have been shit scared at the time and my extreme joy might represent relief that it was over. On the other hand you might be my mother, who watched the event from a distance hill. Your exhilaration could have therefore been prompted by anxiety, stress, followed by relief and joy that it was over, we have an abundance of food and your son was OK.

The analogues of the mammoth – sounds and chalk – prompt different images in your mind than they do in mine. Just as when I say “butterfly”, although you known what I’m talking about, the image that comes into your head, although similar, is different to mine. In the same way your strawberry and your lemon is different to mine. So if I use a six-letter analogue like “mother”, your pictures will be very different to mine. Even if you and I are siblings.

These differences are important because it’s these differences that cause marriages to breakdown and nations to go to war. Or to be more precise, it’s not the differences themselves, but rather a lack of awareness of these differences.

My mother is different to yours and my “God” is different to yours – even if we are both from the same church.

We see the world according to our own unique analogues. They seem so tangible and real that it is very difficult to become aware that there could possibly be any alternative. We grow up assuming that everyone sees just as we do.

This is the arrogance of self.

Leonard McDonnell

The Edge Media Pty Ltd