Between the Infinite and the Infinitesimal: A Scientist’s Search for the Fulcrum of Faith

If we awoke each day remembering that we are the product of 13.8 billion years of chance events, subatomic subtleties, and violent cosmic collisions beyond our control, beyond our complete understanding, beyond the time horizon of consciousness itself, we might orient differently to our days. We might begin to relinquish the central organizing illusion of human life: control. We might begin to trust the organic unfolding of time and events — which also means trusting ourselves and each other, living fractals of the universe — and arrive finally at the antipode of control: faith. For control — the illusion of it, and all the wounding actions that spring from its pursuit — is our coping mechanism for faithlessness, for the helplessness and nihilism we can easily slip into if we confront our insignificance in the cosmic scheme without sufficient faith that it nonetheless matters: It matters what we make of the cards chance has dealt us, whether we carry our cold atoms with the full warmth and grace of our humanity, how much love we give in this sliver of spacetime we have been allotted.

How to reconcile an indifferent cosmos with all the passionate longings of being alive, with all the magnificent improbability of life itself, is what biologist Ursula Goodenough explores in The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved (public library) — a book inspired by her Methodist preacher father’s obsession with understanding why people are religious, which she first rebelled against, then returned to through the improbable backdoor of her life as a scientist.

A scientist is a person devoted to chipping off some microscopic fragment of knowledge from the monolith of mystery — it is not uncommon for a scientist to spend thirty-five years decoding a single protein — while having unfaltering faith in the totality of truth. Emanating such faith, Goodenough writes:

The universe is a single reality — one long, sweeping spectacular process of interconnected events. The universe is not a place where evolution happens, it is the evolution happening. It is not a stage on which drama unfolds, it is the unfolding drama itself.

A living testament to Simone de Beauvoir’s reflection on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, Goodenough looks back on her uncommon path to this life at the crossing point of the pursuit of truth and the pull of meaning:

I went to college with 1950s expectations: find a husband, raise two children, and continue to read novels. But everything changed when I took Zoology 1 as a distribution requirement. Nothing in my girls-school training had led me to understand that creatures are made up of cells and genes and enzymes, that life evolves, that kidneys control blood electrolytes. I was astonished. Better still, I was good at it. And Dad was quite as excited about my unexpected calling as I was. “Ursula a scientist! How splendid!” What a father.

For the next twenty-five years or so I played it straight: biology professorships, research projects, federal grants, graduate and undergraduate teaching. I still do all those things, and with as much pleasure and satisfaction as ever. But as my five children grew and there was more time for myself, my father’s question returned. Why are people religious? And then: Why am I not religious?

But was that true? What is being religious anyhow? What about the way I feel when I think about how cells work or creatures evolve? Doesn’t that feel the same as when I’m listening to the St. Matthew Passion or standing in the nave of the Notre Dame Cathedral?

Across the core tenets of the world’s major religions Goodenough discovers two recurring fundamental human concerns: “How Things Are and Which Things Matter.”

Every human life is animated by these questions and by the tension between the two, inseparable from the tension between control and faith: The more something matters to us, the more control we try to exert on how it is — to possess it, to protect it, to protect ourselves by preempting its loss. And yet, paradoxically, it is faith that makes a thing matter in the first place — the belief in its value, the helpless tug of longing it exerts on us, the irreduceable mystery of why it has valence for us at all against the backdrop of an impartial universe.

Stephen Hawking, who reckoned brilliantly with the question of God, captured this central tension between our search for truth and our hunger for meaning: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for humans to describe?” he asked. A century after the French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin set out to bridge the scientific and the sacred, and a generation after the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective that “to go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” Goodenough offers a term large enough to hold that wondrous improbability — a one-word answer to Hawking’s question:

I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don’t need to seek a Point. In any of it. Nor do I need an answer to Hawking’s question. Instead I can see it as the locus of Mystery.

The Mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing.

The Mystery of where the laws of physics came from.

The Mystery of why the universe seems so strange.

Mystery. Inherently shrouded in its own absence of category, its own absence of an answer.

Complement with Hannah Arendt on the value of unanswerable questions in our search for meaning and physicist Alan Lightman’s wonderful notion of “spiritual materialism,” then revisit Rachel Carson on science and our spiritual bond with nature and John Burroughs’s century-old manifesto for spirituality in the age of science.