"To most scientists throughout history," notes George Steiner, "the term of reference has been discovery; technology has aimed at invention. The new cosmologies regard creation as being ambiguous, mythological, and even taboo.

"To ask what preceded the Big Bang and the primal nanoseconds of the compaction and expansion of our universe is, we are instructed, to talk gibberish. Time has no meaning prior to that singularity. Both elementary logic and common sense should tell us that such a ruling is arrogant bluff. The simple fact that we can phrase the question, that we can engage it with normal thought processes, gives it meaning and legitimacy. The postulate of unquestionable ("not to be questioned") nothingness and intemporality now made dogma by astrophysicists is as arbitrary, is in many regards more of a mystique, than are creation narratives in Genesis and elsewhere."

Individuals who strive for an autonomous existence, a life distinguished from that of the pack, almost always incur the suspicion if not the wrath of their society. Moral reformers are often denounced; political dissidents are forced into exile or sent to prison; the lone wolf is banished from the group and tarred with the label of "other." It is not only the rebel or dissenter or free spirit, however, who has to contend with the judgment of the larger society; to a considerable extent we all do. At any time our actions can come under the gaze of our fellow man. We can be summoned before the court of public opinion and be made to give an accounting of ourselves. For some, such as Rousseau, this condition constitutes the hell of modern man.

Today it is almost considered bad form to acknowledge being bored, for the complaint suggests that there is something deficient or lacking in the confessor rather than something amiss with external circumstances or social life. The cry “I am bored!” can easily be misheard as “I am a bore.”

Yet many of the greatest artists and thinkers of the last three centuries complained about boredom. Kierkegaard called it the root of all evil. Dostoevsky in one of his novels says "I could have hanged myself out of boredom." Heidegger saw unrelieved boredom arising out of what he called the spiritlessness of the nineteenth century; the question of boredom is upon us, he said, "when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is, or is not."

One scholar contends that the incidence of boredom has risen markedly in modern times, and that little to nothing can be done about it because the issue is far more complex than merely identifying and removing specific causes.

1. Nietzsche On The Need To Be Alone. "A traveler who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: they are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience -- why? From fear of his neighbor who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia -- in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke."

2. Conversational Narcissism. In social situations, people often steer the conversation away from others and toward themselves. This conversational narcissism, notes the sociologist Charles Derber, "is the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America. It occurs in informal conversations among friends, family and coworkers. The profusion of popular literature about listening and the etiquette of managing those who talk constantly about themselves suggests its pervasiveness in everyday life."

3. On The Shortness Of Life. "It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much," Seneca noted. "Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully. But when it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone...before we were aware it was going."

Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it's hard to think of a historical movement which has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins [than Christianity]. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive. The liberal establishment really has nothing whatsoever to fear from it and everything to gain. For the most part, it's become the creed of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the rifraff and undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out. The suburbanite response to the anawim, a term which can be roughly translated into American English as 'loser,' is for the most part to flush them off the streets.

This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of the female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. It laments the death of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U.S. global dominion. By and large, it worships a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image -- a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting, sexually obsessed God with a special regard for that ontologically privileged piece of the globe just south of Canada and just north of Mexico, rather than the Yahweh who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of their comfortable settlement into the tractless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely informs them that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils...Far from refusing to conform to the powers of this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant of lying politicians, corrupt bankers, and fanatical neo-cons, as well as an immensely profitable industry in its own right...

The Christian church has tortured and disemboweled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning its critics alive. It has been oily, santimonious, brutally oppressive, and vilely bigoted. Morality for this brand of belief is a matter of the bedroom rather than the boardroom. It supports murderous dictatorships in the name of God, views both criticism and pessimism as unpatriotic, and imagines that being a Christian means maintaining a glazed grin, a substantial bank balance, and a mouthful of pious platitudes. It denounces terrorism, but excludes from its strictures such kidnapping, torturing, murdering outfits as the CIA...

This brand of faith fails to see that the only cure for terrorism is justice. It also fails to grasp to what extent the hideous, disfigured thing clamoring at its gates is its own monstrous creation. It is unable to acknowledge this thing of darkness as in part its own, unable to find its own reflection in its distorted visage...It is hard to avoid the feeling that a God as bright, resourceful, and imaginative as the one that might just possibly exist could not have hit on some more agreeable way of saving the world than religion.

I am talking, then, about the distinction between what seems to me a scriptural and an ideological kind of Christian faith -- a distinction which can never simply be assumed but must be interminably argued. One name for this thankless exercise is what Nietzsche, who held that churches were the tombs and sepulchres of God, called in Kierkegaardian phrase saving Christianity from Christendom. Any preaching of the Gospel which fails to constitute a scandal and affront to the political state is in my view effectively worthless. It is not a project which at present holds out much promise of success.

I am a physicist and an agnostic, neither believing nor disbelieving in a supreme being, lacking indeed any personal experience which might allow me to attach a meaning to the idea. To make this state of ignorance an excuse or even an incentive to attack the beliefs of others, as some do, seems to me indefensible. It is as if a tone-deaf man were to deride the pretensions of those who find in music an expression of realities which lie beyond the power of words. When the scientist can explain convincingly to a musician the origin and mechanism of musical feeling he may care to try his hand at religious belief. The true believer, however, need not fear -- his citadel is impregnable to scientific assault because it occupies territory which is closed to science...

Whatever the ultimate reality is that underlies the sensory impressions we interpret as material objects, and explain in terms of fundamental particles and mathematical equations, it has so far eluded imagination; we must not expect to discover or deny God by comparing any model we have managed to construct for ourselves with a futile preconception of what it ought to have been.

All the same, the search for evidence of God's existence in the material world is not lightly abandoned. Why does the universe exist at all, if it was not created? The evidence that it all started with a Big Bang hangs together pretty well, better than any other hypothesis. The trouble is that we can talk about the beginning but not of a time before the beginning; nor, when we imagine the start as an inconceivably hot fireball, are we allowed to picture it situated somewhere in space. Space and time as we know them are aspects of the universe itself, not, as Newton supposed, a divine absolute framework and a divine clock within which our universe came into being at God's command. It is hard enough to imagine space and time as linked in the way demanded by relativity theory, let alone anything that transcends these primary concepts. No human meaning can be attached to the idea of God 'outside the universe' nor, in a timeless nowhere, to words like 'act of creation' or 'God's purpose.'

To labor the point once again, our notion of the universe is part of the model we have built, and if we are to find God it will not be by looking within the model, or outside it, but in the no-place and no-time where we cannot look, the reality beyond our grasp. I think the majority of scientists accept that no explicit revelation of God's presence is to be expected in the faultless mechanics of the lifeless material world.