I TOLD MARSHA I’D be happy to watch over Bernie, even if, as Bernie said, he didn’t need any watching over. I also said I wanted to head back down to LA for a couple of days before doing so. I’d now been a guest at the Haisches’ for close to a week, and though it was all comfortable and friendly, there was something about Bernie’s and my daily talks that not only nourished but also drained me. Taking a week away would let me clear my head and come back ready to finish up my interviews and, hopefully, find that third Key.
I got back up to Redwood City the afternoon after Marsha’s departure. She’d been a little upset when I told her Bernie would have to stay alone for a night, but I found Bernie no worse for wear for having been alone a full twenty-four hours.
“I see you didn’t burn the house down,” I said, letting myself in the front door and spotting Bernie on the couch.
“No,” Bernie said. “House is still standing. So . . . shall we do an hour or so of taping tonight?”
“Tonight?” I said with surprise. It was around seven, I was worn out and stale from the drive, and the last thing I felt ready for was a plunge into particle physics. I begged off, telling Bernie we had seven empty days ahead of us—surely enough for him to get any and everything else off his chest that he felt he needed to.
A tad reluctantly, Bernie accepted. Around eight o’clock I left him to his CNN in the den, and holed up, once again, in Taylor’s room. Back in LA I had cut back my Ambien to the usual one a night, but now I took two again, and was out by nine.
“You wouldn’t catch me dead at Burning Man,” I said to Bernie the next morning, as he sat at the dining table reading the hard copy of the San Francisco Chronicle that washed up, somewhat anachronistically to my mind, on his driveway each morning.
“Me neither,” said Bernie. “But Marsha . . . she’s been going for a couple of years now and she’s become sort of a mother figure to some of the kids there. She loves it.”
I told Bernie I’d be ready to have our first talk of the day shortly.
“I was thinking,” I said, pointing to the big, brown, L-shaped couch in their sunken, totally seventies-style living room, “that maybe with Marsha not teaching her students, we could branch out a little and do our talks in there.”
“Sure,” Bernie said. “Don’t see why not.”
I have always worked best in the morning, and late midday has always been a struggle for me. Bernie seemed to suffer from the same ailment. During those days when Marsha was absent, both of us would be pretty much at loose ends except for when my phone was on and we were talking physics and so forth. Then that odd atmosphere would descend. The objects in the room would become somehow . . . different, and I would once again start to feel, at moments, like I was what Bernie said I was: a real being, living amid a world of virtual objects; a being who was more—much more—than met the eye.
As Bernie slowly but surely continued to win me over to his vision of the world, I got into the habit, when going for a walk or the gym or to a bookstore or to whatever fast-food restaurant I’d chosen to get Bernie and me our dinner at that night, of trying to really feel the facts of what Bernie had been telling me: that I was not an ephemeral bit of nothing passing through a world of solid lasting objects, but just the opposite: a being whose physical body was made, literally, of atoms cooked in the heart of ancient stars, who had been raised with great care by my local star, the sun that blazed a mere ninety-two million miles above us, and whose mind and heart had been created, mindfully and purposefully and with an expertise beyond all comprehension, by God.
I immediately noticed that conducting our talks out of Bernie’s study had a kind of liberating effect on us both. I felt like, with two Keys out of the way and (I had somehow decided) only one left, I was ready to tackle some more daring topics, to take things a little farther afield.
“So Bernie,” I said that first morning of our solo week, “it seems to me that the most important thing I’ve come away with from these talks so far is an appreciation of consciousness—of what it really means, and of how little our culture values it today.
“It also seems to me that this knowledge means I should do something about it—but I’m still not really sure what. But . . . I do believe that all of this has something to do with the idea that faith is active, not passive. The New Testament sentence that seems to me of greatest importance in this regard is John 5:8, where Jesus tells the stricken man to rise.
“Some translations use the more colloquial ‘Get up,’ and to me, that two-word command contains the essence of everything we need to do in a world that scientists try to tell us is cold and pointless. Faith-wise these days, it seems like the world is trying extra hard to knock us down, and to knock us down again the minute we struggle to our feet. And yet, the Gospel texts suggest, if the world has knocked us down, there is always a hand there, ready to reach out and pull us up. Faith, through being active, and incorporating the intellect rather than pushing it aside, suggests that truly unknown possibilities lie ahead for all of us.
“As our talks have underlined for me already, genuine faith is, if anything, easier now than it was before the advent of modern science, and the more we know of that science, the easier our faith becomes. Even when things seem terrible, it is always possible, faith-wise, to get up. And far from holding us back, science is today’s version of that hand reaching out to help us. In a way, I see it almost as a challenge, as if we are being dared to see the real bounty we are being offered today, in terms of knowledge of our world and our place in it. Even as, at the same time, a chorus of voices is telling us just the opposite—that that we have no hope for any deeper understanding of God, or of ourselves.”
“Absolutely,” said Bernie. “Science is just exactly that helping hand, even though, most of the time, it’s presented as being just the opposite. Listen to this,” he said, getting slowly to his feet and heading off to his office.
In a moment he came back with a book—one which I recognized easily enough: Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time.
“Stephen Hawking,” said Bernie, “is probably the single most revered scientist alive today. People hang on his every word—not just about science, but, more importantly, about what science means. What, in short, the point of it all is. ‘I believe,’ he says here, ‘the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.’
“I admire Hawking,” Bernie said. “His achievements, both as a physicist and as a human being coping with overwhelming challenges, are impossible to dispute. But reading a statement like that, I can’t help but ask what, exactly, there is to be so grateful for?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Totally.” I picked up my iPhone and, while leaving the “record” function running, rummaged around on the Internet for a quote from Steven Weinberg:
“Listen to this,” I said to Bernie. “ ‘The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.’ That quote is just about as famous as that one from Hawking you just read me. But listen to it. Basically, human beings have the option, if they work really hard and are very talented, to raise themselves an inch or so above the sick, wretched joke that is the universe. At least for a moment or two. But what is the highest level of achievement, of insight, of getting to the real truth of what the universe is about, that is available to us? The grace of tragedy! That just kills me.”
“I know what you mean,” said Bernie, as if seeing my bid and raising me. “I was watching a rerun of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos recently. In it, Sagan talked about the wonder of the universe, how extraordinary it all is, and how lucky we are to be living at a time when we can see all this wonder . . . for a brief, flashing moment. Sagan’s tone was upbeat, he was all good intentions. But to me his remarks completely echoed Hawking’s and Weinberg’s. For these men, these enormously accomplished and passionate scientists, the most inspired and exciting vision of the universe available to us—is . . . completely hopeless, completely grim.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Totally. Like, I’m a crummy little ant of a tourist, getting a quick peek at all this vast, impersonal magnificence that just happens, through millions of years of blind natural selection, to have spat me out for no reason. I’m an accidental being, accidentally conscious, and doomed almost immediately to enter back into the darkness. I look around, with my accidentally produced mind and my accidentally produced senses, at this magnificence that has close to nothing to do with me, and I’m supposed to emit a quick little ‘cheep-cheep’ of wonder before I’m smashed back into oblivion.
“That reminds me of a line from an essay by the novelist Jonathan Franzen that I read recently. It was just a throwaway line in a piece of his, but it stopped me in my tracks. ‘I have a brief tenure on earth,’ Franzen said, ‘bracketed by infinities of nothingness.’ What a statement! I mean, Franzen is a smart guy, and his word is gospel in the literary world. And yet . . . he’s capable of a statement like that. A statement that is almost adolescent in its gloom, but which is also so simply . . . wrong. And, I mean”—I paused and took a swig from the can of Red Bull that was on the table in front of us—“who cares how many stars there are in the universe, or how cool it must look when a supernova explodes, if you yourself aren’t a part of it, if you aren’t involved in the story in some deeper, longer, more significant way?
“I watched an Internet video the other day about what people on their deathbeds regretted most,” I continued. “You know what it was? All this junk they hadn’t gotten around to doing while they were alive! Why hadn’t they ever taken a hot-air balloon ride? Why hadn’t they visited Antarctica? The guy narrating the video, his whole point was: ‘Get out there! Make that great invention! Find that girl of your dreams! Because when it comes time to die, you’re going to regret it if you haven’t had all these fine adventures.’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with going out and finding the right girl and going to Antarctica, I guess. But what I found so disturbing about the video was how unquestioningly it accepted the assertion that when your present life is over, your existence as a conscious, unique individual being is over too.”
Emerging from this impassioned speech, I took another swig of Red Bull, and continued, in a quieter mode:
“I guess someone, a psychologist looking at me, for example, might say that I just hate endings, probably because my parents divorced when I was very young, you know, all that junk. Well, I know I was affected by my parents’ divorce. I know that the interests one has in life have all kinds of findable causes, including personal, psychological ones. But I can’t leave it at that. I think my absolute, gut objection to the idea that when we die we’re dead and the universe came into being for no real reason—I think its causes run much deeper than all that. I think this feeling exists because something truly deep in me, something absolutely central to who and what I am, simply says: ‘No, it isn’t true.’ And I think there are a lot of other people out there like me—people who have the same basic negative, gut reaction to the vision of pointlessness modern science presents us with.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “the thing to remember about people like Hawking and Weinberg is that just because they are brilliant at physics doesn’t guarantee they know diddlysquat about anything else. Ignoramus is simply Latin for ‘we do not know.’ They are very good at what they are paid to do—which is basically to figure out how the universe works using mathematics as their primary tool. But they are lousy philosophers. Both of those men are as conversant with the discoveries science has made in recent years as anyone on earth. Yet when they open their mouths to tell you what it all means, what it turns out to mean is, basically, nothing. And that’s ironic, because the scientists who came before them—the ones whose shoulders they’re standing on—thought differently. Each and every one of them!
“There isn’t a single one of the primary architects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the two major breakthroughs in physics in the last century, who wasn’t deeply interested in the spiritual implications of what they had discovered. And that goes not just for physicists, but for astrophysicists as well. Listen to this,” Bernie said, and headed back down to his study again, emerging a few minutes later with another book.
“This is what Arthur Stanley Eddington, arguably the greatest astrophysicist of the first part of the twentieth century, had to say about the physical world that Hawking and Weinberg both feel has such total dominion over us:
“ ‘It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.’2
“‘The substratum of everything is of mental character.’ What an extraordinary sentence! It’s not just that, for Eddington, so-called physical reality, the world that we experience directly through our senses, isn’t real after all. It’s that what truly is real is not only nonphysical—it’s mental.
“What Eddington is really talking about in this sentence is . . . consciousness. Now, the word ‘consciousness’ is only three hundred years old. And these days, it gets batted around so much, by so many people, for so many different reasons, that it’s hard to just stop and sit with that word, and consider what it really means. On a basic level, of course, ‘consciousness’ means ‘awareness,’ our ability to know that the world around us is there—that it has being, that it is. But what lies behind that apparently simple meaning?”
“Well,” I said, “I have my ideas. But this book, all the talking I’ve been doing notwithstanding, is supposed to be about you. So . . . what do you think lies behind it?”
“I think what lies behind it is what James Jeans, the other premier astrophysicist of the first half of the twentieth century, had to say about this apparently physical universe we live in. ‘The universe,’ he said, ‘begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.’ ”
Bernie paused, as if to let those words just float in the air for a moment.
“So there you have the two greatest minds in astrophysics at the dawn of this new era we live in, and both are basically saying the same thing: The universe is a mental place before it is a physical one. What are we to make of this? Sadly, all too many scientists today, and certainly all too many astrophysicists, want to make nothing of it.”
This made sense to me on a number of levels. If human beings are made in God’s image, then all our abilities, from painting to architecture to computer programming, issue from our minds: minds created by God, and thus reflective of his mind. Far from disproving God, the discoveries of every field of science give clues to God’s true nature.
Everything we can do, God can do better. But within the things we can do lie clues, endless clues, to what God is really like. We will never be able to completely comprehend God, but with each new ability we develop, each new discovery we make about ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in, we are given another angle, another glimpse, into what God truly is.
2. Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World.