Einstein Again

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Ok, maybe a person could live their lives as though some things are miracles and some are not, I'll grant that. But I didn't make up the original quote; it's one of those Einstein-isms that find their way into conversation from time to time.

Einstein was different, that's for sure. I plowed, quite literally, through his Special Relativity once, substituting numbers for his symbols in an effort to try to make sense of something that otherwise may as well have been hieroglyphics. Actually, hieroglyphics might have been easier. I don't recall much, if anything, of what he wrote but I do recall feeling that I was reading something more related to poetry than science.

Someone asked me once, "How can you be a person of faith in the face of all that science can explain?" I responded by saying, it's a misunderstanding to think faith is about explanations. The more science explains the greater my sense of wonder becomes. I love the sensation I get when looking through a microscope: I feel as though I'm standing on the brink of a great gulf and if I just let go, I'll parachute down into an entirely new world.

Faith isn't about explanations; it's a relationship. And if the explanations of science displace faith, it's because faith was misplaced. In a relationship, the more we know, the closer we may become -- or not, depending on the relationship. But in the case of science, I find it more like the companion of faith than the divorce lawyer.

You've no doubt heard or even asked the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It's a good question and when asked, my scientist friends frequently proceed to outline the cause and effect of chemistry, physics, and biology. For me, it's a matter that there is something rather than nothing that is fascinating. That we even exist, that the universe, expanding exponentially in the spring night sky above my farm, is even there at all, is a cause for wonder.

I love the final scene in the play and film, Inherit the Wind, in which the agnostic attorney for the defense, Henry Drummond, holds a Bible and a copy of Darwin's The Origin of Species in each hand as though weighing them, one against the other. Finally, he jams them together as if to join them even more forcibly by his effort, puts them into his briefcase, walks out of the courtroom -- the place of contention and debate -- and back into life.

Integrity in science and faith does not seem to me to lie in the effort to render them mutually exclusive, but in the willingness to hold them in tension. I'm thinking just now of a professor of biology under whom I studied while doing my premedical coursework. He confided once that his fellow faculty members regarded him as something of an oddity because he was a serious scientist who was open about his faith. When I asked how he integrated the two he said, "Science can only take me so far, but my faith is like an envelope: the more science puts in, the greater the envelope expands and there is no end in sight." I can't say it any better than that.