Prompt 1

Corey Hostetler

AP English Language

Mrs. Wagener

September 15, 2013

Captivating Questions

            Though the two questions "Who are you?" and "Where does the world comes from?"  seem very simple to many, philosophers see these inquiries as intricate analyzations of both humans and life on Earth.  Instead of wanting to know just a name when philosophers ask "Who are you?", they instead want to know what makes you unique or what distinguishes you from the millions of other people in the world.  Additionally when asked "Where the world comes from?", philosophers want to not only know how Earth and humans were created, but also want to know what everything is made of and why everything made that way.  Human curiosity like this has fueled advancement throughout the ages and will continue to fuel this advancement until the questions are answered.

            For starters, my name is Corey Hostetler. I am seventeen years old and have lived in Evansville, Indiana for my entire life. I have two siblings, a younger brother named Cody and an older sister named Courtney, and am the son of Leslie and Gregory Hostetler.  At North High School, upon entering my junior year, I am going to try to play baseball once again and will start getting involved in extracurricular volunteer work.  From a philosopher's standpoint, I would probably describe myself as athletic, intelligent, and kind of quiet.  Though my parents never almost named me something else, such as Sophie almost being named Lillemor, I have sometimes imagined myself with a different name and wondered if some part of me would be altered along with the name. 

            The question "Where does the world come from?" has been asked by the curious people of Earth since B.C.  There are many answers to this question, depending on one's culture and environment, but the two prevailing ideas are the Big Bang Theory and that God created everything.  The Big Bang Theory is a scientific outlook at how the world was created and entailed that the universe was created when the Universe started expanding from a very hot and compact state.  On the other side of the spectrum is the religious thought at how the universe was created, which was saying that God created the world within six days and then rested on the seventh day.  In my personal opinion, being a Christian, I believe that God did create the world.  Within the book Sophie's World, Sophie questions where God had come from.  After hearing this question, I really had to consider the possibility of something having always existed.  In the end though, I concluded that such questions are what make the world so interesting and continued to read on. 

            In my final opinion, I would have to conclude that questions like these and people like Alberto Knox are what make the world go round.  If there weren't people like Alberto, who would push boundaries and ask daring questions in order to figure out how everything works, I truly believe that civilization would be stuck in a stage of zero advancement.  Overall, I would have to say that these questions and many more like it will be detrimental in advancing society.