​THE MIRACLE OF ME

​The physicists may contemplate billions of self-consistent universes…but we should not neglect our own modest universe and the fact of our own existence.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
The physicists may contemplate billions of self-consistent universes…but we should not neglect our own modest universe and the fact of our own existence.  Alan Lightman
 
I am continually stunned by the images from the James Webb Space Telescope. With this relatively small piece of hardware that we somehow managed to catapult into space, we have been able to see almost to the very beginning of the universe we inhabit.  The event or events that initiated the cosmos that we behold happened so long ago that we cannot imagine it. The faint fuzz of light that somehow has been identified as a remnant of the Big Bang is forever away.
 
According to people who study this stuff – and I am not among them – everything that exists in the physical universe began at that moment, which lasted a split second as we measure time. Look to any direction in the night sky with whatever device you can find, and you will see the results of that singular event. Stars and their (presumed) planets, galaxies, black holes, and even the ether that pervades the space among them (and, yikes, even the space in which the ether exists) all emerged from that combustible moment.
 
Now look in the mirror. You, too. Every part of you – every hair, fingernail, freckle – and the whole of your flesh emerged in that moment. It began a journey that happened so long ago you cannot imagine it, forever away. Just like everything else.
 
Alan Lightman, whom I have quoted before, is a remarkable person, a spiritual atheist. He completely rejects the very notion of an uber-being who reigns over the universe of its own creation. As a believer, I can forgive him this small detail because it has been a long time since anyone spoke to my sense of amazement so powerfully. (I think I have to go back to J. Allen Hynek, my astronomy professor at Northwestern University, who had a cameo in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and who paced off the relative size of the universe in a lecture hall.) I recommend (again) Lightman’s book, Probable Impossibilities, as a master class in awe.
 
The simple fact of existence is wildly unlikely. As of this writing, there is no explanation of how the universe came into being. Yes, “God spoke, and it was,” if you like (and I do), but that affirmation only pushes the question back to that unlikely split-second when the notion of creation arose for an inexplicable reason. In our own universe, perhaps only one of many, there are motes of dust tinier than tiny, nuclear furnaces that dwarf our solar system, holes in the fabric of space that can swallow entire galaxies. On the third rock from the sun there lives a species of creatures that tossed an eye up beyond their atmosphere to bear witness to it all. What are the odds?
 
When you think of it that way, that human race is nothing special. Everything that we are existed a long time before it combined into us, and it will remain as long as there is our universe. We are one example of this phenomenon called life, which may or may not exist in any given precinct in this universe.
 
What makes us different? We each have the ability to look outside the collective of matter and energy that is our body and imbue it with meaning. Why do I thrill to images from the Webb Telescope that show clouds of space gunk birthing stars, or tandem galaxies dancing around the edge of a black hole? Don’t disparage my answer as glib: because I can. I do not have the ability to prove or disprove the notion that we-all/I-myself exist for a purpose or accidentally. But the very fact that I do exist is as completely unlikely as it is, with the right set of data, predictable.
 
I don’t deny the miracles in the Bible or anywhere else just because I can’t explain them. In that sense, they are no different than the Big Bang. It is not the fact of their occurrence or whether the reportage was exaggerated for effect that is any concern to me. It is the gift that Allan Lightman identifies that some of us humans use to good effect and others squander that is important: meaning. Without it, my existence would be, literally, un-remarkable.
 
I do not deny the miracle of me. And neither should you deny the miracle of you.