A woman I dated last summer, a Catholic teacher and runner, made one particular comment that has upon many occasions re-entered my head as a starting point for intellectual considerations; she said that it was egotistical to imagine a world without God.
I usually mentally rebuke that notion with the comment that it is far more egotistical to imagine a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and yet interested in the triviality of a human's existence.
Tonight I was thinking of it in a different way.
Some might say that it is sheer hubris to believe that there is no creature or being that is more intelligent than a human.
I say the hubris lies in defining intelligence as a description of how our minds work, by using our attributes as the definition of the scale we measure on. I don't mean this as an insult, or that we are not intelligent. I mean it in the sense that we are like the residents in a nation of blind people arguing over the possibility that some being may hear better than they do, unaware that there might be a sense of sight.
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