I just finished watching this TED Talk via Netflix, and it filled me with such marvelous wonder and inspiration that I just had to write about it.

(Look, Ma, I am following an inspiration all the way into action!)

The talk is by noted historian David Christian and it is about Big History.

Now when he says “Big History”, he means, as big as it gets. From the moment of the Big Bang to the very second in which you are reading the word at the end of this sentence. And what is unique and to me extremely satisfying about Christian’s account of all the history there is, period, is that by framing it as the history of increasing complexity, he provides something absolutely vital and unique : a single meaningful context for the totality of the history of the universe.

From nothingness to singularity to Big Bang to super-hot undifferentiated energy to slightly differentiated energy to electrons and protons to helium and hydrogen to stars to supernovas and heavier elements to planets to one celled life to animals and then to us, it is all a case of increasing complexity, culminating (so far) in sentience and its most important product : culture (what Christian called “collective learning”).

This brilliant framework for understanding the history of absolutely everything has instantly put David Christian into the same category as Carl Sagan and Desmond Morris in my mind, and those who know me will know that this places Christian in a very elite group indeed, because I hold those two men in such enormous esteem that I feel no hesitation in called them my heroes.

What makes all three of these people heroes to me is the brilliance of their thinking and their communication. Desmond Morris’ book The Naked Ape is the only account of human behaviour that I have ever read that makes comprehensive sense of all the crazy things we humans do. And Carl Sagan, and now David Christian as well, have filled me with a powerful sense of the wonder of the real world and the magic and mystery and spectacular splendor of the Universe.

To me, that is all the religion I will ever need. No rituals, no penances, no obeisances, no mysticisms, no sacrifices, no tithes, and most importantly, no demands of sacrificing one’s reason in the name of “faith” required. The real world is more than marvelous enough for me, and the best part is, it does not depend on my believing on it in order to stay real. It is real whether I believe in it or not.

And who would have thought that it was possible that, after centuries of humbling demotions (from the center of Creation all the way down to some mildly clever monkeys alone in a massive and uncaring Universe) that we would suddenly find us human beings (and whatever other sentient life there may be Out There) at the top of things again?

Because to me, that is the inevitable conclusion of Christian’s speech. As sentient beings with the ability to learn and adapt and accumulate knowledge via culture, we are the culmination of the complexification of the Universe (again, as far as we know). Our big sentient brains make us both the most complex creatures we know of, and the creators of complexity in our surroundings. And if we keep it more or less together, we will some day spread the complexity of Life to other worlds, and thus increase the complexity of the Universe still further when we bioform planets and create interstellar civilization. Creatures like us really are the whole point of the Universe, at least from the point of view of complexity.

Of course, that is simply our point of view right now. For all we know, there is something only vaguely imaginable above us in the complexity hierarchy, something the same order of magnitude above us in terms of complexity as we are above the protozoa. There is no reason to suppose that we are the end of the line of this cosmic complexity process, and to do so would be to suffer a tragic failure of imagination.

Remember, just because we cannot imagine it does not mean it does not exist. We like to pretend imagination has no limits, but the truth is, even crazy dreamers like me are limited by our finite minds and incomplete understanding of the Universe. You can only go so far from the home base of what you know and understand, and all of us are bound by that restriction.

It’s just that some of us can see a little further than others. That’s all.

For example, people like David Christian. I greatly applaud his decision to develop a free syllabus based on his framework and put it online, and I hope science and history teachers all over the world download it and teach it. I honestly think that it could provide the others with the same sense of potent wonder and inspiration as it does for me.

Not everybody, of course. But many. If I were in the business of founding a new religion, Big History would be one of its cornerstones. It would make an excellent cosmology and context for a new religion, one based not on old stories someone happened to put together in a book but on the far more durable and reliable observations of science and what we know to be true of the amazing Universe we live in.

Said religion would still be missing a lot of elements necessary for a new kind of religion, like rituals, a format for spiritual counseling, mood synchronizing and reinforcing gathers, and so on.

But at least it would not fall apart when questioned, and require increasingly large sections of one’s reason to be disabled just to continue believing in it.

It would be a religion that was built to last.

And I honestly think that it could work.

Too bad I am not the sort of person to go around starting religions.

Or am I?