THE FOLLOWING DAY— a Friday—Marsha declared that it would be fun for me to get a tour of San Francisco proper. I didn’t much want to go as it seemed early in my stay to be indulging in tourist jaunts, but Marsha was persuasive, so with Bernie and me in tow, she marshaled us into her Lexus, and we headed for the city.
Like most big cities these days, San Francisco was choked with traffic, and for the trip in I spent much of my time (rudely, I knew) texting testily back and forth with Colleen. In the historic district, Marsha, after much looking, at last found a parking place, and we all trooped in to take a look at Mission Dolores, a Catholic church that is the oldest standing structure in San Francisco. While Marsha and Bernie busied themselves in the back of the church, I walked up to one of the front pews and sat down.
So here I was, for the first time since I’d started work on this book about God, in a church. Looking up at the classically grim, no-holds-barred Catholic Jesus nailed to his cross on the wall above the nave, I found myself thinking how funny it was that I, someone who thought constantly about God, so rarely set foot in a church.
It wasn’t that I didn’t consider myself a genuine Christian. In fact, for someone who thought of himself as existing at the borders of the faith, I was quite set in my ways when it came to certain questions of doctrine. When Bernie suggested that God was evolving, for example, I was quick to point out that this was a dangerous idea, leading toward process theology at best, and pantheism at worst. Perhaps because I had not set foot in one until I was ten, at which time I made a brief entrance into an Episcopal church in Boston for my sister’s wedding, my discomfort in churches simply had to do with the fact that I was unfamiliar with them.
However I ended up the way I am, it seemed to me that a book on the inevitable collision of religion and science was probably best written by someone whose faith was an odd and eccentric one, as mine was. Most of my New York friends were atheists or, at best, agnostics. The books I wrote, all of which were in one way or another on spiritual topics, were treated by most of my friends as an eccentricity—something that, inexplicable and mildly embarrassing as they were, could be overlooked because I was, in other ways, a normal enough person.
I was certain that the imminent collision between faith and science would not rob Christianity, or other religions, of their core identities. The coming change was not one where either religion or science would “win,” but one, rather, in which a Sunday worshipper or a scientist in a lab could go about his or her business without the small, nagging voice that was now whispering in so many ears, both of believers and unbelievers. This was the voice that said: “Either religion is wrong, or science is wrong. They cannot both be right.”
And yet I knew, with an assurance I couldn’t completely explain, that this voice was wrong. When an advocate of the “New Atheism,” the intellectual movement birthed by authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, would remark, in the face of any real understanding of history, that religion was responsible for all the bad things that had ever happened in the course of humankind’s time on earth, I would marvel, but not just for the obvious reasons. I would marvel not just at how such a wrongheaded remark could be made by an accomplished scientist or a respected public intellectual. I would marvel because such comments were so far from the real, beating heart of the issue.
Albert Einstein, someone with the genuine credentials to speak on these matters, once famously said that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
In this passage, Einstein is essentially saying as a scientist what Robert Frost said as a poet: We dance round in a ring and suppose (and conduct experiments, and devise brilliant theories), but the “Secret” sits in the middle, the center, and knows. This “place” is where all true science and religion point, and it emanates a fundamental mystery that, no matter how much we know of it, we will never completely capture.
It was my recognition of this sense of wonder that, in a childish yet nonetheless earnest way, made me grumble through my alternative version of the Lord’s Prayer during those morning assemblies of my school days, rather than give praise to a God I didn’t recognize. It was this same recognition of wonder that, thanks to C. S. Lewis and then to other authors, brought me back, with surprise, to a consideration of Christianity as a genuine avenue to this central mystery. And ultimately, it was the words of Jesus that I found in the Gospels that made me recognize, once and for all, that for me the true source of this wonder lay there.
Yet for all the earnestness of my embrace of Christianity, I remained, in a fundamental sense, an outsider to it. I might never be truly comfortable in a church, but this was, in some ways, a good thing because it allowed me always to remain in touch with that sense of being a wanderer and a looker. I was an outsider to organized religions, just as I was an outsider to science. The one area where I was not an outsider was in that sense of wonder that Einstein talked about in that famous passage.
In a time when the established voices of both science and religion so often detract from what is genuinely true and important about the religion/science debate, that sense of wonder was, I felt, a compass point that one could always rely on. In the first two Keys Bernie had handed me the day before, I felt I had the first two steps to where I was going on this journey: steps that would lead, naturally and inevitably, to a third.
I was interrupted from these thoughts by Marsha, who bent over to tell me that she and Bernie were going outside. I followed, stopping on the way out to take a picture of a statue of the Virgin Mary that particularly appealed to me. Colleen, a Catholic, always liked the bare feet that images of the Virgin tended to have. Thanks to a feeling of generousness of spirit that the visit to this church had imparted, I took a shot of this Virgin’s conspicuously bare feet and texted it to Colleen.
We had planned to stay and have dinner in town, but Bernie was getting tired, and I told Marsha I’d seen enough of San Francisco and was ready to go back to good old Silicon Valley. On the way back the traffic was even worse than it had been coming in, and Marsha—an accomplished opera singer—asked me what I thought of opera.
“I hate it,” I announced confidently. “I’m more of a Guns N’ Roses kind of guy.”
“Oh, well,” said Marsha, “maybe you haven’t given it a chance.” Then, to my horror, she reached into the compartment between the two front seats and pulled out a CD.
“This is me singing the lead in a recent local production of Carmen,” she announced. For the next half hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic, I listened to Marsha do what sounded like a bang-up job. Nonetheless, it remained opera, and I still hated opera.
“I’ve got some music here,” I said, when a break in Carmen came up. “I wonder if I can plug my phone into your car’s stereo system.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Marsha said gamely. I had the Cult’s live version of “Love Removal Machine” all cued up, but, sadly, was unable to get the car to connect with my phone, and so was left to wonder how Marsha would have fared at enduring it.
Once we got to our restaurant—a pizza place in Palo Alto, a couple towns south of Redwood City—we were told that there would be a short wait for a table. As Bernie, Marsha, and I stood outside the restaurant in the dimming light, I looked up and saw a single star.
“What star is that, Bernie?” I asked.
“What’s what?” Bernie said, clearly a little worn out from the day.
“That star up there. Or is it Venus? It doesn’t seem quite bright enough for Venus.”
Bernie looked up, but couldn’t make out the celestial body.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve often read something that I still can’t get my head around. It can take so long for the light of a star to travel to earth that the star itself might not even exist anymore.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “that is a popular fact among writers on these subjects. But the truth is actually a good bit weirder. Not only is your retina catching photons that may have left their particular light source millions of years ago, but the photons of light that are hitting your retina knew ahead of time that your retina would be here to catch them.”
By this time I was pretty used to hearing totally nonsensical astrophysical facts. But I was still stopped short by this one.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I mean, even more ridiculous than the average ridiculous. It’s completely impossible.”
“Only if you live in a world of objects that have no relation to each other,” said Bernie. He was still tired, even if he didn’t say so—Bernie was, I knew by this point, not one to remind you that he had a chronic disease—but not tired enough to miss a chance to give his universe-as-computer-simulation theory another plug.
“Remember, in a computer program, everything in the program is instantly connected to everything else. A photon knowing you’d be here to catch it with your eye is no problem, because in this universe, time—the time we’re enduring now as we wait to get a seat at this pizza place—does not exist.
“Einstein’s special theory of relativity states that there is infinite time dilation and length contraction for a particle traveling at the speed of light, i.e. a photon. According to Einstein, a photon of light cannot experience space or time.”
“Bernie,” I said, “I’m too tired to get hit with infinite time dilation.”
“No, you’re right,” he said. “We don’t need to get into that. Just imagine it like this. From the photon’s point of view it doesn’t just whizz though space from there (the star) to here (the retina of your eye) for who knows how many millions of years. It simply jumps in zero time from there to here. We live in a world where we have to deal with time and space. But that’s because we’re caught in the simulation. Get outside the simulation, and you’d see that what we experience as a photon’s long trek across the universe is actually a single event; one that is essentially free of the time constraints that we, not being photons, have to suffer under.
“Of course, taking a photon’s view is hard—impossible, in fact. What’s it like to move at the speed of light? These are experiences that lie beyond us, because we are simply too big, and the apparatus we use to take in information—our eyes, our ears—are simply too big to be able to process information that’s that small and that fast. All we can do is rely on mathematics to paint a picture of what it’s like at that level of existence. But basically, in the world as it really is, as opposed to the (comparatively) very clumsy and imprecise level at which we experience it, the journey of a photon from point A to point B is not something that takes place in time as we understand it.
“The photon’s departure from the star and its arrival on the retina of your eye is essentially a single action. Which it would be, also, if the universe is, as I maintain, essentially a giant computer program. If the universe is a computer program, distance as an issue is essentially done away with because distance is an illusion created by the program. So it is that the emission-absorption process—the journey from the star to the retina of your eye—becomes essentially one event rather than two—like an algorithm in a computer program.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s actually not all that different from what theologians say when they describe God’s view of time as similar to what we see when we look at a mountain range. God sees the whole spread of all that has happened and all that is to come. Because (though the theologians of course don’t use this language) he’s outside the program.
“So,” I asked, grateful that Bernie had pulled me into his world and away from the tedium of waiting for our table to be called, “what if no one was here to see the light? What would happen if that photon had no place to land, if it had been doomed to travel forever through space without ever striking an object? What would it do then? Would it even bother to leave its source to begin with?”
“It’s a good question,” Bernie said. “It hasn’t been tested, so far as I know, and I don’t know that anyone will ever be able to.”
“But there’s a chance that, possibly, a photon could choose, if it knew that it would be doomed to travel forever, without ever hitting an object, not to leave the light source to begin with?”
“Sure,” said Bernie. “We just don’t know because we don’t have the capacity to test what would happen.”
I glanced up again at the distant star, now just a little clearer in the darkening sky than it had been moments before, and tried to process what Bernie had just told me. Again I felt that slight, marvelous disconnect between my mundane experience, standing in front of a pizza restaurant on a busy Northern California Friday evening, and the world as it actually was.
A world where time was an illusion, which I fell for because my senses and intellect were built in such a way that I was programmed to fall for it. And I saw once again how marvelous a tool science was in plugging me into the universe of brilliance and meaning all around me, and how sad it was that so many people thought it was a barrier to belief and wonder, rather than a door to it.