Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
You know, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I'm nominally Catholic, though not particularly religious. I nevertheless think that the above model of events is no less fantastical and requires no less a leap of faith than the idea that the universe was conjured up out of fairy dust by The Big Guy With The Beard.
So, while waiting for the physicists to knit together their superstring theories, I might be inclined to revisit Pascal's Wager. Hedging my bets, as it were.
"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis." [Wisd. of Sol. 5. 15. "The remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day."]