I once heard a description of human beings as the only animal that believes its myth about itself. This is a striking comment, some may even say, damming of the intellect of the human race but then the intellect of the human race has always been the intellect of the few. The human race is no more the mind of Aristotle than it is the mind of Hitler, and many would argue the tendency is to be more like Hitler.
I am sure it is specious to talk about the ‘mind’ of a species but I think it is also specious for all of us to believe in our own importance. We are still in the infancy of our minds, still unable to concede we can live without certainties all of which we can only create for ourselves out of our imagination. Science, the one tool we have discovered that shows us reality, draws us a picture at once immense and fragile, of life on a thread amidst titanic forces, of a form of chaos we can never quite grasp and the unique fatality of everything.
Why do we find such a view terrifying? Because our own deaths demonstrate for us how unimportant the universe finds us as individuals and a species? Because it deflates the ego we so readily stamp on other life? Because we are credulous and science is not? Because we so want to be timeless, and so obviously are not?