Once in a while...

... there comes along a show that seems to capture the imagination of the nation. Recently, these shows seems to have orbited around celebrity, reality, and various (increasingly ridiculous) different takes upon those two things.

But sometimes, a more intelligent show comes along and just enough celebrities endorse it enough for the common man to feel it's not uncool to say they watch it too. Wonders of the Solar System is such a show.

Twitter is all agog - any given night that it's on, a pretty high proportion of people I follow seem to be both online, and watching Wonders. They comment liberally, they praise - Professor Brian Cox has rocketed into the public eye and is single-handedly making intelligence - nay, physics - cool. OK, maybe not cool. But people want in on this.

Is it that celebrity endorsement has made us all watch in the first place, or that the endorsement makes us all more vocal about liking what we see? It's quite a strange feeling, knowing that across the country there are so many of us watching, mouths slightly open, thinking very similar thought.

A Twitterer I follow wrote this just now: Got to say though-how things actually are makes religion seem like a very mundane, quite silly, explanation for it all.

And that sums it all up rather beautifully. The world is capable of, and displays across the world in a million different ways, miracles far greater than the feeing of the 5000, or the parting of the oceans. The more I consider it, the more I am convinced religion is only there as a human construct to help others feel better about death. But then again - does it matter?

What I mean is, whether there is technically a "God" or not is almost irrelevant - if people believe, then it's there. I think therefore I am - it's basic philosophy, not religion. If God is nothing but an ideal by which people choose to live, a code of ethical or moral conduct - where's the harm? OK, I hear you shout, the harm is in the wars, the misinterpretation of religious text. And yes, of course, I am with you on that. But for the first time in my life I find myself thinking that perhaps God does exist - in the same way that I will one day have to accept that popular usage WILL make the meanings of infer and imply the same. I shall cry, but it won't stop it being true.

I may not believe in the big guy in the sky - but when I look at the things on shows like Wonders - I can't deny that God exists. Not that he created it - but that there is a part of all of us that created him to help explain what physics can do.